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Crusader Kings II sold far better than any of their actual grand strategy games, yes.
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Interview Paradox admit Tyranny sold below expectations, DLC still in the works
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
Zero marketing, too high price point and overall a very lackluster game. No wonder it sold bad.
But for a game made for training interns it shocks me how unimaginative it was. They had free controll of the setting for once and all they did was generic fantasy with bronze age slapped on it without anything particularly novel in it. They didn't do their homework, but let's be real that's the industry standard. The disappointing part of the setting was the complete lack of anything that makes it memorable, had they emphasized they emphasized the whole "Archon have powers that are basically self-fullfilling prophecies" in the character building it would've at least made the game a bit unique but clearly something like that was beyond them.
The combat reeked of not having any proper design. To me it seems they took the Pillars system, crammed in spell customization and combo moves, removed friendly fire and resource management and called it a day. There was no indication of a thought process of what supposedly makes the combat interesting or challenging, which is also hinted by the lack encounter design. It's probably the MMO dev background, they assumed combat is ok as long as the player has to press buttons, see flashy animations, click some talent trees and make bouncy spells that break the game.
And even the goddamn characters. There is a certain crowd in the RPG playerbase that can always somehow appreciate one-dimensional orbiting companion characters (Bioware and certain JRPG such as Persona-series fanbases come to mind). And I think this aspect is they came closest to achieve in a way that panders to that demographic, as the companions at least have pretty distinct portraits compared to T:ToN for example. But they even managed to fuck this up because there are no character arcs. If you explore Verse's dialogue options just as you pick her up you can find out she is a spy. Bit later on you can find out she is a half-sibling of Barik. But there really is nothing beyond that, no character centric events, companion quests, no proper closure. And that applies to all companions (actually I'm not sure about the gorilla because I found her so repulsive I refused to keep her in the party).
It's basically a game made by people who can implement a checklist of features and ship something that isn't a complete broken mess, but have no idea what makes a game good.
But for a game made for training interns it shocks me how unimaginative it was. They had free controll of the setting for once and all they did was generic fantasy with bronze age slapped on it without anything particularly novel in it. They didn't do their homework, but let's be real that's the industry standard. The disappointing part of the setting was the complete lack of anything that makes it memorable, had they emphasized they emphasized the whole "Archon have powers that are basically self-fullfilling prophecies" in the character building it would've at least made the game a bit unique but clearly something like that was beyond them.
The combat reeked of not having any proper design. To me it seems they took the Pillars system, crammed in spell customization and combo moves, removed friendly fire and resource management and called it a day. There was no indication of a thought process of what supposedly makes the combat interesting or challenging, which is also hinted by the lack encounter design. It's probably the MMO dev background, they assumed combat is ok as long as the player has to press buttons, see flashy animations, click some talent trees and make bouncy spells that break the game.
And even the goddamn characters. There is a certain crowd in the RPG playerbase that can always somehow appreciate one-dimensional orbiting companion characters (Bioware and certain JRPG such as Persona-series fanbases come to mind). And I think this aspect is they came closest to achieve in a way that panders to that demographic, as the companions at least have pretty distinct portraits compared to T:ToN for example. But they even managed to fuck this up because there are no character arcs. If you explore Verse's dialogue options just as you pick her up you can find out she is a spy. Bit later on you can find out she is a half-sibling of Barik. But there really is nothing beyond that, no character centric events, companion quests, no proper closure. And that applies to all companions (actually I'm not sure about the gorilla because I found her so repulsive I refused to keep her in the party).
It's basically a game made by people who can implement a checklist of features and ship something that isn't a complete broken mess, but have no idea what makes a game good.
set
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2013
- Messages
- 944
The first act is somehow the most interesting, the most challenging, and the most disappointing. I've replayed the first act a couple of times and marvelled by how shallow it is. It's basically one big extended tutorial - where the fight at the end is quite possibly the hardest fight in the game. It's somehow its best moment, which says a lot. But, a lot of people are extrapolating too umch from this and Torment. "CRPGs that aren't literally reviving Baldur's Gate won't sell" is a bad take away. These games are just mediocre and aren't excelling in the areas where they honestly need to.
