Thou Art God(s)

"divided not by nationality but by ideology and their vision for the new world"

Alpha Centauri

 

 

As I grind my teeth through the inordinate grind of Icewind Dale 2's last chapters (damn thing even has a Groundhog Day mission) I ready myself for another attempt at a King of Dragon Pass long-mode playthrough, meaning among other things choosing which deities to favor.

So I says to myself: does this game really need both an ox god and a cow goddess? Or an earth goddess and a clay goddess? It brings to mind Icewind Dale 2's failure to make me give a crap about the ice goddess Auril for the second campaign in a row. Alright, so obviously the big ice temple is dedicated to her... but beyond that, what exactly are our interactions together? Is there anything to this mythical figure other than justifying some ice sculpture decor? Why should I care about Auril? Why are fantasy world gods so boring?

More to the point, why do gods which would seem interesting enough in a passive medium of storytelling fall completely flat in an interactive medium?

 

KoDP can springboard this article because it banks on immersion in the mentality of a Bronze Age tribe, people who were most often born and died in the same narrow valley and whose minds were occupied by the changing of the seasons, bear maulings and worrying where their next meal would come from... and not much else to flesh out an entire cosmology. As you advance and discover more of their legends, KoDP's gods do acquire some character traits like loyalty or pugnacity, but these had to be tacked on to primitivist concerns like grain, cattle, horses and occasionally bartering with your neighbours for same. Let's face it, our ancestors were boring people with sheepish mentalities:

"Our monster-slaying demigod killed a bull."

"So did ours."

"Ours has magic sandals."

"So does ours."

"Well our bull was in a forest."

"Ours was in a field, which is obviously better."

"Nuh-uh!"

"Yuh-huh!"

Cue several centuries of warfare and slavery. Ugh, this fuckin' species... but I digress.

If KoDP's narrow thematic focus justified its gimped godly gamut, I could not make the same excuse while playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The setting's myriad made-to-fit deities leave little room for conflicts of interest. Pathfinder inherited this flaw directly from the grand-daddy of roleplaying, Dungeons and Dragons, whose list of gods and godlings managed to be both redundant and useless. Seriously, count the gods of death. Count 'em! And, once again, DnD like KoDP fell into this by trying to hold true to real-world fake worlds, to mythology. I can certainly forgive old TSR for this, as back in the '70s and '80s their niche American audience would've had little clue about any mythology aside from Christian (easily demonstrated by the repeated moral panics when parents discovered their children were playing the role of pagan worshippers) and thus Wizards of the Coast was nevertheless providing novel entertainment.

 

Still, worshipping the god of three-footed rabbits and crossbow bolts or whatnot emphasizes the main problem with creating a game's pantheon by the same rules as real-world religions. Mythical gods were fabricated by primitive, pre-scientific minds to explain the world and are based on physical phenomena. A game, in contrast, is about player actions. If you want players to give a shit about what deity their characters worship, match gods first and foremost to human tendencies, interests and failings. This is, in fact, why DnD's alignment wheel and the Great Wheel of the multiverse make so much more powerful an idea than the divinities who supposedly rule and define and gatekeep those realms. Chaotic Neutral Lycaon-thrope that I am, I can't say I've ever been moved much by Malar but as soon as I read the description of Pandemonium I could not imagine a better fit for my chaotic nature, a non-stop chase nightmare in a world of cacophony.

Give players divine incarnations of what they do (a.k.a. play) not what they are.

Take the Elder Scrolls as another bad example. Morrowind focused on relatively few gods of its pantheon, and the cults of Vivec and Tiber Septim were different enough from each other to allow some identification. Generally though, the series' multitudinous Aedra, Daedra and whatevera fail to sync up with either the player's actions or the greater world. The Shivering Isles expansion was welcomed after the largely mediocre Oblivion partly for defining the possible attitudes (Mania / Dementia) by which players could relate to one of the setting's divinities.

For a better take on supernatural influences, Dragon Age: Origins, while superficially centering on a monotheistic religion, introduced demons matching human drives (rage / sloth / desire / pride) which fleshed out some villains' motivations. Similarly (and almost as prototypical as Dungeons and Dragons) Warhammer 40,000's chaos gods (Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeench and Slaanesh) are more memorable because their nature translates into action. They're not just the gods of badgers or slugs or rabbits. They're gods of doing. Unto others. Without permission.

 

If you truly want to create a memorable pantheon, however, you have to provide enough thematic overlap for ambiguity and conflict, and the two best examples I can think of hail from two different genres. The first, in fact, doesn't deal with gods at all.

 

Consider why Alpha Centauri's original seven factions remained more valid even after the expansion pack's introduction of seven new ones. The expansion factions were one-trick-ponies: mind worms, probing, naval, production. The original leaders' personalities, on the other hand, provided decisive counterpoints (e.g. University vs. Believers (guess which side I was always on)) and overlapped just enough to let you experiment. Deirdre might be the logical choice for mind worms but Zakharov could rush the right techs for the same effect. Morgan could buy his way to technological supremacy, Yang could leverage his industrial capacity into same and the Believers could zerg at least as well as the Human Hive. All this also translated into a lack of alignment pigeonholing. Sister Miriam Godwinson got some nice jabs in on the topic of technological progress, Yang was an authority on both causing and mitigating personal misery, and the Spartans and the Peacekeepers made surprisingly frequent political bedfellows, seeking the same pax by different means.

When it comes to designing an actual pantheon however, the first Pillars of Eternity got it very, very right, and its designers made it quite clear in various in-universe asides that they forged their divinities consciously and purposefully.

For one thing, there are no good or evil gods, but merely incarnations of behavior in both good and bad aspects. Hylea and Eothas, likely the nicest of the lot, gods respectively of flying creatures and general ebulience or of light and hope and rebirth, seem a lot less cuddly when you realize "pretty flitting things" can easily be argued to include marauding dragons, or that light can burn and requires fuel to be harvested. Conversely, even the nastiest gods like Skaen, Ondra and Rymrgand show their value in extremis, providing redress or palliation when nothing else can.

For another, the various facets of role-playing are given multiple routes for players to identify with.

Instead of a single god of war, bellicosity can instead be embodied by fire, rebellion, or pyrrhic light and hope.

Creativity is not limited to the god of the forge but also to the vitality of nature or decorative prettiness.

Death might mean the finality of entropy or a door from one existence to another or the ultimate truth of the struggle for survival.

Secrets might exist to be hoarded, forgotten or perpetuated.

Disease might be natural, entropic, a secretive subterfuge, a trial to be overcome, a door into the endless cycle, etc.

 

Basically, Pillars of Eternity's gods allow characters to bullshit their way into half a dozen different personal interpretations for everything they do... and that's the point of the activity. An RPG should focus on choices, a middle ground between "everything goes" or an illogical infinity of right answers on one hand or a constricting single right answer leaving no choice at all on the other. If you're designing a role-playing setting, your very cosmology, your plot-driving forces, should reflect this partial ambiguity: give us just enough rope to hang ourselves with. Gods should be philosophies players follow, actions and choices embodied and not merely colorful animal-headed figures to fill a booklet of flavor text.

 

 

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P.S.: From the little I've seen in Shadowrun: Hong Kong and the better Dragonfall, Shadowrun's shamanistic totems might qualify better than DnD's deities if they focus on personalities rather than merely identities.

A(dventuring) Body at Rest

"In the circles we made with our fires
We talked of the pale afternoon
The clouds were like dark riders
Flying on the face of the moon"

Sting - Something The Boy Said


In the past couple of months I finished up one final playthrough of both Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenera, in preparation of moving on to new RPGs. It's a wonder we have any new cRPGs these days, especially good ones, after a fifteen year dry spell punctuated mainly by the overall mediocrity of the Neverwinter Nights series and one quickly betrayed glimmer of hope in the form of Dragon Age: Origins, both lost in a sea of "action" titles and MMO gear farming.

Resource management, abandoned by computer game developers somewhere around the time of Morrowind as too complex for their new cretinous mass-market audience, was grudgingly reintegrated into these new strategic, party-based RPGs. This included resting at specific safe locations instead of just plopping your ass down wherever you want to recover all your daily spells, a mechanic which utterly invalidated the Neverwinter Nights series' feigned difficulty. The Elder Scrolls series was little better; most players probably only rested once in a blue moon to trigger specific quest steps. Dragon Age: Origins at least gave resting some functionality in curing wounds.... then immediately invalidated it by filling the player's inventory with cheap, plentiful wound cures. Tyranny went one better by instead tying wound curing to resting and tying resting to a few specific locations which required travel

... though unfortunately travel time had too little effect to lend resting its due relevance. TToN took the more usual route, charging you cold, hard cash for restoring your action pools

 

... though it, in turn, undermined its relevance by providing entirely too many action point restoring consumables and infinite free lodging as quest rewards. Plus, while the cost is greater than the mere token amount it would be in most such games, it still falls an order of magnitude or two below your accumulated wealth by the last act.

