So the inimitable Hbomberguy has a new video taking on the pickup artists we here at We Hunted the Mammoth have grown to know and loathe, focusing on two of the most loathesome, Roosh V and Matt Forney.
Watch it! This is one of those very rare 30 minute YouTube videos that’s worth watching (that doesn’t involve cats, Russian drivers, or pimple popping).
Well that was creepy yet enjoyable.
Also, Lis can go die in a fire (actually, she does, muahaha !). There was no reason for her existence at all. I mean is she mentioned in any dialogue, text document, quest, anything ? She serves no purpose whatsoever save for occasionally glitching out of her pen and roaming the whole sanctuary oh god it’s come out and it’s right in front of me kill it kill it kill it *sobs*.
Why am I always the only one who liked FO3 in any group? Granted, part of the reason I like it is completely personal, but I really didn’t think it was that bad of a game. It seems like up until a couple years ago, no one had a problem with it and now you’d think it’s the worst game ever made.
@Handsome Jack
I’m bothered by the spiders’ movements. It isn’t necessarily the creature itself that terrifies me, but the way spiders and centipedes move is nightmarish. I don’t know why I’m like this–that’s just how it is. So if I see a fake spider with unrealistic movements, it’s not a problem. Like the frostbite spiders. DA:Origins’ spiders, on the other hand, haunted my fucking dreams.
@ryeash
Okay, this is weird. I rather put DA:Origins in the non-scary spiders category, while frostbites absolutely terrify me. I do agree that their movement and animation plays a huge role though.
Not a huge fan of centipedes either. Or really any creepy-crawlies.
The weird thing is that I like spiders. They creep me the fuck out, but I like ’em. When I see spiders IRL, if they ain’t the too-creepy-for-me-to-handle kind, I just pick them up and bring them elsewhere not to be rid of them, but to put them out of the way of any potential harm I might accidentally do, like stepping on them.
Shit there’s spiders in the stuff I write, and mostly they hold rather positive roles.
They’re one of the most patient creatures on Earth, they’re scary smart and fast and they fucking weave stuff – there’s a treasure trove of things to expand on in fiction with giant spiders ! And they’re, what, the scary boogeymen that really only scares phobics ? Giant meh.
Re: FO3 is not a bad game per se… it’s just not a good Fallout. Also, as Jack said, where the gay at ?
ETA : Yeah, Fallout is kinda horrible if you don’t like creepy-crawlies.
I’d say the designs were more about making them more realistic…which…well, you aren’t wrong. Also, it’s just weird that they didn’t go full tarantula but I guess the fur and biggers eye would make them cuter. Or I guess cute at all.
The sound design is just all-around pretty gross, though. I’m not sure what giant spiders would sound like, but probably not that. They’re feet are too big to make definite clicking sounds and that slimy thing? They aren’t slimy. They don’t need to make that noise.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to put that part in. It was why I used acrophobia in the first place. It was really unneeded. Half of me wondered if they put that in because they were proud of the world design and wanted to show it off…but then I remember the terrible FUCKING MAP Skyrim has that doesn’t even show main roads properly and the few that you can see get obscured by clouds.
The map is awful.
Anyway, I happen to have acrophobia plus a fear of falling (whatever that’s called) and while the height part of the animation wasn’t bad, the falling part wasn’t that great. Also there’s a bug in which you could just be dropped to the group and die so that’s cool.
Giants launching you a 1000 feet into the air is also unappreciated.
That may have been a “fuck you” to arachnophobes but at least he’s fleshed out character because of it. And also cute. But that’s unrelated.
Babette milks her for venom considering that’s something Babette sells. Like a girl have her non-aggressive giant spider pet. :<
It’s an alright game and I liked it alright however it was touted as being completely opened and you could do what you want and your actions effect the world but…it doesn’t. It’s nothing like that at all.