Tyranny has some merit to it, I liked the opening where you made some big choices, and the combat system COULD have been halfway decent, had the encounters been actually designed to be interesting or pose any sort of challenge. I also think they didn't take the concept of "evil wins" far enough - I've read some fiction based on this concept before, and they do some interesting things with having "heroes" as antagonists, or having to chose between two lesser evils in a corrupt society.
To be honest, Tyranny didn't take anything away from PoE's blunders. In PoE, Durance was like the only character of any gravitas, and it didn't even last very long. Fighting is still very pointless and unrewarding in Tyranny, a problem that was shared in PoE. Tyranny blessedly has less overall fighting, but what combat it does have is pretty uninteresting. It's so frustrating to see so much hard work go to waste, I just can't stand it.
Character creation sucked, by the way. Half of your choices were unimpactful or plain out bad.
Crafting your own spells is an idea that sounds great on paper, until you implement it. Until computers can understand natural language, we're not going to have Mage: The Ascension: The Video Game. Games that have you crafting spells I think only work when you really go all out (look at Path of Exile's skill gem system -- but even that leaves a lot to be desired).
Tyranny has some merit to it, I liked the opening where you made some big choices, and the combat system COULD have been halfway decent, had the encounters been actually designed to be interesting or pose any sort of challenge. I also think they didn't take the concept of "evil wins" far enough - I've read some fiction based on this concept before, and they do some interesting things with having "heroes" as antagonists, or having to chose between two lesser evils in a corrupt society.
To be honest, Tyranny didn't take anything away from PoE's blunders. In PoE, Durance was like the only character of any gravitas, and it didn't even last very long. Fighting is still very pointless and unrewarding in Tyranny, a problem that was shared in PoE. Tyranny blessedly has less overall fighting, but what combat it does have is pretty uninteresting. It's so frustrating to see so much hard work go to waste, I just can't stand it.
Character creation sucked, by the way. Half of your choices were unimpactful or plain out bad.
Crafting your own spells is an idea that sounds great on paper, until you implement it. Until computers can understand natural language, we're not going to have Mage: The Ascension: The Video Game. Games that have you crafting spells I think only work when you really go all out (look at Path of Exile's skill gem system -- but even that leaves a lot to be desired).
set
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2013
- Messages
- 944
I will admit I can't think of a game off hand that's ever done it well. Everybody wants to be in the right when they're in control.
Rake
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2012
- Messages
- 2,969
Stellaris lets you play as Fanatic Purifiers, a society hell-bent on exterminating all xeno lifeforms from the galaxy. When you capture a planet filled with xenos, you have the option of just killing them, process them into food, or work them to death. If planet-wide concentration camps isn't evil on a scale that humanity has yet to experience, I don't know what is.
sser
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2011
- Messages
- 1,866,910
Right. There are many games that let you do either one. In fact, really it's the option to be good that makes the option of being bad all the worse. Having a choice in the matter amplifies both ends.
Nonsense, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance sold enough for a sequel.
You weren't advertised as the bad guys in that game though. And it's not really cut and dry whether you were actually the villain. Sure, your friends like living in Ivalice, but the rest of the town never consented and many of them probably don't like being transformed into a Moogle or a Zombie or whatever.
Azrael the cat
Arcane
Particularly when (a) you're going for realistic-ish (as in, morality works in the normal way) feel, and (b) player has, or expects to have, freedom of choice.
There's no problem when you doing a comic 'fuck yeah! For the Horde!' villainy like WC1-2, or even better, Dungeon Keeper or that more recent (and quite good) DK clone where you're a Bond villain managing your evil volcano base. That only needs to be fun. Same for GTA.
But as soon as you want players to take a moral choice seriously, the whole concept of 'playing the evil side' falls apart. It breaks the cardinal rule for portraying evil - i.e. it assumes that evil people get out of bed in the morning and think 'how much evil can I do today' - to be psychologically plausible, they need to view themselves as the good guys. Hitler didn't think he was a monster- he thought he was reclaiming what rightfully belonged to Germany, and, as he went madder and the war started to go badly, he thought he was desperately protecting an entire continent. Nazi ideology emphasised the importance of human life....they just had a rather fucked up view of what counted as human life...