A couple of centuries ago by the time of Alexandre Dumas, rented rooms, inns and taverns were accepted intrigue-riddled set pieces in tales of swashbuckling adventure; later wild west saloon scenes followed suit and the "you all meet in a tavern" stage of role-playing campaigns was again cemented by Tolkien's Prancing Pony. While the motif is slavishly copied into every cRPG, finding a place to rest has rarely achieved its due impact on gameplay. Pillars of Eternity threw a nice wrench in the works by offering specific bonuses for sleeping in some locations, but these were still trivialized by their low cost and on-demand availability. For rest to truly become relevant to gameplay, the time spent resting must somehow affect your campaign. TToN copied the original Torment's scarcity of safe havens but still compromised on this point much like The Elder Scrolls by treating rest as a trigger for a select few quests (the most blatant being a murder spree in the first act which continues every time you rest.) The mechanic only comes into its own in games where everything functions according to a calendar / clock.

The old Dune game from '92, with its odd mix of linear adventure and light RTS (before RTS was even a genre) provides an early example. Everything took time, from your own travel to your Fremen armies' travel and battles to spice mining or the spread of vegetation or smugglers replenishing their stockpiles. While resting was not a mechanic per se, you could decide (or be forced by your script) to wait in some sietch or another while the world shifted around you.

More recently, Mount&Blade or Dead State or Pathfinder: Kingmaker all made a better show of it.

Dead State enforced a strict daily cycle, in which you had to return to your home base to rest every night or risk a hefty morale penalty. Each day you had to both ensure a profitable loot haul from your travels and allot competent workers to care for the shelter's own maintenance and production in your absence.

M&B didn't rely much on you yourself resting, but your injured troops required time to heal. Early on you might pay for their rest & recuperation at an inn. Later you might pass by one of your forts now and then to swap fresh soldiers in and your wounded out of your army. All the while, food was consumed, populations grew, taxes and expenses accumulated, bandit bands, armies and caravans traveled across the map in fitting indifference or malice as to your squandered hours.

Kingmaker being split between traditional adventuring and kingdom management emphasized getting your adventuring done in a timely manner so as to arrive back at your capital in time to deal with the various events plaguing your realm. While the initial implementation was quite aggravating, with too little control and too many triggers rewarding the player's foreknowledge and not foresight, it also added up to the most multifaceted. Not only did you need to recover spells but even the muscleheads in your party would need to clear the hefty penalty to their physical attributes through fatigue / exhaustion.

All three of these most satisfying examples share an integration of the resting mechanic with other facets of gameplay. You or your companions' skills might affect others' healing / recovery times. Kingmaker's camping especially rewarded you for bringing along multiple characters competent as lookouts, hunters, cooks, etc. and if I had to be honest, Jaethal the undead inquisitor's most pervasively useful ability was simply her immunity from fatigue letting her dive into all too frequent ambushes fresh as a rotting daisy. And, in each case such roleplaying and strategic choices mitigate the entropic drag of the game world on your own schemes and plots, the resources automatically decaying or consumed, the inexorably encroaching enemy forces.

Conclusion: a resting mechanic is nearly guaranteed a pointless waste of both developers' and players' time for a traditional plot-driven Adventure game or RPG in which the player actively moves the plot forward by his actions. In order for rest to have a meaningful impact, there must be a world outside your adventuring party which progresses while you are inactive. There must be events not_at_rest. As a prelude to death, sleep carries no threat unless the universe keeps swirling in the darkness outside our feeble fires, hounding us with every unconscious breath.

Piano / Forte! (A Dimension of Sound)

"One thousand cars and a million guitars
Screaming with power in the air
We found a place where the decibels race
This army of rock will be there"

Judas Priest - Ram It Down
_________________________________________________

"And whomsoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And Rrroht inside a corpsy shell"

Vincent Price, in Michael Jackson's Thriller *
_________________________________________________


Though its most memorable moments tended to come from its more tech-driven episodes, The Twilight Zone only rarely qualified as SciFi. I'd speculate that, as Paramount would with ST:TNG forty years later, CBS just found it cheaper to reuse the copiously superfluous cowboy hats and fedoras it had lying around its studios than to pay to build the more unique cardboard rockets and fishbowl helmets by which to ennoble a SciFi production. Looking at it now, the whole series seems anything but a lavish affair (at one point they were even denied the cash for film) and it shows. We might praise the stark realism or the poignancy of one episode after another in which a lone protagonist wanders about an empty town (or an even emptier alien planet) but let's remember it precluded paying extras. And the deserted alien planets were quite depopulated of props and decor as well.

What it did have was sound, from Serling's narrated bookends to details like the sharp pinprick noise of eyeglasses shattering on concrete, to immortalized one-liners like "there was time now" or "it's a cookbook!" More than one episode centered on ventriloquism, of all things, but then it's rare for the real world to provide such sinister props pre-made for a televised thriller. In fact, the show had at times more in common with old-school radio dramas than with the more lavish visuals of its successors, with much of the plot expressed through dialogue instead of action. I had the fortune earlier this year to catch a marathon running through not only the big hits but some of the less popular episodes, including Sounds and Silences, in which a big fat loudmouth is sentenced, in standard Serling style, first to one aural extreme, then the other.

It hit closer to home for me than for most, since I happen to be just a tad sensitive to incoherent noise. When I was young and my ears even sharper, I was even annoyed by those supposedly ultrasonic vermin-repellent devices. (Please try not to draw the obvious conclusion.) I've occasionally gotten up in the middle of the night to close my bedroom door against such noises as... my refrigerator... from six meters and two corners away. Advertisements, with their deliberately intrusive, attention-grabbing flood of white noise, still drive me into a frothing rage. I'm the type to stop dead while walking and track the wind as it hits the trees or the side of a building. Though active noise control has remained slightly too expensive for my tastes, I've come to view a good solid pair of ear-covering headphones as essential to sitting at my computer. My stance on voice chat noise pollution in games is well documented, and it's not too far from my stance on voice chat noise pollution in the physical world.

So in context it's no surprise that so many things remind me of a song I once heard, or that I keep returning here on the blog to the topic of audio in computer games. Watching and listening to Sounds and Silences made me more attentive to how sound was used back in the days of radio and the first grainy, barely discernible flashes of the cathode ray. To some extent we can still hear the same quality these days in a well-narrated audio book, because regardless of technological improvements the main problem still lies in conveying intent. Good narration will relate apprehension and tension by halting, ponderous sentences, will rush awkwardly through relating shameful events, will threaten in a stony monotone, letting the microphone do the work of amplification. Where televisuals fall short, well-placed sound effects will not only color an event but will mark different phases of the action or provide new information. (You -know- the glasses have broken before you ever see the shards.) And, perhaps most importantly, good music is more than filler. It sets the mood and provides nuance.

As far as games go, I more or less started off this blog by complaining about the non-massive nature of MMOs, microtransactions as legitimized cheating, and the decay in game music quality. And I never let up on them. For a long time after Y2K, sound degenerated, as far as I can see for three main reasons:

1) Video cards continued to rule the tech specs while sound cards plateaued fairly quickly. It might shock younger gamers now to see old game boxes from the '90s advertising the number of sound channels a particular title was capable of occupying, right alongside its polygon count. Or Diablo 2 advertising itself for having hired an orchestra. As everyone started getting the same quality sound cards and sound stopped being a mode of conspicuous consumption, companies also invested less and less in what was no longer a selling point.

2) Graphics really did improve. Tremendously. Thus, much like TV shows stopped conveying information via sound in favor of displaying it visually on ever-larger, ever higher definition TV sets, video game sound became more vague, relegated to the background.

3) For ten to fifteen years companies were tripping over each other to widen their market base from obsessive wer-nerds to the mass market. This meant providing more instant gratification, simplifying and dumbing down everything from controls (there were no noteworthy 3D strategy games after Homeworld) to cultural references to level design, to shrinking party / match sizes in multiplayer and eliminating secondary roles in class-based games.... to, as a matter of course, music. It was especially noticeable in online games where you could at times still hear the more recognizable, launch-quality music even as newer patches added more generic white noise. But it was not unheard of for companies to actually go back and vandalize their own previous work, scrapping more interesting original tracks to replace them with blander, more generic, more forgettable, lowest-common-denominator fare.