Like, give the H. Bomberguy vid I linked a chance. Yeah, it’s 1h 30m long but people have said that they came to tear down the video but got caught up and listened to the whole thing and agreed. The video even changed some people’s opinion on the game.
And just because it’s a bad game doesn’t mean you can’t like it. And just because people think it’s a bad game doesn’t mean they hate it or don’t like it. You can like crap, and the video isn’t deriding people or whatever for liking it if they did. He’s just criticizing, not mocking it.
@Anarchonist
While it might be difficult to rationalize allying with Caesar’s Legion (beyond role-playing an evil character) given how obviously brutal and oppressive they are, I’m not sure they’re meant to represent unambiguous evil.
There is at a least a semi-coherent philosophy behind the “one-culture” hegemony. It becomes clear when exhausting some of Caesar’s conversation options.
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Caesar
@Jack
I’ve got that fear of falls thing, I keep forgetting how it’s called. I was half-expecting the drop to happen, to be fair, so I was ready to brace and look toward the sky instead. Became a reflex in subsequent playthroughs (when I bothered to touch that quest again).
Falls in Skyrim I can still sorta deal with… but there’s a trend these days about sudden brutal falls with realistic blur effects – that seems to be a Ubisoft thing mainly, ever since they’ve taken to writing the book on how to asshole. (They made my childhood, by the way. Wish they’d remember how they did that.)
That’s exactly my problem with it. It’s the whole “Yo I’m just human dude, I get that Companions are all about being the manliest manlymen and manlywomen around, but I’m also an adult and I get that it’s unnecessary for me to go fight spiders if I’m phobic and others can do it anyway.” thing.
Like, dude. That’s, uh, cool and all, but I’m phobic too, man. It’s cool that you’ve learned to deal with it and not think it diminishes your burly Companion shtick, but I’m in the exact same situation. Your argument would make sense if I weren’t. Since I am, it doesn’t, and suddenly I’m getting a strange feeling that you’re not talking to me, but to the hypothetical cishet neurotypical white man with no fears whatsoever that your target demographic revolves around.
Well, hey, to be fair, others have that far worse and more often, so I can’t complain beyond just stating it and stating why it’s wrong.
They humanize the NPC and then, through his mouth to add insult to injury, they dehumanize the player. Only Bethesda could accomplish that.
You know what coulda fixed this ? An option to say “I’m phobic too, dude.” and then he comes with you and you both overcome your fear of spiders by smashing them to bits together, and then work together as new leaders of the Companions to rid the guild of its toxic masculinity problem – the one which has caused Farkas to be mocked endlessly by the others.
You over estimate the writer’s ability here. But that’s one reason why many hardcore RPG fans poo poo and hate Skyrim. And that complaint is also addressed in the Bomberguy video I linked earlier because that’s pretty much most if not all Bethesda games.
For instance, this game is definitely written, at least from a character standpoint, to have a male Nord PC. Have you ever been to Windhelm and that dark elf lady comes up to you and asks “Do you hate the dark elves? Are you here to bully us?”
Guess who she also says that to? A fellow dunmer. And then she asks you if you hate “them”–because, you know, you’re not a dunmer in this situation–and you can answer yes or no. I answered yes, hoping she’d catch me being sarcastic but no. She said “we have nothing more to discuss”. And then she hated me because they didn’t think people wouldn’t play anything but a Nord.
And it’s really out of no imagination, thinking that people wouldn’t want phobic characters, and sheer laziness that they’d think people would only play this certain way, with is being a Nord dude.
Although, I guess, being that Nord is the default that you get and a lot of RPG–I’m sorry for using this word but I’m not sure what else to use–“casuals” just won’t care or don’t know if they’d like any other race so they just pick the first dude the game gives them and that’s where most of the actual dialogue it. Because playing as a Nord, there are more special, Nord-specific dialogue than it seems any other race in the game, even for Khajiit and Argonian.