The player isn't insane, so they need a plausible motivation, and they won't view that motivation as 'evil'. And here's the big problem with the whole concept - a fuckload of players, probably most non-US players, won't view the empire as evil ANYWAY. In the real world, we've seen what happens when you overthrow a tyranny through force instead of gradual evolution - you end up like Libya/Iraq/Syria/'the reign of terror' in France. Plus we know that there's no such thing as an absolute despot - people don't just do what you say because you've got a fancy title, especially not in places like Iraq where, when people have a problem, instead of calling their local MP, they pick up a gun and march at that problem, until the problem owns a tank and they go back home. Dictators always have some tribal/religious/factional support, and if it's not a democratic majority, then it's invariably a large minority who know they'll get massacred the moment that anyone who isn't 'their' guy is in charge (eg Allawites in Syria; Sunnis in Iraq).
So it can't be 'evil wins' - to make it even marginally plausible, it ends up being 'power is really fucking difficult, and morally complex'.
luj1
You're all shills
I don't understand. What kind of a person could POSSIBLY,
1) enjoy playing a 20-hour cuckold simulator with 2 types of enemies, cringy writing, banal combat and cancer ruleset
2) pay 40 euros/bucks for such luxury
A low-expectations neofag? A Sawyer-worshipping masochist? An Infinitron??
1) enjoy playing a 20-hour cuckold simulator with 2 types of enemies, cringy writing, banal combat and cancer ruleset
2) pay 40 euros/bucks for such luxury
A low-expectations neofag? A Sawyer-worshipping masochist? An Infinitron??
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Vorark
Erudite
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2017
- Messages
- 1,456
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2013
- Messages
- 6,329
But first we must ask ourselves, "What is evil?"
Yeah, but you are almost always scumming out on other scumbags. Soft ball evil.
Hitman: Blood Money is another example of this type of evil protagonist.
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Johannes
Arcane
How about gifting me one final Underrail copy before you go
I'm sorry, but I'm actually a Shadowrun Returns NPC. I don't drop any loot when killed.
Delterius
Arcane
Unless its a 'Key' item, if you know what I mean.
Delterius
Arcane
I disagree. Players have done some pretty evil things in their games without the need of a justification, or even some half assed rationalization. Its all in the game you're playing. For an example, Strategy games almost always place you in the role of a State actor. As such the player invariably does incredibly evil shit in order to accrue power.
Of course, you might say that RPGs are too personal in contrast and I'd agree. But there are other ways to put people in a position where evil for its own sake is satisfying. The most basic one being what power it allows. MotB does that, you get certain perks for being evil as opposed to good. The BG series I guess does give you the best party members by far if you choose to be neutral evil. However, there's a limit to how far you can go with this before the game becomes either boring for evil characters or impossible for the good ones. That's where I'd go further.
If we want an RPG where you can play an evil character and revel in it, what you need is a proper story and setting for it. Make me hate the people of your game and I'll love choosing to blow up the kingdom. Bloodlines comes very close to this proposal, it just lacks a suitably 'evil' ending to it. By the end I felt used and discarded by every character and faction in the city. Arguably, VV a 'nice' vampire but she only shows that to certain characters (Toreadors, most certainly). To anybody else she's just trying to seduce you into dirtying your hands for her, which is the very best you can expect from those wretched nights. I chose the Lone Wolf ending and just loved flipping everyone off. If there was a Sabbath ending that allowed me to kill even more of LA's vampires, I'd seriously consider it.
Tao
Augur
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2015
- Messages
- 377
What an oasis it is the Codex after reading that dumbfuck article in RPS about this game poor sales. Thank you guys
Game was mediocre, expensive and didn't live to the evil theme in any form of the subject (cartoonish, realistic, historical, filosofical w/e). It was a Bioware game without the house brand and power (and even they flopped with Andromeda). I think it did better than expected.