And sure, it hasn't all been bad. The Secret World, a game from 2011 which failed miserably as a game but dressed up its failure via surprising artistic panache, recently held its yearly Samhain event, part of which treats players to a collection of radio dramas from the days before video killed such stars. While it's unforgivable of Funcom to charge its customers subscription fees for public domain radio as a timesink, I do have to thank them at the very least for their selection, which includes not only the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast but The Thing on the Fourble Board (**) Give it a listen. It's twenty minutes of sane, didactic, low-key narration punctuated by a few precision strikes of otherworldly presence. And you will know it when you hear it, trust me. In turn, TSW was one of the few games which managed to emulate that old-timey radio drama attention to sound. Its colorful yet still nuanced NPCs set a delightfully mundane backdrop against which its various boogey men can boogety-boo!

In fact, horror games and horror themed segments in general have invested more in sound. Shrieks, groans, creaks and ominous footsteps add a great deal to their suspense, especially since they so often need to hide their boogeymen until the last second and can't bank entirely on graphics as other genres do. But, banking on a contrast with eerie silences unfortunately leaves no room for a real soundtrack. While voice acting has always oscillated in quality between titles and sound effects have had their high points, music consistently diminished. My recent jaunt through System Shock's introduction reminded me how much more expressive that '80s/'90s synthesized backdrop was. While some series (Heroes of Might and Magic, Divinity) were lucky enough to latch onto a good composer from the start and clung to them as selling points through many reiterations, most did not, and they really should've paid more attention to how effective a well-integrated, memorable soundtrack can be in other media. Don't believe me? O.K., three, two, one, let's jam. And it's not like animation was new by that point.


But I am happy to note some signs that music might once again be considered a distinctive element of game design and not simply white noise to fill the background silences. Justin Bell's sound direction wasn't bad in Pillars of Eternity but still largely generic, unintrusive medievalism. It wasn't until he really cut loose two years later (2016) in Tyranny that he put out something worthy of having his name mentioned. What's more, I've been seeing some amusing signs of companies reversing the old trend of downplaying music after release. Stellaris' more noticeable tracks seem to come from its later DLCs like Synthetic Dawn (2017). Warframe, launched in 2013, has some surprisingly engaging tracks... most attached to content added since 2015-2018.

MAKE SOME NOISE !

Yes, music can sometimes intrude on other gameplay elements (those thunderous old '90s tracks were partly meant to cover up the lack of other sound effects or ambience) but intruding can also be a good thing. The Tristram theme did as much for the original Diablo's popularity as any other of its high points, and many a mediocre game has remained fixed in gamers' memories for its soundtrack. And there are endless ways to mitigate the potential nuisance factor. Set it in-character or in an appropriate locale. The sea shanties in PoE2: Deadfire were more immersive than half its chauvinistic abortions of storytelling put together, the Sleepless Lullaby along with Lilith's monologue or the Siren Song rendered their little corners of TSW unforgettable, no-one who's played STALKER can forget the NPCs randomly breaking out their guitars and We All Lift Together defined Fortuna better than any other location in Warframe. V:tM-Bloodlines made its night spots come alive with Isolated, A Smaller God, Lecher Bitch... and appropriately enough, Come Alive... and nobody and I mean nobody was complaining about Bloodlines' music being too intrusive!

MAKE SOME FUCKING NOISE !

Even completely out of character, let music symbolize your setting instead of just underscoring it. Even a twenty-second flute solo can stick in your customers' minds years afterwards for marking their call to adventure. I sure as hell have never met that wailing banshee in Tyranny's soundtrack in all my replays of the game, but she fits her imaginary world every bit as perfectly as The Thing on the Fourble Board's inhuman meowling.

It's not unreasonable to assume that people still remember that often painfully jarring 8-bit tootling from 1980s computer games for its sheer nostalgia factor... but let's not exclude the possibility that they memor it for being memor-able. Yeah, that's a quality we really should get back around to recapturing.

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* You know, on one hand I'm disappointed that after three decades that's still one of our most satisfying portrayals of lycanthropy. On the other hand... might as well enjoy it!
Aaroooooo... AAAHAHAHAHAHAHA !

** Shockingly enough, that is, officially, a word.

"In the name of the Prophet: figs!"

"And I don't know what the fuck that you rhyme for
You're pointless as Rapunzel with fuckin' cornrows
You write normal? Fuck being normal!
[...]
I make elevating music; You make elevator music"

Eminem - Rap God


I've been gradually trudging through Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Of its varied disappointments I find myself particularly annoyed by the lapses in quest prompts, immersion and writing, given that I was drawn to the project (like, I would assume, many others) by Chris Avellone whoring his name out to Owlcat as he did to Larian. In both cases he seems to have worked largely in an advisory capacity, as little in the finished products bears his personal style. Despite Kingmaker's interesting basic plot, his main job may have just been running remedial English courses for ex-Nival "writers" - the same incompetents responsible for making Heroes of Might and Magic 5's scripts so unbearably farcical as to push me into abandoning its campaign at the first cry of "Griffin eternal!"

Three years ago I praised the first Pillars of Eternity game (the good one) for, among other things its apt use of flavor text tooltips - things like working the word "rancid" into the description of a house in a zombie-infested district. Though simple and low-tech, these can easily enhance immersion. That is, unless your "writers" get lazy or completely miss the point of describing scenery, as happens too often in Kingmaker.

Okay, first off, bonus incompetence points for placing that clickable object behind terrain so I can't even see what I'm seeing.
Second, peevish as this may sound, my character's a Mystic Theurge with a +36 unbuffed bonus to Knowledge: Arcana. There exists not a single beastie, concoction, miasma, radiation, thingamajig or doodad in the multiverse which my elvish self would so ignorantly assess as "weird, magical thing."

Third, and most relevant to this post, even if you don't work the flavor text into the skill system, describing something should probably entail description. Sure, exceptions exist, like April Ryan the art student charmingly (and somewhat sardonically) describing an abstract sculpture in her Longest Journey neighbourhood as a 'spiky thingie' - but these are contextualized, self-conscious counterpoints to known rules. "Show, don't tell" being one of the most fundamental.

I don't mean to rag on Owlcat and Kingmaker alone. People like Avellone, Mitsoda and Tornquist made a name for themselves fifteen or twenty years ago precisely because their wordsmithing competence and creativity stood out among computer games' usually hackneyed, clumsy, perfunctory or nonexistent storytelling. Bad writing is a game industry standard. And, though computer game design has been gradually improving over the past few years, even the small-time, more innovative part of the industry has tended to treat the literary side of its products with disdain. A short trawl through my own kvetching here: The Last Federation's creative enough conceptually but unnecessarily restricts all its descriptions to out-of-character mode. UnderRail tried to copycat Fallout while completely missing the point of its narrative progression. Surviving Mars actually cooked up some captivating mini-plots for its over-arching in-game events but obviously didn't bother hiring a writer who could express these from an immersive viewpoint. Divinity: Original Sin made a name for itself via combat mechanics but gratuitously mangled its fairytale world with random attempts at humor or whimsy. Wasteland 2's designers banked entirely too much on geek in-jokes and gave the distinct impression they just weren't feelin' it by the second half, phoning in what should have been dramatic or touching encounters. Obsidian Entertainment (who you'd think would know better) defamed themselves by exchanging the expert world-building and character development in Pillars of Eternity for dumbed-down fanfic-grade politically correct droning repetition in Deadfire.

Why does anyone skimp on writing?

Some studios might want to fall back on the excuse of not hailing from the anglophone part of the world, but that doesn't hold up because:
1) It doesn't stop companies like 11bit from striking the perfect dramatic tone in Frostpunk. There's this thing called teh internets, you see, chock-full-a Brits, Yanks, Canucks and Aussies just waiting for their chance to slap their name on a writing credit. I don't care where you live, if you've got a computer you must be able to find at least one or three pedantic linguaphiles among your personal or professional acquaintances autochthonous to the lingua franca.
2) Most cases don't fall to translation errors. Instead, no effort is even made to adopt a thematically-appropriate point of view for in-game scripts and exposition. Even if you're a one-man studio, can't you at least resort to some schoolteacher friend who can draw you a plot diagram?

Neither is this a matter of more or less word content per game unit. I'm not saying that The Last Federation needs an Avellone-sized, dialogue jungle, doorstopper novel of a script filled with tragically flawed characters. The problem is that nobody's seeking higher quality at the same quantity.

It is of course true that bad writing, stupid writing, oversimplified, predictable, minimized writing, sells better to the public at large, just as it does in popular fiction and movies... but few of the games I play can claim a mass-market audience. I can understand why Skyrim might bank on dumbing down its themes, riding the coat-tails of at least two successful, genre-changing series... but the rest of you ain't Bethesda. When addressing a niche audience, quality might actually matter.