Oh, another thing, if that dark elf lady asks you that question and you happen to be Argonian (whom the dark elves have a history of enslaving and exploiting), her responses are similar as it would be for any other race, including dismissing or applauding the player. But she’ll also say things about “lazy Argonians” to your face. Because that makes sense.
But back to it only being really a Nord story and what Bethesda expects out of their player base–they don’t expect a lot. In fact, Skyrim and Fallout 3 and probably 4 were made for a “broader” audience and what that means is for an audience that doesn’t understand how RPGs work and will likely rush through all the dialogue and crap so they can get back to exploring or shooting things because God forbid the player actually wants to role play in a role playing game.
(And I’m sorry but I’m still really salty about this FUCKING VIDEO about Mass Effect Andromeda that was praising it for it’s combat while fucking hating on RPGs. Here’s a link, it’s 8 minutes long, not that I finished it, but I think my fellow RPG fans would understand my confusion on why someone who hates RPGs THAT MUCH is playing an RPG in the first place.)
Honestly, by the next installment of Elder Scrolls or Fallout, might as well just be maybe a character action FPS at this point.
I don’t prefer sandbox-style RPGs because I’m casual or stupid, I prefer them because I love filling in the vaguer parts with my own unique stories and spending the exploratory downtime watching the world unfold on its own terms. I’ll take one emergent encounter that nobody else has ever had over a hundred story-heavy RPGs that play the same way every time. That doesn’t make me “Crap” or the games that let me do this (objectively) “Crap” or anything else “Crap” except gatekeeping – and no, saying “But it’s okay to like crap!” doesn’t make it any less insulting.
@SFHC
Where did I say I was criticising sandbox RPGs in general? Especially since I was waxing lyrical about Fallout New Vegas in this very thread? I’m criticising primarily Skyrim and Fallout 3 and I guess also 4 (which I shouldn’t because I haven’t played it sorry).
I apologise for my wording. I’m not sure what else to call people who play an RPG but instead of paying attention to the story or even caring about what skills your character should work on, they’re rushing through the game, playing it more for combat than for things that make an RPG an RPG.
Yeah, there’s no right way to play a game but you’re not really “role playing” if you don’t take the time to at least read through what you’re saying to people. And I don’t mean people replaying a game, either, I mean people who treat fresh straight out of the box RPGs like this. “Casual RPG player” seemed the right choice of words for that.
I will say that is a legitimate style of gameplay but don’t you think it’s a little weird that you can give very little thought to dialogue choice in Skyrim and Fallout 3? Most of the dialogue choices are questions and either a yes or no to accept a quest. There’s no actual talking to people. That’s what makes Skyrim and Fallout super crappy RPGs. Not crappy games, just crappy RPGs, just like Mighty Number 9 is a crappy platform shooter and Brutal Legends is a crappy RTS.
(I’m sorry Brutal Legends, you know I love you.)
I know I called some people “casual” and that’s terrible but the game lets a character be arachnophobic but not your character, and for some reason a dark elf is asking if I’m a self-hating dark elf- coming to harass other dark elves as if I’m not a dark elf-that’s an oversight there RP wise is all I’m saying here.
Skyrim is the reason so many games even have an open world these days for better or for worst; I should be able to criticize a game that has impacted so much. Maybe not without scrutiny but without thinking I’m taking a dig at sandbox RPGs in general.
In Fallout 4 it isn’t that you have to be the bad guy, in fact in many ways you have to be a bad guy to someone, as regardless of who you pick you’ll have to kill off at least one faction. In fact I was somewhat annoyed you couldn’t even try to broker peace between factions (I had a good idea as to how to achieve that as well).
@Jack
Re: The sound the frostbites make
Okay yeah, that’s horrible. I hated going into the first Dark Brotherhood sanctum because of that. And I HATED when my kids brought home frostbites. Like yeah, you can totally keep that pet just let me crouch over here for a sec. Don’t mind the bow.