Game was mediocre, expensive and didn't live to the evil theme in any form of the subject (cartoonish, realistic, historical, filosofical w/e). It was a Bioware game without the house brand and power (and even they flopped with Andromeda). I think it did better than expected.
Part of the issue with evil protagonists in cRPGs is that computer games are set in stone. There may be lots of branching dialogue and C&C that's tangibly reflected in the game world, but nonetheless the developers have to write it all, and whatever they write is what the player has to work with.
That's all very obvious, and it's a problem for a variety of reasons. For one thing, you can't freestyle your evil deeds (aside from brute acts of stealing owned items or killing NPCs), nor can you hatch grandiose nefarious plots unless the game specifically allows for it. One way or another, the developers have to hand you the script. Evil on a personal level lies on the fringes, hidden (or ignored), and works against the apparent rules and desires of society and civilization. It's a much more personal and particular way of being than "goodness," which is the default, expected, and universally accepted way of being. Evil and good are opposites, but they certainly aren't equal opposites. As a minor aside, you can't feel hidden and secret doing your evil deeds when you know the omnipotent computer is watching you... judging you.
Here we've got a team of developers who almost certainly don't have a single genuine low- or zero-empathy person among them, designing an evil story and a set of game rules for how that should work—for players who overwhelmingly also aren't low- or zero-empathy. At the risk of perpetrating yet another horrible analogy, it's a bit like a lizard trying to describe a bat to a snake.
Then there's the self-evident reality that the developers don't want to gleefully spin a tale of genuine, unbridled evil, nor would most people actually want to play it. As Delterius suggests, we only get to see true evil in games if it's through the lens of several layers of abstraction, at which point it's impersonal and statistical anyway.
New Vegas is the perfect example. You have the option to side with Caesar, but Josh and co. make sure to get the point across that the Legion is irredeemably evil and wrong in every way, with singular, very minor lip service paid to the "benefit" of caravans in their territory being a bit safer or something. They exist to be the bad guys, and you can align with them only because the worldbuilding wouldn't make sense if you were passively and artificially prevented from doing so.
That's another thing: If the game's actual theme is that you get to be the bad guy, then you're not really making a choice to be evil, are you? The game already decided for you.
That's all very obvious, and it's a problem for a variety of reasons. For one thing, you can't freestyle your evil deeds (aside from brute acts of stealing owned items or killing NPCs), nor can you hatch grandiose nefarious plots unless the game specifically allows for it. One way or another, the developers have to hand you the script. Evil on a personal level lies on the fringes, hidden (or ignored), and works against the apparent rules and desires of society and civilization. It's a much more personal and particular way of being than "goodness," which is the default, expected, and universally accepted way of being. Evil and good are opposites, but they certainly aren't equal opposites. As a minor aside, you can't feel hidden and secret doing your evil deeds when you know the omnipotent computer is watching you... judging you.
Here we've got a team of developers who almost certainly don't have a single genuine low- or zero-empathy person among them, designing an evil story and a set of game rules for how that should work—for players who overwhelmingly also aren't low- or zero-empathy. At the risk of perpetrating yet another horrible analogy, it's a bit like a lizard trying to describe a bat to a snake.
Then there's the self-evident reality that the developers don't want to gleefully spin a tale of genuine, unbridled evil, nor would most people actually want to play it. As Delterius suggests, we only get to see true evil in games if it's through the lens of several layers of abstraction, at which point it's impersonal and statistical anyway.
New Vegas is the perfect example. You have the option to side with Caesar, but Josh and co. make sure to get the point across that the Legion is irredeemably evil and wrong in every way, with singular, very minor lip service paid to the "benefit" of caravans in their territory being a bit safer or something. They exist to be the bad guys, and you can align with them only because the worldbuilding wouldn't make sense if you were passively and artificially prevented from doing so.
