Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Interview Matt Chat 435: George Ziets on Torment: Tides of Numenera and the Future of Digimancy

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
Yes. It is possible to come up with either (1) alternative gameplay or (2) ersatz combat / gear (DE for sure has you equip gear, so I'm not sure what you mean on this score) / gold to replicate cRPG gameplay. Once you settle on what that gameplay is, it dictates what kind of setting would work to transform mechanics into atmosphere and narrative. For instance, it's pretty clear to me that Revachol -- with its densely packed factions, lack of central authority, smashed-open layers of history, horror aspects was constructed to wrap around a detective RPG focused on a fractured mind talking to itself. DE's gameplay in the Forgotten Realms would be worse than in Revachol, just as normal RPG gameplay would be worse in Revachol than in FR.

I think an Earthsea nu-adventure game centered around dialogues and minimal puzzle solving would work fine with the setting, though nu-adventures can be dropped into almost any setting, as Telltale Games proved. Probably you could also do a Choice of Games style Earthsea game. But I don't see what about the Earthsea setting would work well with RPG gameplay, no matter how much fake meat you use to replace the RPG beef.

By the way, I think the KOTOR games are good examples here. I really like them a lot, and they had the advantage of an adolescent zoo/theme-park setting centered around WARS and exploration and toys -- exactly what ought to translate well into a cRPG. Yet still neither game feels particularly like a Star Wars story. Star Wars (TFA notwithstanding) isn't really about dungeon diving to get map pieces or minmaxing gear or leveling up. Pushing Star Wars into a Bioware RPG mold distorted the setting in significant ways. Earthsea is much farther from that; translating it to a traditional RPG would break it.
 

Shadenuat

Arcane
Joined
Dec 9, 2011
Messages
11,955
Location
Russia
KOTOR2 didn't do too bad. It had some uncomfortable consequences for following Dark Side.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
I'll add that while I am sure some kind of fun game could be set in the Earthsea setting, the setting is also totally unmemorable to me (despite, as I said, loving A Wizard of Earthsea and reading it several times, and reading all the other books, and short stories, at least twice, except for Tehanu). It's like a bunch of islands and there are dragons and wizards and a school for wizards and a land of the dead. Some neat names for locations. It's quite "thin," too -- not like, say, Glorantha, where you have some giant stock of existing lore to draw upon. Whatever game you'd want to make in Wizard of Earthsea could be made just as easily in a Ziets homebrew setting, and would then not be saddled with the baggage of a licensed IP. The only upside to licensing the IP is name recognition, but I'm not sure that helps.
 

Shadenuat

Arcane
Joined
Dec 9, 2011
Messages
11,955
Location
Russia
Well that might be for the best. Because if people would find out most people there are bronze skinned and there are white maneating barbarians it would just all go to shit quickly.

Also Goro did terrible job (because Le Guin hesitated to give rights to his father during his prime which was a terrible loss to fantasy and animation which now cannot be fixed) so whoever owns this probably wouldn't be happy to give rights to some dum computar game.
 
Last edited:

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Going back through my emails, for instance, I discovered that for the Ouya obelisk -- which is just a farce in which the obelisk is an weirdo Orz pastiche obsessed with "exclusive product" -- I have multiple email threads (one 29 emails long) in which Colin, George, and Thomas are all chiming in with thoughts.

What year was this? Maybe it happened before they realized the game was overscoped.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
Going back through my emails, for instance, I discovered that for the Ouya obelisk -- which is just a farce in which the obelisk is an weirdo Orz pastiche obsessed with "exclusive product" -- I have multiple email threads (one 29 emails long) in which Colin, George, and Thomas are all chiming in with thoughts.

What year was this? Maybe it happened before they realized the game was overscoped.
February 2016, so a year from launch. The major rescoping and change from Kevin to Chris was all in Oct/Nov 2015.

It really is possible that all my damn whining and bickering is what killed this project. 23-email-long chain fighting with Adam Heine over the size of marteling whales. I'm positive it's a typo in the rule book. What a stroll through memory lane.

A taste:
In the bestiary, it says: "The largest marteling ever recorded was more than 300 feet (46 m) long from head to its multi-finned tail."

Numenera has a 3:1 foot:meter ratio (right?), so something is wrong with one of these measurements. Assuming 300 feet is correct, it still seems too small. (That is about the size of a very large age-of-sail ship, or, as you know, a football field.) First, the accompanying illustration looks much larger than that, though the scale is somewhat inconsistent: the part with the canons makes it look much less than 300 feet (at 200' of deck, the USS Constitution had 16 canons in the length that the Marteling has 7), but the series of Renaissance buildings on the back make it look way larger. (The long width of the Piazzo del Campo is 500', and it looks much smaller than the town on the whale's back, which itself only takes up 2/3 of the whale's length.)