Re: FO3
I’m…not actually that offended. It’s just the general ‘I like this thing, why does no one else like this thing?’ frustration. I like HBomb’s videos, and I was thinking of checking that one out, but I figured if I wanted to see people tearing down FO3 I could pretty much go anywhere that Fallout was being discussed. I’ve been trying to play the first game, but the style is difficult to get into. My introduction to games that weren’t DOS or handheld was when consoles were pioneering 3D. Isometric is completely foreign to me.
@John
I pretty much agree with everything you said about spiders, except I can’t touch them. I’ll trap and release, but that’s as far as it goes. Except orb weavers, we’re cool. As for the DA:Origins spiders, I think it’s that Overwhelm attack that really does me in. They’re scuttling around at range being mildly creepy and then they’re ON YOU tearing your face off, presumably from the sounds. I died a couple times in my mage playthrough trying to clear that first little tunnel area because I kept panicking when they swarmed me.
Tbf, where’s it at in most of the games from that era and before? AAA games are only just starting to add a small amount of gay. I’ve been playing through the Mass Effect series for the first time (dunno why I never picked it up before, just didn’t), and I kept talking to Jack thinking I could romance her with my femshep, but NOPE. Even though she thinks you’re asking her about boy- OR girlfriends in one conversation and even mentions dating a couple at one point, you can’t romance her unless you’re a male Shepard. And that’s Bioware, scourge of bigots the world over. They sort of have a work-around with the asari, but you can’t even romance an asari in ME2, and it’s some weak sauce to present a character as bi+ and functionally make her straight.
I’ve been realizing that ME2 super plays to a cishet white male audience, though, and I am disappoint. Yes we can see that you, designers, dressed Miranda in a skin-tight suit. You don’t need to keep pointing it out and making implications about her morality through ambient NPC dialogue.
@Sinkable John
At the risk of sounding a bit callous here… one thing that bugs me about giant invertebrates in games is how non-scary they always seemed to me. They should be ruthlessly efficient, cold, alien, literally heartless killing machines and yet they inevitably end up clickety-clicking up to you and inflicting a poison debuff whilst you smack them in the face.
eta bleah, you actually said a load of this stuff already. ignore me.
eta more, weaving spiders aren’t necessarily the most clever or interesting kind. i loves me some jumping spiders. you familiar with the portia genus? well worth looking up
That was some poor wording, Jack, and I would know.
But yeah, that’s how Bethesda makes their games – the 2010’s version of last decade’s thing where some games gave you the option to play as a female character but it’s actually really just a skin and nothing beyond that changes at all, so every bit of dialogue and text still treats you as male.
Yeah, I’ve had that conversation while playing a Dunmer and I was like, omg this is ridiculous, must be a glitch though, game’s barely out (and Windhelm is where all the glitches chill, so why not) – but then 5 years later it happens to me again and it turns out it wasn’t a glitch, otherwise they’d have fixed it, ’cause they only fix the easy glitches and you don’t get any easier than mismatched dialogue lines, as long as you still have the audio for the missing lines.
I played The Witcher 3 last year, and while there’s a lotta bad things to say about the series, 3 definitely rises higher than the other two. It still has its flaws, but overall my biggest surprise when I started it was that I had zero expectations on the writing – I hated those books. Well, turns out it’s much better written than the books. Also dat voice acting.
The important thing is how I had more control over what kinda person the Geralt I played as turned out to be, than I had over my own player-created characters in Bethesda games. No choice but to play a burly master swordsman with a weak-ass grasp of Magic 101 and a rather repellent personality at first – except I ended up liking him, whereas I never felt anything for my own player-created characters in Bethesda games. They’re literally just a pair of hands and a sword.