That in itself brings on another paradox: small companies marketing niche products should logically be looking for cheap ways to enhance their products - in lieu of adopting the latest motherboard-breaking technical requirements, with all the over-paid code-monkeys that entails. While good composers can't be drawing very heavy salaries outside an 18th-century Austrian court, and talented graphic designers have become shockingly abundant, it's still easiest to underpay scriveners. Yet this still seems the most likely position to be overlooked at any studio.

Finally, it's easiest to underpay writers due to the abundance of people who think they can write. All the bloggers, amateurs, dilettantes and fry-cooks with liberal arts degrees... and game studio executives. Speech acquisition being more pervasive in our recent evolutionary history than abstract reasoning, musical harmony or even visual style, it's likely more susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect. (At this point it might behoove me to admit that yes, I have gradually realized that my own shit stinks.) We might not all be able to compose a painting or paint a symphony, but we are all capable of exchanging a few words - as a rule more eloquently in our own heads than on paper. It's much easier for would-be game designers to assume they can "do it yourself" when it comes to narratives, settings and characters.

And you can't.
Yes, you, jack-ass with a programming certificate and a $100,000 Kickstarter campaign. Hire yourself an actual storyteller to tell your story. And no, it can't just be your drinking buddy or kid sister butchering My Little Pony fanfics.

Otherwise, you wind up with "weird magical things" - and that's a bit curt, don't you think? One could have said, in short, by varying the tone, let's see:
Amicable: the vaporous flask beckons your nostrils.
Revulsive: oily fumes boiling in the alembic drizzle unwillingly into the nearly-clotted ichor coating its receptacle.
By simile: the mace-head has the look of basalt, obsidian, blackened lead... a meteorite only gently hammered into killing shape.
Naive: an abnormally vigorous specimen of wolfsbane, if only it could tell of the gardens of its birth.
Curious: what use this writing-desk in the shape of a raven?
Gallant: a translated book on manners and fencing etiquette, gold-embossed with an illusory shifting frontispiece.
Erudite: a bound sheaf of dated and annotated manuscripts on cyclopean dig-sites.
Mysterious: the wand sits heavy upon its rune-embroidered placemat, as though in the clutch of some other world's gravity.
Sympathetic: the frog paws wetly at its cage's confines, awaiting an unknown fate.
Dramatic: this ransom letter still bears the stag-lord's seal.
Aggressive: the kukri's curvature bends toward you, candle-light flickering at you from its pommel off its point.
Macabre: phalanges grip the light in an orderly, bleached pyramid.
Truculent: thus, sir, might you have said unto me, were you possessed of letters and of spirit. A pity that to you the gift of language remains an alien symbol, triune and inchoate: "weird" "magic" "thing"
!

To Make Life Mine

"Someone hold me
(Tell me I'm pretty)
Someone hold me
(Tell me you need me)
Someone talk to me
(I hate feeling lonely)
Someone, anyone,
Rescue me, set me free

It's all bullshit anyway,
I cannot be what you say"

My Black Heart Machine - It Beats Like This



I've done a lot of bitching about Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire over the past year, pissed off at seeing what should have become the new reference point for cRPG series get turned over to a writing team of self-righteous incompetents. It resulted in a betrayal of the first game's setting, a self-indulgent fanfic filled with repetitive bigotry.

It also brought back what should be an obsolete tradition in cRPGs, NPC romances. Starting with Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 2, the Black Isle / Bioware / Obsidian genealogy of party-based tabletop-inspired cRPGs have usually allowed you to cozy up for some corollary campaign canoodling and hump your hired help. The newer revival of such story-based campaigns (InXile's Torment: Tides of Numenera, Obsidian's own excellent work Tyranny and the original PoE) have thankfully tended to do away with such nonsense. Its return in PoE 2 was both badly written and noticeably intrusive.

It didn't help that two of the adventurers-with-benefits options, Tekehu and Xoti, were the only main healers in the default companion roster (chanters notwithstanding) which almost ensures you'll drag at least one of them along on a first playthrough. Both were designed as romantic from the ground up and their role as such is pushed on you, quite incongruously, right from the start. Tekehu's the lowest sort of romance novel detritus, a mystical prince with a-may-zing hair, meeesteeerious origins and great expectations, who nonetheless needs emotional manipulation to achieve his full potential. Everything he does is in the name of his divine mother (seriously, his battle cry is "be- HOLD ME, MOTHER!") except the madcap partying, for which he's constantly ridiculed and condemned, needing to be tamed by the love of a good woman. In his very first dialogue, my character was falling into the tall handsome prince's dark shining eyes for no particular reason.

Xoti was, if anything, even worse. I can only assume it's what the writing team assumes (or wishes) would appeal to strong-minded men, a simpleminded, ignorant fanatic hillbilly given to swooning. I deliberately avoided the romantic dialogue options like hugging her close to you in a tender embrace when she's had a bad dream. Don't ask me where the hell that even came from in the absence of any previous sign of emotion. Nevertheless, the dialogues progressed on the assumption that you'd picked the option her writer wanted you to pick. Not to mention her slashfic-grade descriptions:
"The tip of her tongue, a peek of dusky rose, dabs at the corner of her mouth, leaving a glimmer of wetness."

Even avoiding most of her inane repartee and picking only the darker, less touchy-feely routes leads to this gem:

***
Me: "You're being called to a higher purpose, Xoti. Embrace the harvest - the darkness of the fall."
Her: "Suppose I am. Must be a reason Gaun's showing me these things." Absently, she thumbs the flat of her sickle. "Sometimes I hear them like a whisper in the back of my mind."
Nod "Me too."
She offers you a wry, knowing smile. "We'll figure this out together."
Carefully, she slips her hand into yours. Your fingers easily entwine, palms pressing together so tight you can feel your heartbeats between you.
Shoulders squared, she looks off into the distance.
***

No, seriously now, WHERE THE HELL DID THAT JUST COME FROM???
"Hey, boss?"
"Yes, underling to whom I've barely spoken three lines this whole time?"
"Ah bin fantasizin' on rippin' the souls outten ever-one in tha world."
*cue violins and rain of cherry blossoms*
!
...
... one cannot help but feel we skipped a few crucial turns in the conversation there.

Better yet, your only two available responses are:
"Is there anything we can do to alleviate your nightmares?"
and
[Say nothing] - which by the way leads to the same subsequent quest step of her unburdening her soul at a temple.
No, I'm sorry, that bombshell of turning into a mass-murdering soul collectrix needs a third reply option:
"Bitch, you cray-cray!"

Ah, but that's in keeping with the usual cheese and crackers invited by romantic interludes. To date the only such character self-possessed and complex enough that I would consider her worthy of attention is Morrigan from DA:O.
At least Annah's one passionate kiss from Planescape: Torment was a very brief interlude.
When bandits held a crossbow to Jaheira's head in BG2 I just attacked and let them shoot her. I'm a cloth-clad mage and she's my team's tank, it's her damn job. Turns out making the tactically sound choice as party leader was the wrong answer. Oops.
I sure as hell wasn't about to start anything with that grand ham from NWN, Aribeth.
Elanee from NWN2 seemed intriguing for a few lines, but she got very needy and whiny very fast.
And so on. Safiya from Mask of the Betrayer was more promising but still fell short.

No matter the game, playing at romantic favor-currying brings the inevitable realization that this has nothing to do with anything. (Another reason Morrigan stood out: her agenda was actually contextualized.) It adds nothing to the game universe's immersiveness and as far as character development yields outright cognitive dissonance. No, I don't think my character, the diamond mind standing as the multiverse's only bulwark against the all consuming shadow (there's always an all-consuming shadow) should spend half his time genuflecting before and applauding some codependent belle's one-woman play about her oh-so-gooey fee-fees.

Even on the rare occasion when they're handled with passable skill, cRPG romances sap development time and funding. Minigames in general tend to do so (gambling minigames are a classic example) but at least most can be integrated into gameplay (Elder Scrolls lockpicking for instance) and this is simply not the case  with romances. While it's safe to assume the greater world around your adventure incorporates plenty of emotional manipulation, codependency and mammalian pair-bonding (baby adventurers have to come from somewhere after all) this background assumption need not be spelled out.

Heros Ex Machina

"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer."

Voltaire


_________________________
Major spoiler alert for Pillars of Eternity 1's ending.
_________________________

One of your first adventures in Pillars of Eternity (#1) has you infiltrating Raedric's Hold to speak with and/or murderize Lord (coincidentally enough) Raedric. You can either fight your way through or sneak to him with minimal combat by helping one of his two advisors kill the other. And you thought workplace competition was cut-throat in capitalist societies. One of your choices of ally, Nedmar, is a priest and loyal old follower of the Raedrics. He speaks softly, inhabits a cozy study on the castle's top floor and though it breaks his heart, asks you to do what's best for the suffering people of his land even if it means siding with the plucky rebel resistance and killing the now tyrannical Raedric. The other choice, Osrya, is a disfigured, monomaniacal loner mad scientist haunting the castle's dungeon alongside her army of zombies and other fleshly abominations. She wants you to preserve Raedric no matter what atrocities he's committed (and will continue to commit) since he's paying her bills.

