Game News Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor Released

[Zeriel]

Vogel wringing his hands over "empire" has to be the gayest and most pretentious fucking shit I've ever seen considering about 90% of his catalogue was based around an eponymous Empire and no one cared. Holy fuck I hate the world post 2014.

Exile/Avernum as a setting always had a somewhat libertarian slant to it. The Empire controlled most of the surface with an iron fist, and the underworld was the last bastion of freedom, populated by pioneers and very loosely governed.

Think he is kinda late on the woke bandwagon, also seems very scared

Not sure about "woke;" Vogel's always been a bit of an oldschool egalitarian (think of a game like BG1). Women and minorities featured quite prominently, even in his early games. The opening splash screen for Exile III (back in 1995) had two humans, one (seemingly) white person who's cloaked and one black woman warrior (you can see it here). He had a couple that got thrown into the underworld for being gay that appeared in the first Avernum, I believe, back in 2000.

He's never been heavy handed about it, but diversity in his games isn't anything new.

I don't know why so many of you lack reading comprehension, but that's exactly my point. He's been making games with these themes for 30~ years, but NOW he chooses to caterwaul in public about it?

 

[Late Bloomer]

Vogel wringing his hands over "empire" has to be the gayest and most pretentious fucking shit I've ever seen considering about 90% of his catalogue was based around an eponymous Empire and no one cared. Holy fuck I hate the world post 2014.

Exile/Avernum as a setting always had a somewhat libertarian slant to it. The Empire controlled most of the surface with an iron fist, and the underworld was the last bastion of freedom, populated by pioneers and very loosely governed.

Think he is kinda late on the woke bandwagon, also seems very scared

Not sure about "woke;" Vogel's always been a bit of an oldschool egalitarian (think of a game like BG1). Women and minorities featured quite prominently, even in his early games. The opening splash screen for Exile III (back in 1995) had two humans, one (seemingly) white person who's cloaked and one black woman warrior (you can see it here). He had a couple that got thrown into the underworld for being gay that appeared in the first Avernum, I believe, back in 2000.

He's never been heavy handed about it, but diversity in his games isn't anything new.

I don't know why so many of you lack reading comprehension, but that's exactly my point. He's been making games with these themes for 30~ years, but NOW he chooses to caterwaul in public about it?

It's not reading comprehension. They just won't address that particular issue. No minds will be changed. It's fun reading regardless.

I wonder if any of the posters here are one of the 8 user reviews on Steam.

The opening splash screen for Exile III (back in 1995) had two humans, one (seemingly) white person who's cloaked and one black woman warrior (you can see it here).

Thanks for the link. Is that your favorite Spiderweb Software game?

 

[PatataFamilia]

Vogel wringing his hands over "empire" has to be the gayest and most pretentious fucking shit I've ever seen considering about 90% of his catalogue was based around an eponymous Empire and no one cared. Holy fuck I hate the world post 2014.

Exile/Avernum as a setting always had a somewhat libertarian slant to it. The Empire controlled most of the surface with an iron fist, and the underworld was the last bastion of freedom, populated by pioneers and very loosely governed.

Think he is kinda late on the woke bandwagon, also seems very scared

Not sure about "woke;" Vogel's always been a bit of an oldschool egalitarian (think of a game like BG1). Women and minorities featured quite prominently, even in his early games. The opening splash screen for Exile III (back in 1995) had two humans, one (seemingly) white person who's cloaked and one black woman warrior (you can see it here). He had a couple that got thrown into the underworld for being gay that appeared in the first Avernum, I believe, back in 2000.

He's never been heavy handed about it, but diversity in his games isn't anything new.

I don't know why so many of you lack reading comprehension, but that's exactly my point. He's been making games with these themes for 30~ years, but NOW he chooses to caterwaul in public about it?

It's because your point is a silly. Honesty != Pretension. Literally, He's honestly describing what he's always done. If I plant a tree every day for twenty years and talk about planting trees when I'm 60, that's not me pretending to care about trees or virtue signaling. And of course he talked about empire in public before this. He described Avadon as a game partially about crumbling empire in 2010, and far more directly in 2016. He described the original Queen's Wish as a game about empire in 2018. His blog started in 2009, so it's safe to say he's been talking about it for a while.

Furthermore, there's not this enormous separation between communication in a game and communication out of a game. Making a game ambivalent about empire is talking about empire in public. Most of his games are ambivalent towards the subject of empire, particularly the Geneforge series. The shapers are brutal tyrants that are somewhat vindicated by what the rebellion unleashes. Alwan is the most complex character he's written, and that's because he is a genuine benevolent dictator.

You wrote an ill-thought, reactive post, and got mildly rebuked by people with a better command of the creator's collective work in games and out. That's not a lack of reading comprehension.