Shit, Horizon is definitely no RPG. Gameplay-wise, it’s got the now-mandatory skill trees and crafting system, a 3-tier choice of equipment, but that’s it. Story-wise, it sometimes gives you a Bioware-like choice between Strong/Smart/Empathetic in dialogue but those don’t really change anything. A few quests have occasional choices but they don’t matter much. So all in all, Aloy is and remains the way she is and you never have any control over that (which is fine because she’s perfect like she is, m’kay ?). It still RPGs better than Bethesda games, because while it’s Aloy’s story and not mine, well, Aloy’s story is definitely much more enjoyable than Bethesda’s not-my-stories.
Being able to choose how my character looks and fights isn’t enough for me to relate to them. It actually doesn’t matter at all, since the game is gonna dismiss 90% of the options it gave me in the first place if I dare choose them. I’d rather go back to the blindingly-white recovering misogynist with the sexy voice, or the smart-mouthed redhead who toes the line between stupid and badass (let’s say, “unnecessarily awesome”) whenever she jumps off the cliff before securing her grapple and rappeling down.
Just to make a counterpoint about sandbox vs linear RPGs, Dishonored is linear as all fuck but never plays twice the same.
It’s published by Bethesda.
It’s pretty awesome though. And much better written.
By the way :
That RTS aspect pretty much killed the game didn’t it ? Makes me so sad.
@ryeash
I dunno how, but I never fought a lotta spiders in Origins. So the first time I saw that Overwhelm move, it was Morrigan’s, and it scared me so much that I made sure to keep her away from that entire school of magic altogether.
‘course it’s much more awesome when she does it as a bear. Bears will always be the cool alternative to giant spiders.
ETA : @Pie
Yo the last thing I want is “better” (read : even worse for me) spiders. Your approach to game design is the right one in my book, but please stay away from it forever.
This is the problem with a lot of game monsters though. No matter how good the animation and the art is, they always end up being a sack of hit points which inflicts game-mechanical ailments on you. I’d argue that this is because games need to make so much information available to the player.
I was once bitten (stung?) on the hand by a real-life spider whilst exploring, and I remember the terror of looking at the slight redness and not knowing whether I was going to live or not. The doctor said it was fine and nothing to worry about, but the period while my parents were driving to the hospital was one of the scariest of my childhood.
That’s hard to replicate in a game: a spider which pops up out of nowhere, offers you no chance to avoid it or defend yourself, and inflicts an effect on you which means you might already be dead without knowing, is really not fun. That would probably come across as frustrating rather than terrifying.
@EJ
Well… traps as an object and mechanic aren’t uncommon. Fallout regularly tries to dismember me with frag mines, so why not poison me with spiders as well ?
Then it’s just a matter of calibrating the venom’s damage-dealing and debuffing effects right.
Actually I’m pretty sure some games do have that, now that I think about it. It makes more sense than the damn thing rushing you and fighting you and getting smashed. Like… that’s what stupid animals like humans do, not spiders. Spiders are smart.
@EJ
They’re a bag of hitpoints which inflict game-mechanical ailments because that’s easy to program. This is kinda related to the reason they’re that way in tabletop RPGs too; keep the rules simple. Problem is, tabletop games have to use simpler rules because complex rules take forever to work through. You can make up for them by giving everyone and everything potentially human-equivalent intelligence (depending on who you’re playing with).
Computers can handle all the book-keeping in the world (but generally don’t, because it is hard work and difficult to translate into fun and the old bag’o’hitpoints abstraction is enough for most people) but if they can’t back it up with clever enemies all you get is waves of suicidal idiots.
Spiders, wolves, humans… they’re all basically interchangeable in so many games. They just have different graphics, and maybe different debuffs. The wolves probably don’t get ranged weapons, but that’s about as nuanced as it gets. That’s just plain lazy. There are various survival, survival-horror and FPS games that do have a modicum of enemy intelligence, so it clearly can be done by people who actually care.