Kind of seems like an open and shut case of classic good/evil roleplaying choices, except for the unexpected twist of the woman being on the selfish "evil" side. Their interpretations of their nation's calamity remain in character. Nedmar the priest says you have to appease the gods while Osrya the scientist says it's the fault of mortal villains acting via technological means. It turns out Osrya was absolutely 110% correct and Nedmar was talking out of his ass. In fact even Nedmar's entire pantheon were secretly manufactured by an ancient civilization in order to bring the whole world together under one faith.

Religion is psychologically safe. It's a cozy upstairs study. Lets you feel taken care of. Saves you the trouble of thinking for yourself. "God did it" makes a convenient explanation - for whatever. Unfortunately it's also a very, very lazy non-explanation leaving you with the inevitable question of who or what, in turn, did that God thing in the first place, or at least "why did God do it?" It fails to answer anything satisfactorily, not only from a scientific perspective but from a storytelling one.

We've had fantasy storytelling forever. Folklore is replete with epic poems, fairytales and fables in which things happen "just because" some inscrutable supernatural will wills it so. About the second half of the 19th century, western society became increasingly aware of the value of rationalism, of knowing just how things work, and its literature branched out to reflect this growing consciousness through science and detective fiction. By the time superhero comics became a thing of their own in the 1940s such fiction had undergone decades' worth of pulping. The public was all too willing to revert back to its golden oldie superstitions. Nevertheless, Batman grew out of detective thrillers like The Shadow and Superman was among other things a logical reversal of pulp SF's planetary romances. Through the Silver Age, most of the most memorable superheroes like Spider-Man, Flash, The X-Men, Iron Man stood out against previous centuries' background of mystical superheroes like Siegfried and Herakles for embracing 20th century science, albeit superficially. Superheroes are demi-dei ex machina, emphasis on the machina.

This may seem like splitting hairs. Siegfried bathes in dragon blood, Spidey gets injected with spider spit, po-tay-toe / po-tah-toe, who cares, it's really all about punching stuff. The justifications for superheroes' powers withstand little more scrutiny than mystical babbling anyway... but that little counts for a lot. When you dream up kryptonite you're creating a substance with physical properties, and its role in the story is constrained by those properties. Fans begin to ask questions. Good questions. Like, what's its density? Valence shell? How exactly did so much of the stuff make it to Earth given the inverse-square law? Or where in the original planet's crust did it come from? What's its LD50 if Supes eats some on toast? In a hamburger with ketchup? In a homeopathic distillation? The same kind of inquisitiveness is not prompted by the unanswered questions of why, for example, Nessus' blood was poisonous in the first place and how many species could it affect (could it penetrate the skin of Achilles / Siegfried?) how long is its half-life sitting in Deianeira's amphora or krater or whatever, what exactly are its pharmacokinetics and renal clearance, etc.
Meh. Who cares. Centaurs are just weird like that, dude. Whatever, brah. God(s) did it.

Science is messy. It gets its hands dirty. "Scientific" explanations in fiction quite often reek of the sewer and cause no end of efforts at cleaning up some writer's spewing buzz-words like "gamma rays" or "ruby quartz" or whatever the hell Flash is snorting. Comes with the territory. Unfortunately, superhero comics were littered from the start with truly supernatural supes like witches, gods, amazons and Atlanteans, but they used to take a back seat. Used to. I take it as a sign of our times that the biggest names in superhero movies since last decade have become Thor vs. Loki and Wonder Woman vs. Ares, and that Spider Man was apparently retconned to have been bitten by a magic spider-pixie or some bullshit instead of a radioactive spider. As each generation since WWII degenerates farther and farther into anti-intellectualism, it becomes more and more susceptible to facile, shallow mysticism instead of facile, shallow technobabble. And yes, there are degrees to facile and shallow, even among punch-drunk comic book characters. "Abracadabra" is still lazier than even half-assed technobabble.

Games and gamers have the potential to turn this nocive flood around. To actively play a game instead of passively absorbing a story is to deal with game mechanics. Even with god-moding enemies, you're more likely to ask yourself how expansive exactly is Almalexia's mana pool, or how many total 9th-level spells per day Talona can hand out to all her most toxic players. You start thinking of the dice rolls behind the squinting and grunting of magical conflicts. Your fictional setting might need gods, sure; it might need the influence of vastly superhuman wilful forces. But it is important to root these forces in mechanistic vulnerabilities, even if the mechanics are not fully explained. If you must have gods then manufacture them, in universe, by means accessible to others within the same universe. Start assembling superpowers from nuts and bolts instead of starting with a "flying brick"effect and then trying to justify it. As unpleasant as Osrya seems, remember she is ultimately right, and her methodology infinitely more likely to yield coherent answers than kindly old Nedmar's kow-towing before his own tulpas.

You want to write better superheroes? Game the system.

The Art of Femismancy, Part The Last: What Have We Learned?

"And it's ironic too

'Cause what we tend to do
Is act on what they say 
And then it is that way"

Jem - They

A few chapters ago, the webcomic Wilde Life featured a siren who unwittingly mesmerizes the male lead, invading his dreams and tormenting him with nightmarish visions. The writer repeatedly drives home the point that this is not her fault, that she regrets it and sets out to right her wrong by skipping town to cut the magic link.
The latest chapter of Wilde Life features a story about a girl who fell in love with a (male) supernatural raven. They merge into one entity. In the present day, another teenage male character is accosted by the raven-man, who sinisterly gets grabby with him, invading his dreams and tormenting him with nightmarish visions. Then suddenly the raven breaks character, shies away mumbling "no no no no no no no I don't want to hurt you" - and is revealed to be currently embodying the female half of their pair. Because of course. Man bad, woman good.

Two years ago, the remake of Ghostbusters came out with an all-female cast, pushed by an ad campaign costing more than the movie itself, and anyone who complained was shouted down as anti-female. Its fanatical adherents failed to grasp the problem that a movie entirely predicated on anti-male bigotry, on a sweeping replacement of men by women, was not likely to have anything else going for it. By all accounts, the result was a slog of a script peppered with a few half-assed, awkward action scenes. If the flick's remembered at all now, it's as a flop, and the critical reviews praising it make endless transparent excuses for its failings, obligated to applaud a feminist propaganda piece.

That same year, Siege of Dragonspear came out, which again earned a reputation as a social justice warrior mangling of a classic cRPG. More level-headed players also noted that aside from proselytizing, it lacked any of the positive qualities of the games whose name it took in vain.

Earlier this year, I played a badly written sequel to a good game. Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is not terrible, all told. Its gameplay mechanics, while not outstanding, brought minor improvements or at least managed not to wreck the first installment's take on old-school isometric RPGs. Its sound and visuals were well enough executed, though the figures and landscapes they portray fall short of the original. Unfortunately, Obsidian Entertainment's leadership decided to hand over the writing job to a cabal of propagandists whose storytelling ability and incapacity for nuanced thought would best fit children's books, self-insert fan fics or cheesy inspirational posters. Characters, places, monsters, political factions, roleplaying choices, all fall flat. Even the background reincarnation-themed cosmology seems to be getting replaced (for no particular reason) by a standard "Hel" complete with standard red-skinned imps. That they actually thought "oh my Gaun" would stay funny through more than one repetition makes one wonder what qualifications, if any, Deadfire's writing team boasted to land their jobs.

It was also hard to miss Deadfire's dedication to feminism. The gravelly-voiced male narrator (a direct throwback to the old Infinity Engine games) is replaced by a female one, and the newly breathy, over-emotive narration expanded to nuisance levels. Male deities are degraded to boogeymen and thrown a line or two while female ones take up endless interludes with their (supposedly grandiose) bickering. So on my second playthrough I took the time to tally up its rather extensive supporting cast and see how many men or women were portrayed in a positive or negative light. I had originally planned to do so for this last post as well, rounding it out with end-game encounters, but honestly I lost my remaining interest in the game and the few remaining examples just reiterated more of the same:


Nemnok the Devourer (m) - a jumped-up imp masquerading as a stereotypical volcano god for an island's worth of primitive dwarves. Like all imps, which seem to be all male, he's disgusting, obnoxious, cruel, despicable in every way.
or 
Lucia Rivan (f) - "she is the epitome of Grand Vailia. Of magnificence, honor, and duty. Living or undead, she strives still to serve her charge."
She's an honorable zombie too, and well-mannered to boot!
"What the goddess of death has marked, I will leave untouched." She nods solemnly, once, then with a tilt of her skull, steers the ship away.
or
Menzzago (m) - Lucia Rivan's former second, now leading an island full of flesh-eating undead abominations, hypnotized into submission. Evil, evil, evil down to his villainous lair's black and red color scheme.