That's another thing: If the game's actual theme is that you get to be the bad guy, then you're not really making a choice to be evil, are you? The game already decided for you.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2013
- Messages
- 6,329
There may have been some conveyance issues but I never saw Caesar's Legion as being irredeemably evil or wrong. Josh made them more like the Ancient Romans than people give him credit for, but without any sympathy or romance for their finer accomplishments.
Remember that the Ancient Romans dipped meek Christians in tar and set them on fire on crosses and torture stakes for the purposes of public entertainment. The 'decimation' practice where people have to execute their compatriots as a punishment for failure is also an accurate representation of what the Ancient Romans were like.
Romans (like most ancient humans, or currently living humans for that matter) were a pretty sinister bunch, a draconian and militaristic culture shaped by being outcasts and foreigners in a Latin dominated land that was constantly attempting to destroy them -- a similar relationship between the Dorians/Spartans and the other Greeks. However, they channeled their savage impulses into creating the durable and prosperous civilization modern people still admire.
Caesar's Legion is represented as being much the same thing. Ancient Romans became what they were for the same reason the Spartans or the Aztecs became what they were, they were trying to survive in the hard circumstances of the ancient world. Caesar's Legion are trying to survive in the similarly hard circumstances of the post-apocalyptic world.
Remember, not everyone in the Fallout universe has a reliable, unpolluted source of potable water. Goodsprings is in the minority.
Remember that the Ancient Romans dipped meek Christians in tar and set them on fire on crosses and torture stakes for the purposes of public entertainment. The 'decimation' practice where people have to execute their compatriots as a punishment for failure is also an accurate representation of what the Ancient Romans were like.
Romans (like most ancient humans, or currently living humans for that matter) were a pretty sinister bunch, a draconian and militaristic culture shaped by being outcasts and foreigners in a Latin dominated land that was constantly attempting to destroy them -- a similar relationship between the Dorians/Spartans and the other Greeks. However, they channeled their savage impulses into creating the durable and prosperous civilization modern people still admire.
Caesar's Legion is represented as being much the same thing. Ancient Romans became what they were for the same reason the Spartans or the Aztecs became what they were, they were trying to survive in the hard circumstances of the ancient world. Caesar's Legion are trying to survive in the similarly hard circumstances of the post-apocalyptic world.
Remember, not everyone in the Fallout universe has a reliable, unpolluted source of potable water. Goodsprings is in the minority.
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Right, but the trouble is that it's extremely concentrated.
Your average Roman citizen (or legionary or patrician, for that matter) didn't have an itinerary like this:
The only time you ever see Caesar's Legion is in the middle of some nefarious deed, and that's pretty much all they do. Part of that is the nature of games and the need for interesting action, but then again it's not really true of any of the other factions.
The reality is that not a whole lot exciting happens the vast majority of the time, even amongst soldiers on a front, and that includes atrocities and nasty/unpleasant things. Modern people for example believe that ancient and medieval battles happened all the time, when in fact actual large-scale warfare battles were quite rare. Sieges or simple chest-beating were far more common. It doesn't make sense to have your two armies just meet and kill each other real hard unless there's a strategic objective at stake, and usually not even then.
Your average Roman citizen (or legionary or patrician, for that matter) didn't have an itinerary like this:
- wake up
- burn some Christians
- have breakfast
- oversee the breaking-in of the new sex slaves
- do some light reading
- order the sacking of a helpless city
- have lunch
- mock some subhuman barbarians
- have dinner
- watch slaves kill each other for sport (okay, maybe this one)
- bedtime, looking forward to another awesome day tomorrow
The only time you ever see Caesar's Legion is in the middle of some nefarious deed, and that's pretty much all they do. Part of that is the nature of games and the need for interesting action, but then again it's not really true of any of the other factions.
The reality is that not a whole lot exciting happens the vast majority of the time, even amongst soldiers on a front, and that includes atrocities and nasty/unpleasant things. Modern people for example believe that ancient and medieval battles happened all the time, when in fact actual large-scale warfare battles were quite rare. Sieges or simple chest-beating were far more common. It doesn't make sense to have your two armies just meet and kill each other real hard unless there's a strategic objective at stake, and usually not even then.
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