(incidentally, I know that not every game needs clever and well designed enemies, but bethesda’s offerings could really, really do with some)
There are parallels here with snipers and minefields, and in both cases game mechanics can be thought up to turn them into an interesting challenge rather than a boring slog. If J. Random Game Designer can’t work out how to have spiders be spidery and fun, then maybe they should be looking at something else that doesn’t require any thought and can be implemented solely with cliche and mediocrity. Zombies spring effortlessly to mind.
Incidentally, your encounter with a spider mostly shows defensive behaviour by the spider against a large, unaware and basically invulnerable opponent. This isn’t predatory behaviour, like you’d be expecting from giant spiders hunting you down in a game. Have a look at how big hunting spiders like tarantulas acquire food, or what big venomous snakes do. A game where it is you, dumb human, vs highly specialized poison-packing ultra-stealthy athletic ambush predator might be considered unfair, but that’s not to say that it needs to be impossible or arbitrary.
@Jack:
Well now, this sorta brings up the question of what truly makes an RPG an “RPG”.
Something I’ve realized from watching people talk over the past decade or so is that, for a very large number of people, poring over stats and equipment and determining what tomb or dungeon they’re going to plunder next is what makes it an RPG. Hence why popular parlance has turned leveling up and skill trees into being “RPG mechanics” in every other game in existence. This aspect of RPGs isn’t helped by the prevalence of JRPGs and games like Diablo III, where the arguable central focus is in the combat because there’s very little control that the player tends to have over the personality of any of the characters.
Does this take away from their overall “RPGness”? Does this make Kingdom Hearts closer to Devil May Cry than Planescape: Torment? Certainly in some aspect, but I would argue that there’s a distinct difference still between the two former games that delineates the difference between action-RPGs and RPGs; to put it bluntly, the only way grinding will make DMC easier is because it’ll allow you to buy tons of healing items. There’s little technical difference between obtaining most new weapons in either game, but there’s still a difference in the intended weight behind each moment in either game due to the different weight each game puts behind its story.
…
All of this is mostly just to say that after seeing countless arguments about whether The Legend of Zelda is or isn’t an RPG, I’m pretty well convinced that the term has very little practical use anymore anyway, and if you were to apply it with its most stringent restrictions then you would be leaving the vast majority of “RPGs” outside of the umbrella the term is supposed to represent. Much as I appreciate that games like Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun Returns, and Divinity: Original Sin are coming back into prominence, they’re far from the only RPGs that I find enjoyable to play. And sometimes, yeah, that includes games like Diablo III, where the story isn’t what keeps me coming back time and again, or Final Fantasy, where I have very little input over how the main character acts or levels up.
@dslucia
Well, like good old-fashioned Obscenity, I know it when I see it.
Even the marketers are starting to retreat from the term now, after years of shitting all over it and burying everything that distinguished an RPG from any other genre. It is all about the “Action Adventures” now, so we don’t have to worry about confusing poor post-millenials with complex technical jargon like “RPG elements”.
Having little control over the personality of a character isn’t necessarily incompatible with the notion that you are Playing a Role, I note. Having your actions constrained is sometimes a good thing in heavily story-driven things, because it makes derailing a bit more challenging.
I played SOMA not that long ago. You don’t get much control over your character’s arc and there’s no combat as such. The world isn’t open. There aren’t really any proper puzzles to solve. It is a far cry from an action adventure or even the traditional grave-robbing murder-hobo simulator, but I posit that it might be reasonably described as an RPG.
@dslucia
I’m of the school that says “you know it when you see it” and “your mileage will vary”.
Most recent games use (sometimes very poorly) “RPG mechanics” like xp counters & skill trees, equipment & crafting, main & side quests. Does all that make them RPGs ? Shit I dunno, you tell me, on an individual basis. The devs might’ve an accurate idea of what genre they were aiming at, but they can also stray a bit.
In the end, and like the very concept of genres, it’s a pretty blurry thing. I also don’t think it actually matters. When Bethesda tells you “open RPG with CHOICES and STUFF”, you know what to expect, and you know where and how it fails.