And so on and on. What Deadfire's script lacks in quality it makes up for in droning repetition. This is, in fact, what has rendered it such a good case study for this sort of chauvinism. "Boys stink, girls rule!" makes a shaky foundation for a rather expansive game like Deadfire, but our stalwart auteurs stuck to their guns, yielding a noticeable, endlessly repeating pattern of juxtaposing negative male characters with positive female ones in order to emphasize female superiority. It only jumped out at me after having written my first post on the topic, at the start of my second playthrough. Once I had all the characters written down, the contrast of Governor Clario's moral failings against the virtuous women with whom he interacts (Benessa and Ikawha) became impossible to ignore. Not that it was subtle to begin with, given their overt badmouthing of him.

Three such patterns emerged.

1) Bad man, good woman.
For example, faction leadership for all four major factions is composed of a leader and second in command, one male and the other female. Regardless of who's actually in charge, the negative aspects of that faction are voiced and embodied by the male. Especially glaring in the case of the pirates, where the entirety of the pro-slavery faction is cast as male and the entirety of the anti-slavery faction is female.
It can also be much simpler, like the female shipwreck survivor on the beach in the tutorial jeering at her male counterpart and asking if he'd cried when he almost died.
Repeated at least 15 times by my estimate.

2) Bad man, good women.
Two or more women want to cooperate for some noble purpose, but wouldn't you know it, there just happens to be an obstacle in the way of their cooperation and that obstacle just happens to be male. Or, several idealized women are somehow all linked by their connection with a single bumbling, stupid, evil male.
Examples: Clario, Oswald, Hati, the nameless "a man" who created Modwyr, etc.

3) Bad men, good woman
A competent, well-intentioned female is somehow surrounded or being actively held back by the machinations or bumbling of two or more stupid, evil men.
Many more examples: Savia, Syri, Nairi, Wehata, Fassina, Bekarna, Elette, etc. - the archipelago's just stuffed with over-competent, saintly women beset on all sides by male evil and stupidity. Just the same old heroine indeed.

The scant positive male characters in Deadfire are a couple of female fan servicers lifted straight out of romance novels or a couple of conveniently wrinkled old daddy-figures with a disturbingly high chance to have been physically maimed somehow. The only negative female characters... well, shit, try to find one. Whenever any woman does something wrong, it's somehow toward a greater good, usually in service to her tribal unit or justified by the greater evil of the nearest male next to her. They managed only one true villainness, Malnaj, and even she was permitted more dignity than most of the male cast. Then you've got the monster races, which acquire gender-specific attributes in the sequel like the Spindle "Man" or "Mother" Sharp-Rock, with predictable demonization and sanctification.

So, class, what have we learned?

1) Fanaticism is, among other things, a refuge for the incompetent. Social justice tracts, much like the religious morality plays they so naively emulate, tend to weigh down the low end of the intellectual and artistic bell curve. Stepping back from social issues, there emerges a pattern of unskilled hacks shielding themselves from criticism behind the unbending bulwark of constantly repeated politically correct mantras. My crap promotes people of the correct skin color or sex, so if you call my crap crap then you're a sexist, racist, child-molesting nazi pig.

2) Propaganda is not art. It's psychological conditioning. I may bitch about the endless repetition in Deadfire, but repetition is the whole point. Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra. Man bad, woman good. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Repeat it on the news and in movies and especially repeat it in university literature departments, so that it carries forth into every publication, so that everyone can recite the feminist gospel truth. Deadfire, more blatant than most, is merely a reiteration of the conditioning we've endured all our lives. We have all grown up with this presumption of male debt and duty, of male "patriarchal" original sin to be expiated only by constant service toward women and children.

And it's an easy sell. It meshes perfectly with our instinctive view of men as competent, unfeeling instruments, the active, utilitarian branch of the family/tribal unit. It fits with men's instinctive eagerness to beat each other down as sexual competitors and with women's instinctive need for psychological leverage over men. Good or bad, it's hard to find any creator not kow-towing to female purity and moral superiority, from folklore to modern media. I'd count Wilde Life a great deal more clever and captivating a work in its own right than the others I've mentioned here. But still, of course the mentally invasive siren in Wilde Life must be presumed well-intentioned while the mentally invasive raven must be presumed creepy and evil... until he turns female. We know it, we expect it, we demand it, we hunger for it with the same pre-sentient, fanatical, impulsive, salivating reflex as Pavlov's dog knew the sound of the bell.
Man? Bad!
Woman? Good!
Repeat the mantra.

The Art of Femismancy, Part 7: Periki's Overlook, Serpent's Crown and the Wahaki

I'm taking time during my second playthrough of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire to tally up the supporting cast, (m)ale and (f)emale, and see how many are portrayed in a positive or negative light. Whether it's a heroic, benevolent woman surrounded by stupid, malicious males or a single mean, dumb man getting in the way of angelic women, how many times did Obsidian Entertainment need to re-iterate their chauvinistic tropes in a single game?


Periki's Overlook

Worthless Idiot (m) - recruitable imp. As with the guy with "dumb" in his very name, I really shouldn't have to explain why this one counts as negative. Imps are new in PoE2, and they're all male, and they're all loud, smelly, obnoxious, disgusting little vermin. And if you haven't played the game, that name's just the tip of the iceberg. As with Vektor (m) and Pietro (m) fecal matter is involved. Compare to the newly gendered portrayal of representatives from other monster races.

Hurwyna (f) & Seinu (f) -  expectant mother relying on Ancient ChineseHuana Secrets taught by her midwife.

Marihi (f) - highly skilled blacksmith who can repair your PoE1 weapons. No-nonsense "traditional" smith (whatever the hell that means in an island culture with no mining industry) only prettifying her utilitarian work for the tastes of the nobles. Insults Tekehu (m) and is praised by him.

Amreo (m) - old man who uncrosses his legs at the bath-house so you can have him punished by the authorities, because when men act like liberated women you have to beat them down.
vs.
Udyne (f) - centuries old war veteran soaking her battle scars at the bath-house. Helpful to Serafen and Remaro. Lays on the pre-Norman dialect even more thickly than Iselmyr or Yseyr... and yet manages to pull it off much better than them. Some of it is due to her dialogue's better flowing narration, more than just isolated caveman speak. Most of the credit must however go to the voice actress who just outright sold it, start to finish. Excellent work.

Quarno (m) - Rauataian at the bath house, trading illicitly with the Principi. Plus he's a total meaniehead who tells you to go away. Easily flattered into divulging his crime.
vs.
Tola (f) - Quarno's Principi contact. Startlingly, she's at least as susceptible as Quarno in your quest to get information for the Vailians (babbles when she's drunk) and a rare female character not portrayed in terms of her superiority (moral and/or practical) to her male counterpart. Someone dropped the ball on this one.

Shop Imp (m) - truth in advertisement and Ifren (m) - failed (and rude) thief trapped in a wooden puppet by Arkemyr. Both of them basically exist due to Arkemyr (making him look worse for creating and employing such abominations) and to provide counterpoints to Fassina's positive qualities.
Fassina (f) - recruitable clerk at The Dark Cupboard. Clever, sexually liberated, directly contrasted to her boyfriend in being gainfully employed. Like every other woman in this game, she's surrounded by stupid, evil, oppressive men, from a stinky imp to a shoplifting boyfriend, a whip-cracking, stingy boss and an obnoxious wooden (male) puppet. Oh that poor angelic woman having to deal with all those worthless bestial males! Though by this point in the game it's very much a case of "just a rerun heroine, just a retread heroine, just the same old heroine"
vs.
Bertenno (m) - "that flaccid bazzo!" in Fassina's words. Her boyfriend. Cowardly, dishonest, incompetent, deadbeat, whatever it takes to make his girlfriend look good by comparison.
vs.
Hamuto Stoneheel (m) - lawful neutral captain collecting Bertenno's debt at the Brass Citadel.