 

[almondblight]

I don't know why so many of you lack reading comprehension, but that's exactly my point. He's been making games with these themes for 30~ years, but NOW he chooses to caterwaul in public about it?

I honestly don't understand what the issue is. He's been making games showing these issues for 30 years, and he recently wrote a blog post about the issues he's been throwing. Is this supposed to be some sort of gotcha? "How come you're just NOW saying the things you've been saying in your game for years?"

Thanks for the link. Is that your favorite Spiderweb Software game?

I haven't gone through his full catalog. But I think every Codexer should at least try Exile III and Geneforge 1.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

He has been on a kick about being white for a long time now. Almost as long as he has complained about being old.

That's normie boomer white guilt. He clearly sees which way the wind is blowing in the indusrty and is trying to match what others are doing.

I will say that I like his approach to Diversity from the start of Queen's Wish.

When you boot up the game: WE WAZ KANGZ AN SHEEEIIIIIIT.

When you make a white character: back to marry old England with a white queen and her family.

I don't mind the sort of Diversity that gives blacks the option to feel immersed. I do mind it when it comes at the expense of white people's immersion.

 

[Sardine Dev Poster]

Vogel wringing his hands over "empire" has to be the gayest and most pretentious fucking shit I've ever seen considering about 90% of his catalogue was based around an eponymous Empire and no one cared. Holy fuck I hate the world post 2014.

Exile/Avernum as a setting always had a somewhat libertarian slant to it. The Empire controlled most of the surface with an iron fist, and the underworld was the last bastion of freedom, populated by pioneers and very loosely governed.

Think he is kinda late on the woke bandwagon, also seems very scared

Not sure about "woke;" Vogel's always been a bit of an oldschool egalitarian (think of a game like BG1). Women and minorities featured quite prominently, even in his early games. The opening splash screen for Exile III (back in 1995) had two humans, one (seemingly) white person who's cloaked and one black woman warrior (you can see it here). He had a couple that got thrown into the underworld for being gay that appeared in the first Avernum, I believe, back in 2000.

He's never been heavy handed about it, but diversity in his games isn't anything new.

In other words, he was a classic liberal type and that about checks out with the years you listed. Man is so old, his mind is likely still in the 90s to 2000s. You never truly move out of your most influential time period.

People need to remember the libtard shit wasn't a huge problem until just around 2010 which is where you started hearing about progressively more and more annoying and retarded shit. There was a time where voting democrat was the seemingly reasonable position and it's not like muricans had the self loathing for their country that they have now, no, they were still for the flag.

If things had only stayed at "sometimes you occasionally get a dark skinned cutie who identifies more as an American than wherever she came from," and "black guy dies first in movies at worst and is your sitcom best friend at best," we'd still be here making strawmans about seemingly conservative figures caring too much about sex mods in video games like GTA SA and Hilary, and if video games actually cause violence.

Vogel's boomer brain is still in that time period and he's assuming it's legitimate criticism if he isn't just scared out of his mind that some danger hair has the patience to play a game straight out of... yet again, the same time period when freeware was a word people used.

 

[Infinitron]

Jeff Vogel isn't woke, lol: https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-freedom-of-expression

 

[Late Bloomer]

He must have been browsing the 8 reviews and noticed he caught the ire of a chinaman. Pretty funny read. He locked the thread.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1947750/discussions/0/3314107199322662644/

 

[oscar]

The Geneforge games had some fairly intelligent political reflections and moral ambiguity (and lots of endings based on what you do or do not do). So he's certainly capable of it.

But he should be far more concerned about making an actually good RPG.

 

[Mortmal]

He must have been browsing the 8 reviews and noticed he caught the ire of a chinaman. Pretty funny read. He locked the thread.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1947750/discussions/0/3314107199322662644/

He got what he deserves there really, apologetic about using the word empire, to not offend at all cost the white guilt and woke crowd which is unsignificant but very vocal and toxic...Instead offend a whole nation of 1.4 billion people in the same blog.

 

[Dayyālu]

The Geneforge games had some fairly intelligent political reflections and moral ambiguity (and lots of endings based on what you do or do not do). So he's certainly capable of it.

Sometimes, I do truly wonder if he wrote Geneforge alone. They're too smart for what I've read from him for years, he makes an Empire ran on genetically-enforced slavery sound like a reasonable option with good points.

His latest additions on the remake (the "broken serviles" that had autism an' shit) looked flat-out clumsy compared to the nuance of Geneforge 4, for example. And considering the staggering amounts of bad takes in everything regarding marketing, writing, graphics, theorycrafting, fan interaction etc etc one wonders if it was merely lighting in a bottle or someone helped him massively to properly build the thing.