The 300-foot figure is also at odds with "Communities and cities of all sorts grow on the backs of martelings." A nuclear submarine is 360 feet or so, and carries about 130 people in very cramped quarters. The Titanic was 883 feet long and held like 3,000 people. The biggest aircraft carriers are around 1,100 feet, and can carry maybe 5,000 people. An aircraft carrier could possibly fit a "community" on it, like a town. Anything smaller seems odd, but the biggest Marteling is a quarter that length.

(The best counterargument I can generate is that the famously tiny and hyperdense Kowloon Walled City was 6.4 acres, and held 33,000 people. A football field is about an acre in size, so I guess with a KWC level of verticality and density, there could be 5,000 people on a Marteling!)

Can I either elide measurements of the Marteling's size in the Indigo Mere (while de facto inflating it to more like 1,000 to 2,000 feet)? Alternatively, can we check with Monte to get some clarification as to how big they actually are, in order to avoid breaking the rules? Or can we just rationalize by saying, "Those are the dimensions in the Corare Sea, but this is a different ocean, and no one has recorded this particular whale"?
After being told I couldn't vary from 300 feet, I continue:
I guess if you want me to, I'm happy to stick to that as the length, but I dunno -- it seems like we're just elevating the line of the text that gives a length figure over the body of the text that describes the creature and its function, even though the length figure clearly has at least one typo in it (the meters and feet not being consistent).

As best I can tell, the source book uses the term "city" for a population of >10,000. Almost invariably, anything less than 10,000 and more than 1,000 is called a "town." (E.g., Keford (4,000), Jaston (8,000), Kordech (7,000).) Two communities of 1,000 are called "small towns." (The Base and Druissi.) Likewise, Yosh-ul, with a permanent population of 1,000, is a "town, if it can be called that." Sonduel Ruins, with a population of "just under 1,000" is a "village," the book's generic term for communities of less than 1,000.

There are some exceptions: Verbaar (8,000), Rarrow (7,000), Hidden Naresh (1,000), and Brodrov (1,000, "even though the city could easily house ten times that many, and once did") are all called "cities." But they're definitely out of the norm.

I'm fairly certain that the Marteling is drawing on the myth of the Aspidochelone (and its variants), a folkloric/mythological creature (typically a whale or huge fish, sometimes a turtle) mistaken for a habitable island. Having the biggest Martelings be moderately large age-of-sail galleons strikes me as defensible under the text (you have the 300 foot figure and the "hundreds of soldiers" line), but inconsistent with the overall spirit of the things, namely whales so huge that they can support "communities and cities of all sorts" on their backs without even noticing. While you can cram 1,000 people into a very big galleon, it's not a city: they barely survived relatively short voyages and only then when carrying provisions from a port; not remotely self-sufficient, and none of the elements of what we'd think of as a city.

Technically, the bestiary says the largest are "more than 300 feet," so really, any number >300 is okay, right?
It's like a scope problem within a scope problem...
 
Last edited:

Shadenuat

Arcane
Joined
Dec 9, 2011
Messages
11,955
Location
Russia
this is why modders often succeed where developers fail. they don't ask about the size of the whale, they just go in editor and try and make a city on top of a whale.

and yes it reads like total autism; Sawyer would really like this probably. you should be friends.

also maybe there are more than 1 whale so like in waterworld cities are built on top of herd of them
 
Last edited:

Cross

Arcane
Joined
Oct 14, 2017
Messages
2,983
I think an Earthsea nu-adventure game centered around dialogues and minimal puzzle solving would work fine with the setting, though nu-adventures can be dropped into almost any setting, as Telltale Games proved.
All the Telltale games are terrible adaptations of their source material though. I thought you were objecting to the idea of an Earthea RPG because you believe the setting doesn't lend itself to RPG-style gameplay. I hardly see how Telltale's formula of quick-time events and meaningless dialogue choices is an improvement. At least certain aspects of Earthsea, like the magic system, have some commonality with RPGs.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
I think an Earthsea nu-adventure game centered around dialogues and minimal puzzle solving would work fine with the setting, though nu-adventures can be dropped into almost any setting, as Telltale Games proved.
All the Telltale games are terrible adaptations of their source material though. I thought you were objecting to the idea of an Earthea RPG because you believe the setting doesn't lend itself to RPG-style gameplay. I hardly see how Telltale's formula of quick-time events and meaningless dialogue choices is an improvement. At least certain aspects of Earthsea, like the magic system, have some commonality with RPGs.
Telltale's formula is content agnostic. You can have QTEs where you fight zombies, solve mysteries, race cows, whatever. Any character verb can be conveyed by the system. And the formula is good for conveying dialogue and offering a certain sort of C&C. The problem with an Earthsea cRPG is that core cRPG systems would be actively hostile to the setting. So either you would need to drop those systems (and end up with a nu-adventure) or harm the setting. A Telltale Earthsea game would not require Ged to shoot fireballs and kill 1,000 xaurips in order to level up and learn True Name: Dragon. An Earthsea RPG would.
 

hexer

Guest
KOTOR2 didn't do too bad. It had some uncomfortable consequences for following Dark Side.