Tumara (f) - Rauataian who wants to get her hands on Arkemyr's epic stones. Greedy, insults illiterate islanders. However, unlike most Rauataians or especially Vailians' comments about the Archipelago (amounting to "squeeze, Rabban, squeeze") she actually makes a valid point about natives' willingness to sell off their own lands for quick profit.
vs.
Netehe (f) - Huana who wants to get her hands on Arkemyr's epic stones. For her people! Plays the cultural heritage card to its fullest. Obviously the politically correct choice here.
vs.
Arkemyr (m) - "the bringer of Foul Wind" according to Fassina. Complete stock character: the mean, stiff-necked, pompous old English boarding school master from any number of children's movies. Despite being the victim of your burglary (and really being one of the good guys, apocalypse-wise) his every description and verbal inflection is designed to make you hate him. Oh, and of course he failed to acknowledge the greatness of a woman.
vs.
Bekarna (f) - whose greatness a man failed to acknowledge. Despite being "dame not appearing in this entertainment product" her notes and others' commentary on her eat up more screen time than most faction leaders. Oh, look, it's yet another retread heroine positioned between two meanie men.
vs.
Concelhaut (m) - who's out to pilfer a woman's hard work for his own ignominious male ends. Downgraded from his somewhat dignified antagonist role in PoE1 to a cartoonish recurring bumbling weekly villain role.

Ekenu (m) - watershaper mook holding the door during the naga attack.

Guildmaster Mairu (f) - righteously indignant watershaper superior (in every way, and don't you forget it) to Tekehu, the first of many women to scold him for all the wrong reasons. Later, heroically holds off a horde of naga, unto death: "Too many, even for me." Y'know, at least Boromir had the decency not to be so smug about it. Not a word is said against her apropos her keeping a gigantic scaly slave in her basement.
vs.
Tekehu (m) - Mama's boy. Mr. 'don't hate me 'cause I'm beautiful.' Obviously intended as service to female fans, but that'll come up whenever I get around to complaining about romance minigames in RPGs. He's a tomcat waiting to be tamed, the chosen one of his people, a rising star, desired by other females and therefore desirable, in short the cheapest sort of romance novel detritus.
Amusingly, his main interactions seem to be getting badmouthed by every single person you meet. I'm sure this was intended to make him even more sympathetic in a "shut up Wesley" sort of way but it vastly overshoots its mark via repetition. Ondra: "he thinks himself frail but MY heart beats in his chest. He is stronger than either of you could know." Ok, so he's a whiny, unreliable prettyboy but I'm supposed to coddle and praise him because he embodies a female's purpose? Wooptie-freakin'-doo.
Notably, he gets shoved in your face as a romance option from the very first dialogue. You meet a tall handsome prince and immediately find yourself getting lost in his dark eyes.
Who the hell gave these idiots Lit. degrees?

Periki (f) - appears only in statue and soul form. Filthy liar. Caught a dragon by the tail, thus kicking off a generations-long and civilization-spanning government cover-up as to the source of Huana magicians' powers. Yet others' comments about her are nothing but admiration while her direct descriptions are shamelessly sympathetic. No, really. You hold her statue's hand, at which it literally cries a single tear which you have the honor of wiping off its cheek.
Quite the Dickensian treatment for a slave mistress. How come Master Kua (m) back in Crookspur doesn't get this kind of sympathy?
Bonus feminist points: her soul's memories begin with her brushing off a man's touch.
"One of [your shipmates] claps your back with approval.
You step back and aim a reproachful look at your mate, however friendly his intent."
Bad touch! Bad touch!
vs.
Scyorielaphas (m) - (and damn you for making me spellcheck that) Ok, pause for the inspired? accidental? humor of opening your dialogue with a gigantic, blatantly obvious dragon by shouting "Dragon!" But anyway, to further shift guilt away from the women who enslaved him, his first line is:
"Have you come to deliver me from this prison of my own making?"
When dumb, stinky boys get enslaved by the very people they tried to help, it's their own damn fault. So there.
Tekehu further brushes off any question of Mairu's treachery by instead focusing on "the gifts and encouragement" her guild lavished upon him, in true spineless millennial snowflake praise-junkie fashion.
Onekaza, when informed of the slave she's been keeping through her willful ignorance, pulls the usual "for my people" routine.
Skeereeoh-whatver's deliberately made less likeable by constantly insulting Obsidian's cheap gift to their female fanbase, Tekehu, by calling him "half-breed" - *gasp* racist dragon!
His parting shot, should you choose to continue enslaving him?
"Make no mistake. You are the only monster here."
Holy mother of hacks! That's your big dramatic finish? That line was already so overdone and antiquated that it got ridiculed on The Simpsons' Hungry Are the Damned Halloween special back in 1990 for being 1960s Twilight Zone cheese. "There were monsters on that ship and truly we were them."



Serpent's Crown


Takano (m) - useless old blowhard dick-measuring his estate's size, easily swindled out of his priceless macguffin because he's desperate because he's broke, which being he's also male gets played off as well-deserved and funny.

Nungata (f) - bounty contractor, stately old matron, eloquent, long heroic history of victories. The second woman to look down on you for working with Abocco (m) the bottomfeeder from Queen's Berth, and she only deals in high-end contracts. "A lady needs standards, after all."

Maia (f) - aside from her tough chick demeanor, her very introduction has her ridiculing both Eder (m) and Kana (m) and quizzing you on how to stop a mutiny, thus establishing her as a moral paragon

Barati (m) - bounty contractor, a.k.a. Big Chief Killumall. Seemingly exists to drop Tangaloa's name into every sentence and otherwise lay the Nativese dialect on as thick as possible. Not much of a personality otherwise.

Prince Aruihi (m) - Onekaza's foil. His first line "I say our guest forgets himself" a relatively soft rebuke of an unjust accusation of mass murder, immediately earns him a slam by his sister the queen "You are the one who mistakes this for a sparring arena." Yes, because implications of violence are beneath royalty and only a dumb male would ever resort to them. That's why Onekaza keeps TWO HUGE TIGERS by her side.
Same dull repetitive setup as the other factions. The Huana are ruled by a leader and second, one male one female, with any negative connotations embodied by the male. To motivate Aruihi to feed his city's starving underclass, playing on his sense of compassion or justice doesn't work. Only his competitiveness.
vs.
Onekaza (f) -intended as a supremely impressive and glamorous native queen... except she never actually does anything. The writers characterized themselves into a corner. They wanted Onekaza as grandiose and angelic as possible. Problem: grandeur's rarely angelic. So aside from her inexplicable telepathy and bragging about her pet tigers, she just sits back and delegates to her brother, to the guildmaster, to the Wahaki, never getting her hands dirty. Even the captive dragon under the city makes sure to note the Queen didn't know about him, just in case you were wondering whether a female faction leader might have some negative traits.
They don't.
All female leaders are always perfect.
'cuz.
So there.
Shut up.


Motare o Kozi

Baltia (f) - Vailian expedition's sole survivor, trapped in vines. Sent to their deaths by Director Castol (m) and specifically Castol, not his (f) assistant. They were tracking another (Huana) expedition sent to their deaths by Aruihi (m) and specifically Aruihi, not Onekaza (f)
vs.
The Green Lady (f) - menpwgra in the swamp, introduced as "The Rotted Lady" and she's "a very powerful woman" in the words of your quest journal. Sure she's a murderously parasitic blight upon all that breathes, but being female that's of course everyone else's fault but hers, and she can effortlessly be redeemed through dialogue back to her status as an ancient, wise guardian of the land.


Ori o Koiki

Kipeha (f) - plucky archer guarding the main entrance

Auata (f) - xenophobic islander. Likes Tekehu.
vs.
Aparo (m) - xenophilic islander. Likes Ruasare.

Tangara (m) - tribe's enforcer, repairing a purchased construct. Whatever happened to the Wahaki being isolationists?
and
Burapo (m) - tribe's mystic, stinking up the place with his burnt offerings.
vs.
Ruasare (f) - yet another idealized female native leader, because you can never paint with too many colors of the wind. By dint of savage nobility, the Wahaki tribe are all pretty glamorized. Sure they murder and pillage random passing ships, but they're totes not pirates, bro. Everything they do is entirely For My People and therefore justifiable, ekera.
Their leadership follows the usual structure from other factions. Burapo and Tangara are slightly ridiculous, inept, unimpressive old farts while Ruasare herself is described as mighty in battle and mighty in bed, blue-blooded going back millennia, last bulwark against foreign aggression, honorable, reliable, etc., etc. The most severe character flaw they could come up with for her? She likes fruit.

 

 

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Series concluded here.

 

The Art of Femismancy, Part 6: The Brass Citadel, Hasongo and Sayuka

I'm taking time during my second playthrough of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire to tally up the supporting cast, (m)ale and (f)emale, and see how many are portrayed in a positive or negative light. How does Obsidian Entertainment glorify women at the expense of men?

Interestingly, both the Brass Citadel and Hasongo are overall much less fanatical in pushing political correctness or trite good woman / bad man dichotomies. It's subtle while running quests back and forth but blatant enough when separated from the rest of the game that I'd wager on the Rauataians having been created by someone outside the central coven of Deadfire's "writers."


The Brass Citadel

Rauataian Guard (f) - standing by the entrance, accuses:
Vailian Merchant (f) - of espionage. Not much difference between them. Both insult and distrust each other.