Also, who the fuck cares about "QW2: The Graphics Horror": you lucked out with the Steam Indie explosion Jeff, there's far better stuff around nowadays

 

[thesheeep]

Jeff Vogel isn't woke, lol: https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-freedom-of-expression

Anything is woke now if it's not blatant fan service.

Didn't you know?
Get with the times, old man!

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Vogel is a complainer and dimwit. Does he not realize, no matter what efforts, you can't ever appease woke!? They are in the business of being offended, and as a privileged old white man he won't ever be accepted as one of them.

He should have accepted there is very little money in what he is doing and doubled down on trying to please his existing sympathic audience instead of insult them with rubbish games.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Well I'll keep my dirty imperial white man money far away from his project, and his virtue can be considered well signaled.

 

[Luzur]

imma gun' pirate it bros lmao

 

[Mortmal]

imma gun' pirate it bros lmao

Besides the kickstarter backers i dont think anyone bought it, it's not going to change anything.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

He should have accepted there is very little money in what he is doing a

The money was there, he just had to pick it up. But for some inexplicabple reason, during the era when internet was throwing a million dollars at every isometric RPG on Kickstarter, Vogel decided the most productive use of his time was making mobile remakes of remasters that end up making $399 profit before taxes.

 

[Sardine Dev Poster]

I bought his game, and I might like it. Granted it wasn't my own money I used, so I did have reservations, but the money goes all the same. The shit he has said is nowhere near the level of other devs on twitter, and I guarantee some of you guys have something like Deep Rock Galactic in your libraries that you didn't think too hard about, did you? We're in Kali Yuga tier of decline, we can't be too picky to where some old man's muhdemocrat senility bothers us enough to sink a very niche field that hits the bases for an RPG more so than anything else.

But if he starts saying anything to do with faggots and nigger lives matter or some pandering with black serviles in geneforge being disproportionately attacked by player enforcement or something, make sure to come back to this thread and I'll suck you off about how right you were.

 

[Late Bloomer]

I guarantee some of you guys have something like Deep Rock Galactic in your libraries that you didn't think too hard about, did you?

Oh no... Please fill me in.

 

[Zeriel]

Vogel wringing his hands over "empire" has to be the gayest and most pretentious fucking shit I've ever seen considering about 90% of his catalogue was based around an eponymous Empire and no one cared. Holy fuck I hate the world post 2014.

Exile/Avernum as a setting always had a somewhat libertarian slant to it. The Empire controlled most of the surface with an iron fist, and the underworld was the last bastion of freedom, populated by pioneers and very loosely governed.

Think he is kinda late on the woke bandwagon, also seems very scared

Not sure about "woke;" Vogel's always been a bit of an oldschool egalitarian (think of a game like BG1). Women and minorities featured quite prominently, even in his early games. The opening splash screen for Exile III (back in 1995) had two humans, one (seemingly) white person who's cloaked and one black woman warrior (you can see it here). He had a couple that got thrown into the underworld for being gay that appeared in the first Avernum, I believe, back in 2000.

He's never been heavy handed about it, but diversity in his games isn't anything new.

I don't know why so many of you lack reading comprehension, but that's exactly my point. He's been making games with these themes for 30~ years, but NOW he chooses to caterwaul in public about it?

It's because your point is a silly. Honesty != Pretension. Literally, He's honestly describing what he's always done. If I plant a tree every day for twenty years and talk about planting trees when I'm 60, that's not me pretending to care about trees or virtue signaling. And of course he talked about empire in public before this. He described Avadon as a game partially about crumbling empire in 2010, and far more directly in 2016. He described the original Queen's Wish as a game about empire in 2018. His blog started in 2009, so it's safe to say he's been talking about it for a while.

Furthermore, there's not this enormous separation between communication in a game and communication out of a game. Making a game ambivalent about empire is talking about empire in public. Most of his games are ambivalent towards the subject of empire, particularly the Geneforge series. The shapers are brutal tyrants that are somewhat vindicated by what the rebellion unleashes. Alwan is the most complex character he's written, and that's because he is a genuine benevolent dictator.

You wrote an ill-thought, reactive post, and got mildly rebuked by people with a better command of the creator's collective work in games and out. That's not a lack of reading comprehension.

I have yet to see any rebuke. It's people looking at a shitpile, then choosing to make a dissertation on an unrelated topic, and pretending that means the shitpile doesn't exist, or isn't a shitpile.

 

[Zeriel]

imma gun' pirate it bros lmao

I don't think it's even worth that. QW1 was unplayably bad. Those random steam games with 3D poser art in JPGs come off as less creatively bankrupt.