@Pie:
Whenever I get particularly frustrated by the arguments about what constitutes an RPG, I tend to take a reductionist version of this point. For the record, I vehemently disagree with the idea that RPGs are built off of a basis of stat/equipment management and leveling up, and I also don’t believe that a game can’t be an RPG if the main character has a predetermined personality. Which… kind of muddies everything together, really, and it’s another reason why I view the term itself as being a bit weak. Everyone has their own line of where they define something as being “RPG” enough for them or not, so I tend to find conversations about them to just be very circular and thus tedious (perhaps counterintuitively, considering that I inevitably get myself involved in such discussions).
Oh, no, I’m not talking about games published by Bethesda but made by Bethesda. Just like I correct someone earlier who said Obsidian made FO3 when they had nothing to do with it and Bethesda just published FNV. The Elder Scrolls series and Fallout 3 and 4 were made by the Bethesda Game Studio team at ZeniMax while Dishonored and other titles are made by other studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda Studios is who I’m really talking about when u day Bethesda.
And RE: What makes an RPGs, honestly, that’s really easy. It’s the writing.
Oh, no, I’m not talking about games published by Bethesda but made by Bethesda. Just like I correct someone earlier who said Obsidian made FO3 when they had nothing to do with it and Bethesda just published FNV. The Elder Scrolls series and Fallout 3 and 4 were made by the Bethesda Game Studio team at ZeniMax while Dishonored and other titles are made by other studios and published by Bethesda Softworks.
And RE: What makes an RPGs, honestly, that’s really easy. It’s the writing.
If you give a player the choices to make their own character, they should have a personality regardless if it’s just picking different dialogue choices. A personality that matters. RPGs like Kingdom Hearts are still RPGs regardless because Sora has a personality. He affects the world, both environment and characters, and the world effects him. You know, because good writing.
In Skyrim and Fallout 3, you don’t really do that. All the characters are static, the world really doesn’t change. Decide to poison the water supply for reasons and no one dies in Fallout. Pick Empire and Free-Winter still doesn’t let the Argonians into Windhelm for…Reasons? Your choices aren’t impactful enough to really change anything, you’re just changing the set dressing and not the set. (Because bad writing and lazy programming.)
Even in a more linear, story driven line where things will change because they’re linear and that’s what they do, it’s still changes, and you, the player, feel like you’re actually having an effect on the world even if it’s all entirely scripted. (Because, you know, good writing.) When your character and the characters around you have personality, even if it’s not a personality you control, you get attached to them, you feel effected when they have emotions and stuff when you get to know them, especially when they change as the story goes on. (Because good writing.) Change that likely isn’t just different voice lines for an occasion. (Because good writing and also programming on that part.)
That’s why everyone LIKES the Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim. And also why some people like the Thieves Guild and College I guess.
You get to know these characters, you get to interact with them in unique ways. I mean, yeah, the entire questline you get to choose only between normal person dialogue, HAIL SITHIS dialogue and no talking but it’s about 75% more choices and personality your character would normally get in the game.
And when you interact with pretty much everyone in the Brotherhood they have their own personality and they give out advice that is good and not so good. They even walk around and talk to others so their personality is expressed even more. And every quest can be done a number of ways with different reactions from the targets even if it’s just killing someone in the end.
And since everyone in the Guild has a personality, you feel more impacted by the ending. Yeah, there’s a lot of dialogue dumpage in places but at least it feels like something has happened by the end.
Which is why I don’t understand how, what’s his name, this one writer for the Elder Scrolls I can’t remember the name of, Michael Something. Like, he hates the Dark Brotherhood and hates that people like them because it’s easier to write shit for the bad guys or something? Yeah, if the bad guys are the only people YOU GIVE A PERSONALITY TO PEOPLE WILL LIKE THEM YOU DINGUS. And that’s not even just NPCs but the player character too!