It has been years since I played it but I remember KOTOR2 feeling like an experimental SW story.

It really is possible that all my damn whining and bickering is what killed this project. 23-email-long chain fighting with Adam Heine over the size of marteling whales. I'm positive it's a typo in the rule book. What a stroll through memory lane.

There's nothing wrong with being precise, I would be the first person to take the plunge into the details.
But it's also important to realize before it's too late how some things require lots of sacrificed energy / time and give little back.

I understand how you both acted profesionally but 23 emails-long exchange over such a detail is something I'd expect from Britannica employees :lol:
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
It was largely my stubbornness -- I felt like the lore was wrong and wanted it to be right for my Mere, and Adam was too nice to say "no matter how lame or obviously incorrect, the rulebook text controls no matter what." :)
 

hexer

Guest
It was largely my stubbornness -- I felt like the lore was wrong and wanted it to be right for my Mere, and Adam was too nice to say "no matter how lame or obviously incorrect, the rulebook text controls no matter what." :)

Hmmm.., wasn't Monte Cook an advisor for the game?
I'd spam the crap out of him with all sort of questions if I was in your place heheheee
 

MicoSelva

backlog digger
Patron
Joined
Sep 10, 2010
Messages
7,480
Location
Vigil's Keep
Codex 2012 Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Divinity: Original Sin 2 Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
Colin McComb will be the next guest on Matt Chat, it seems. We will see which questions get asked and maybe answered.
 

Cross

Arcane
Joined
Oct 14, 2017
Messages
2,983
A Telltale Earthsea game would not require Ged to shoot fireballs and kill 1,000 xaurips in order to level up and learn True Name: Dragon. An Earthsea RPG would.
That's not even how learning magic works in a majority of RPGs, where spells are found/bought rather than learned from leveling up. There are even RPGs like Ultima Underworld and Arx Fatalis where, to use magic, you have to find the true name of things (represented as differently shaped runes) and combine them in a certain way to cast the spell with the desired effect.

Telltale's formula is content agnostic. You can have QTEs where you fight zombies, solve mysteries, race cows, whatever. Any character verb can be conveyed by the system.
I don't consider glorified cutscenes to be a gameplay system.

And the formula is good for conveying dialogue and offering a certain sort of C&C.
Nor do I consider a dialogue system with mostly cosmetic options and no stat/skill checks to offer anything of value.
 
Last edited:

Kyl Von Kull

The Night Tripper
Patron
Joined
Jun 15, 2017
Messages
3,152
Location
Jamrock District
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
That's not even how learning magic works in a majority of RPGs, where spells are found/bought rather than learned from leveling up

Eh, more CRPGs lock new abilities behind progression. You’re talking about non spontaneous arcane casters in D&D, but even they need to reach the appropriate level before they can actually cast the spells they’ve learned.
 

Bohrain

Liturgist
Patron
Joined
Aug 10, 2016
Messages
1,442
Location
norf
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
I'm not really sure what benefit would a licence like Earthsea bring to them. It's not a popular series in this day and age, there are obviously going to be licencing costs and who knows what kind of restrictions the IP holders might give. And it's not like Pathfinder where people essentially like the ruleset, but find the setting and the lore pretty banal. Fairly sure Ziets is recognizeable enough amongst the core audience of CRPG's to do just fine if he used his homebrew setting.
 

Darkforge

Augur
Joined
May 25, 2011
Messages
216
I don't think I can think of a WORSE setting other than Harry potter to set a Computer RPG in other than Earthsea .....
 

almondblight

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
Messages
2,549
- constant fighting and killing being a normal part of an adventurer's life
- an interesting bestiary of things to fight and kill
- magic being sufficiently commonplace that adventurers are casting spells all over the place for utterly trivial purposes like killing rats
- adventurers constantly changing their gear and having tons of cool gear to use
- acquiring and spending money being a central focus of an adventurer's life
- the player character gets more powerful in interesting ways at frequent intervals
- the player character is the most important person in the events that unfold in the game

Those probably fit Earthsea better than most settings in literature. Magic is all over Earthsea, (even common amongst poor and illiterate village folk), there are mages that go island to island working magic, monsters and marauders to fight (Ged gets into a number of battles with these in the first book), and mage battles (the second Earthsea short story is about a mage battle).

Though I agree, it would make more sense to make your own setting that just takes what it likes from the Earthsea setting (and others).
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom