Robert Erick
Educated
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2019
- Messages
- 52
I would like to think that I have enough experience with people to know that many of them, especially artists, are often confused, uncertain, and prone to using rationalization. Josh can ramble about what he thinks is and isn't but it doesn't change the facts. FR got butchered hard in the transition to third edition, yes. FR is also not a flawless setting, it's true. Yet, it's better, more compelling, more fun, and more interesting than Pillars of Eternity, simply because it's a fantastic setting, with fantastic imagery and features, meant to facilitate a compelling story, outside of the boundaries of normalcy. And before you reach for the "fantasy has to make sense" bullshit argument, yes, it has to follow its' own internal logic or else it falls apart and the willing suspension of disbelief is no longer willingly suspended. But I'll take having whacky and inconsistent things happening over a bleak, boring, meaningless nothingness, with absolutely nothing interesting, nothing fresh, nothing exciting or stimulating happening, which is what PoE is. Whatever Josh's goal was, he failed, because I found his opus to be on the same level of the shitty settings I, and many people I met, were making 20 years ago when we were trying really hard to break away from generic medieval fantasy settings that litter the RPG playgrounds.nd I can see why he doesn't understand his own setting, his own work and why Deadfire failed if he thinks Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms didn't have thought put into it.
Search in your heart and know that it's true, come to grips that it falls apart under scrutiny. A long blogpost he made https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-patch-4-0-preview.124865/page-6#post-5902301
Also you're fucking deluded if you think I'm ever going to take seriously an adult who capitalizes random letters in a word. Fuck Josh, fuck Pillars of Shiternity and fuck anyone who thinks you should waste time with this subpar gnostic period drama.
Do you really think the setting is what makes PoE (I&2) plot bland?
In the first game alone you have an ancient civilization that engineered their gods, a crusade (sorta) that terminates with the literal explosion of one of them, a centuries old conspiracy whose goal is to hide the origin of said gods and a plague (again man-made) that strips away children of their soul ...
I don't know you, but to me these are really interesting premises ON PAPER. Problem is, the only Obsidian employee that was able to write interesting bits of storytelling with these premises left the company long time ago...
Yes, because the plot is the setting. The plot exists as a vehicle for the writers to present their setting. The hero's journey is a long, boring car ride on an empty highway, with a couple of uninteresting and slightly obnoxious assholes in the back seat, with thousands of long signs passing by on which trivia is written, and the ride is very slow and you have to stop to read the signs multiple times. Sometimes you pass by an accident or a roadkill and you stop to look at it and try to help or eat it, but it's unsatisfactory and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and you get back in the car. And at the end of the journey, you are given an unsatisfactory conclusion because it's a revelation that you did not care about, because you didn't know where you were going, why you were going and it's not even where you expected to go in the first place, and the car isn't even what the manufacturer said it was going to be when you ordered it.
Anyway. my point is that you can have the most overwritten book in the world and there's probably some interesting ideas in there, but if you can't turn that into a story, it's just words on paper whose only purpose is to tell you that someone sat down to write on that paper. Nothing learned, nothing gained, nothing felt except indignation. Also most of the events you mentioned are not seen or interacted with, just told to you, and the only reason Thaos' stupid shit qualifies as "shown" is because of the technicality of you seeing past memories that you can't even interact with.