Why doesn’t my character get the choice to Hail Sithis and shit any other time in the game? Why can’t I remain silent when people talk to me any other time? Skyrim has just a weird combination of alright writing and no writing. It’s ridiculous.
EDIT: Forgot to add another reason why it’s writing that makes an RPG.
Did you know there’s RPGs…WITHOUT COMBAT? I know, it’s really surprising, but it’s true. In fact, not only is there RPGs with no combat but a lot of RPGs give you options to not have to fight at all in their games that still have combat in them! It’s almost like the writers anticipated that maybe someone would want to do that or something.
(Credit to everything I pretty much said to Bomberguy because I’m basically just pulling points out from the Fallout video. It’s almost like the video isn’t tearing into Fallout but is more of an actual critique of the fucking RPG elements of it and other games.)
@Jack
Published by Bethesda does mean that some issues remain, though.
Like the goddamn language lock. Pretty much every game they released on PS3 except Oblivion* had it, and that included the first Dishonored.
*Oblivion had a super nice glitch instead that would throw you into an inescapable test room if you loaded a save with your system parameters set on any other language than the one you made that save with. Back then I had a girlfriend who played Oblivion in French on my PS3, while I played it in English. We had that shit happen to us all the time so I broke up because no one fucks with my saves.
(The last sentence may or may not be true, but regardless, no one fucks with my saves.)
@John
That is also true; I admit I may be letting that slide because I’m an English speaker in America and thus do not go through such shit but it’s still sucks. I wonder if it’s localized in America or somewhere else. Does Bethesda even handle their own translation? The Spanish and French translation sucks, which you’d think would be the two languages Bethesda would do right.
Also I didn’t see I copied and pasted something so that’s cool.
@Handsome Jack
I doubt it, though it wouldn’t change much because then they’d just hire professional translators who are basically the exact same people they outsource that job to. And the French ones are… well.
As a general rule, any translation to French sucks. Not just for Bethesda games. Hell it even affects movies and friggin books, to a small extent.
There are exceptions. Dishonored was actually quite good… probably because Arkane is originally a french studio based out of Lyon and chances are the “translation” is actually at least part original version as well. Though I may be wrong, Arkane Austin coulda done the writing for all I know, and then it’d mean that either Lyon handled the translation themselves (they’re all billingual so it’s… plausible I guess), or (I doubt it) translators actually did their fucking job.
There are more legit exceptions of course, with translators actually doing their fucking job.
But as a general rule ? They have no fucking idea what they’re doing. Seriously, Way of the Samurai 3 had a mention of a “three stories building” somewhere in dialogue. That became “bâtiment à trois histoires” in the French version. That’s not even a beginner’s mistake, it basically amounts to a Reverso translation. Which would be scandalous in its own right… except I ran the English text through a bunch of automated translators and, well, never got a single match. The whole sentence had a bunch of pitfalls that no automated translator can avoid, and those were avoided in the translation, which means someone actually did a translation job worthy of Reverso, by hand. Someone who’s a paid fucking translator.
There’s another problem. We have very few professional voice actors. Actually I think we only had one and he died a few years ago (you will be missed, you beautiful raspy voice), so we probably don’t have anyone left. When I said that voice-acting cast are literally picked up on the street during Localization teams’ smoke breaks, I was not exaggerating. That’s actually how we handle this shit.
Last but not least, I mentioned WotS3 because it’s a Japanese game, yet the mistake in the French version implies that it was translated from the English version, itself already a translation. And we do that with pretty much every other language that isn’t spoken in Europe. So there’s already a big problem there, which can only worsen if it’s handled by a bunch of fools.
The result is that your dialogue is recited by a bunch of people with no experience whatsoever, who either overact or underact while reading botched translations from a version that was already a translation itself.
This shit is half the reason I learned English for fuck’s sake.
(the other half is that some games never get a translation at all)