Rauataian Guard (m) - technocrat
vs.
Kuaru Artisan (f) - luddite
A spirited debate among equals! Male and female, technology and primitivism, conversing for mutual enlightenment! How fair-minded!
Now let's get back to the other 95% of the game with its blameless noble savages standing up to greedy, scheming ersatz Europeans and all those saintly women so oppressed by stupid, drunk, backward, evil, incompetent, mean, useless, disgusting MEN.
Hilarity.

Orlan Peddler (f) - gives an unexpectedly sedate and unromanticized outlook on Rauataian imperialism

Emeini (f) - cannonball girl, undergoing cruel and unusual punishment by The Man for punching her captain, Wakoyo (m) after he insulted her cannoneering expertise.
vs.
Fleet-Master Wakoyo (m) - bounty contractor, for some inexplicable reason given a pompous s'thern g'n'lman speech pattern but there's not much else to him. At least he's not spouting quaint ethnicisms every other word, ekera.

Sabormi (f) - aggravatingly chipper clerk at Imperial Command.

Maia (f) - your sniper companion. Turns out she's been assassinating people, but she's allowed to retain the moral high ground through remorse so she somehow comes out sounding like a victim.
vs.
Atsura (m) - spymaster for the Rauataians, taking the blame for Maia's assassinations. Puts a male face on all the negative aspects of Rauataian militarism, and acts creepy to boot. Every dialogue with him is padded with lines like "greets you with a hard-edged laugh that barely sounds like his own." oooh, eeeee-vil. Note the Rauataians and Vailians have inverted gender structures in their leadership. As you progress through both, you learn more about their bad side.
For the Vailians, this means you cease to work through the (f) second in command, so the more negative aspects are embodied by the (m) leader.
For the Rauataians, it means you... continue to work with the (m) second in command up to the end, to continue embodying the negative aspects as male.
Even when the poor guy is openly opposing slavery, your dialogue options lead you to question his motives as though he's doing something wrong.
vs.
Hazanui Karu (f) - adventurous, heroic one-armed not-a-bandit leading the Rauataian forces in the Deadfire. "Don't tell me you've never gazed at a horizon and wondered at what lies beyond. Or seen a 'no trespassing' sign as a challenge." Daring, strategic action girl whose hand has been pre-washed of any skullduggery. This should be a highly familiar setup by this point in Obsidian's little epic fempic: two or more women performing heroic deeds while a man they both interact with is somehow guilty of all incumbent wrongdoing.



Hasongo

Zuhira (f) - shellshocked leader of the Rauataian survivors. Both sympathetic and admirable in desperately trying to hold it together.

Aimuro (m) - fatalistic, calm and collected engineer who cares more about his work than his life.

Yanass (f) - dead naga, of those attacking the Rauataians for despoiling the land with their technology. For a snake creature, surprisingly sympathetic: "Now there is no way and no light. I am afraid."

Sugaan (m) - naga leader. Asks for reasonable proof of your magical powers before letting you approach your goal, and accepts said proof in a reasonable manner. Amazing!

Bearn (m) - son of Eder's old flame. Brainwashed by cultists after leading a hard life. His dialogue actually comes across as much more nuanced than most, reminiscent of PoE1's better points.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled male-bashing:


Sayuka

Tebe (f) - glib Huana greeter on the docks. Prescient too! She just *knows* (or dare I say intuits) that Galawain (m) is behind the giant creatures plaguing their town. Oh, and she "certainly will not" call her male boss "sir"
vs. her supervisor, the nameless
Undersecretary (m) - mean, stuffy Rautaian man crushing Tebe's free native womanly spirit: "and no smiling!" - no, seriously, that's his second spoken sentence, no smiling.
One of your own character's dialogue options is a conspiratorial aside to Tebe: "[Whisper]: 'Is it just me or is this guy terrible?'" Why, yes, when the writing team chooses to write him as terrible, the guy is indeed terrible.
For bonus "intersectional" feminist points, count the number of times this game's writers equate their glorified angelic natives (Huana) with their glorified angelic women.

Iverra (f) - inventive, scientifically-inclined Vailian willing to get herself smuggled in a crate for a chance to continue her research.

Okaya (f) - serious, mathematically-inclined Rauataian Fleet Master of Sayuka. Has a crush on Karu (f) and warns you against Atsura (m) Though juxtaposed against the idealized Huana as their invader, she never does anything even remotely antagonistic beyond merely defending her town. Disposable males are instead conveniently interposed between herself and the Huana women bucking Rauataian oppression (the undersecretary above and Weto below.) Even the Huana druids she sends you to kill are minimally developed and rather unlikeable. Wants you to stop the constant stream of super-sized creatures attacking Sayuka.
vs.
Galawain (m) - the source of the monsters attacking Sayuka, via ancient sunken magitek. Wants you to preserve the machinery making all the kaiju. He gets the same treatment as Rymrgand in his Sacred Stair appearance, stripped of all positive or balancing attributes and relegated to the status of boogeyman, and unsurprisingly he's again positioned as directly antagonistic to a female questgiver. In PoE1, Galawain was the god of beasts, the hunt, survivalism, etc. but that also meant vitality, savvy, courage, caution, occasional cooperation and anything else that plays into the evolutionary struggle. His god quest fully acknowledged the validity of strategic thinking and combative caution. Now in his PoE2 feminist reinterpretation, Galawain's degraded to a simpleminded force of destruction who just likes things big. End of story. Even the Kraken formerly (indirectly) associated with the sea goddess Ondra (f) in The White March is now Galawain's pet. Well, naturally. It's ugly and evil, so it belongs to a man.

Tipa (f) - recalcitrant native railing against Rauataian expansion. Rattles off social justice warrior catchphrases against imperialism like a humanities graduate: "protect our culture" because they're only trying to seduce us with their technologically advanced trade goods, we don't need their superior technology because we're in tune with the land, and anyway, their helping us was "only a ploy to make us dependent on them" and best of all "our differences make us strong" even when those differences come in the form of an oppressive caste system
vs.
Weto (m) - Tipa's brother, pro-Rauataian. The dialogue is presented as a standard RPG prompt to choose between two equal sides. In practice, Weto accrues not one third of Tipa's lines and nowhere near her barrage of righteous indignation.
If you side with Weto, the dialogue ends with him telling you: "don't mind my sister - her heart is in the right place."
If you side with Tipa, it's "Weto shakes his head sadly. He tries to put his hand on his sister's shoulder, but she shrugs him off, a look of disgust curling her lips."
Ouch.
Can you spot the rampant moral entitlement written into that supposedly two-sided roleplaying choice?
Can you spot the gratuitous interposition of a strawman? Both Tebe and Tipa's rants could just as easily have been directed at Okaya herself, yet they were provided with male targets for their abuse. When Rauatai is represented by hyper-competent, overworked, pedantic fleet masters, they're all heroic warrior women. When Rauatai needs to lose an argument as stiff-necked imperialist scum, <insert male here>

Waturi (m) - pompous, selfish high-caste native: "I am Mataru, a warrior. The best quarters are mine by right." Oh, and he snores. Are we sure he doesn't also spill ale on his pants and shit them while sweating profusely, like so many other men in this game?
vs.
Osauro (f) - middle-caste, middle-aged woman magnanimously teaching a lower-caste man how to tie rugs. "Putting up" with the presence of Waturi in the longhouse.
vs.
Nedunga (m) - kindly lower-caste man bettering himself by learning a trade. Conveniently old and directly suppliant before a socially superior woman, so he's permitted a favorable characterization.

Remaro (m) - Serafen's friend and former mentor. Morally upright. Branded an outlaw by his own pirate faction for fear he might out them as slavers.
vs
Malnaj (f) - Serafen's abuser from back in his tragic youth, hunting Remaro's bounty. Here we have, at last, a true villainess both disliked by others and objectively on the wrong side of an ethical question. Take any negative character trait and Malnaj probably has it. She's cruel, ugly (by standard human standards) boastful, heartless, underhanded, etc. all in a very short appearance. In fact Malnaj has such a suspiciously high concentration of negative traits, in such direct contrast to every other woman in the game, as to be an obvious decoy the writers could point to in response to criticism like my own.
Yet they still could not bring themselves to completely trash her like they do the men. For all her negative traits she at least displays competence in her attempted task, unlike other villains like Benweth (m) or Anaharu (m) or Degnos (m) or the Valeras (m)(m) or Bertenno (m) etc. all of whom moronically stumble over themselves in their thievery / treason / general destructiveness.But hey! I can honestly say Deadfire features one (1) truly, decisively negative female character. And she appears for about half a page, in an easily skippable companion quest no less.
Ever heard of the exception that proves the rule?

 

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Series concluded here.