 

[Marte1980]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsHdB0M2Sq4

 

[Joyvankek]

So Vogel writes well over a thousand hours of games about Empire, most of which are morally suspect, and it's pretentious to mention that maybe that's a theme of his games? That's literally the opposite of pretentious. He's just listing what he's done over his career. He said the whole thing about China to let the readers know that this wasn't an America Bad! Grrr! vs. God Bless, Murica, and guns, and trucks. This game is a reflection on Empire: the good, the bad, and the ugly. That's all he's saying, and he's absolutely right.

You should visit the main thread where his blog gets posted. While you are at it watch some of his interviews on youtube. Anything 5 years or newer. He has over a thousand hours of games about Empire you say. Just like that he feels guilty about it. He also feels guilty about being white. About being male. About getting old. He lost part of his audience. He says as much in a recent blog. He also mentions replacing them. If you just read this partiuclar blog and know nothing else I could see how you came to your conclusion. Thats why you should read up a bit more.

You must be a fan if you came out of hiding just to post this. Do you know if his previous games featured the same diversity of Queen's Wish?

All I played from him was Geneforge 1 remastered.
So I don't really cared about that dev before.
Could you give me TL;DR on what happened here?
Did dev became a self-hating neo-marxist and if so, then why?

 

[Zeriel]

So Vogel writes well over a thousand hours of games about Empire, most of which are morally suspect, and it's pretentious to mention that maybe that's a theme of his games? That's literally the opposite of pretentious. He's just listing what he's done over his career. He said the whole thing about China to let the readers know that this wasn't an America Bad! Grrr! vs. God Bless, Murica, and guns, and trucks. This game is a reflection on Empire: the good, the bad, and the ugly. That's all he's saying, and he's absolutely right.

You should visit the main thread where his blog gets posted. While you are at it watch some of his interviews on youtube. Anything 5 years or newer. He has over a thousand hours of games about Empire you say. Just like that he feels guilty about it. He also feels guilty about being white. About being male. About getting old. He lost part of his audience. He says as much in a recent blog. He also mentions replacing them. If you just read this partiuclar blog and know nothing else I could see how you came to your conclusion. Thats why you should read up a bit more.

You must be a fan if you came out of hiding just to post this. Do you know if his previous games featured the same diversity of Queen's Wish?

All I played from him was Geneforge 1 remastered.
So I don't really cared about that dev before.
Could you give me TL;DR on what happened here?
Did dev became a self-hating neo-marxist and if so, then why?

No, he's just the usual liberal. In the past, being a liberal meant being, well, liberal. Now it means submitting to marxists because they have the political headwinds. He has no spine, this is just what he thinks is the "in" thing now. That's what makes it, again, pretense. He's just saying whatever he has to to fit into his environment. If you lived here, this would be a lot easier to understand viscerally, but trust me when I say nothing here is some keenly thought out and deeply sought personal insight on his part, it's a performance.

 

[Dayyālu]

All I played from him was Geneforge 1 remastered.
So I don't really cared about that dev before.
Could you give me TL;DR on what happened here?
Did dev became a self-hating neo-marxist and if so, then why?

You can freely ignore the usual suspects crying /pol/ buzzwords on the thread: culture warriors are bothersome and boring. The main point you have to take from Vogel's personal opinion, lectures and blogs is:

- The man did traditional RPGs during the 90ies and during the darkest ages (before the Indie boom on Steam and Kickstarter). This gave him a good headstart and a faithful community.
- He managed to crawl on Steam and get a release before the indie deluge, with still a loyal community and a market that he could exploit.
- He proceeded to shit on his former loyal community by purposefully aping Bioware's writing and simplifying mechanics an' shit, and labeling as "toxic fans" everyone who complained.
- This links to the fact that there isn't a single point where Vogel had any insight. If you read his blog for years you realized he's not an industry veteran, he's an industry survivor. His takes are absurd or outright nonsensical: he railed against Steam until Steam became a source of money for him, he didn't trust Kickstarter until he realized he could use it as a pre-order system, he does not understand properly how to commission and use assets, he doesn't understand the indie market, his fans are always wrong and should not be even read or considered until he had to consider them, endless remakes are good and a way to work as little as possible for the maximum return, and of course the classic

"I'm old and tired and I just want to make money with the minimum amount of effort"

Queen's Wish 1 was kind of an eye-opener for me: reading his triumphant posts about NEW AMAZING mechanics and playing something that was below what rookie RPGMaker amateurs manage to build made me understand that Vogel did not keep many mechanics and encounters "simple and boring" in his previous games out of a conscious design: he's merely an incredibly mediocre RPG designer that lucked out in the market. I still love Geneforge's reactivity, but I keep asking myself if the same man can be good in a single matter and so mediocre and wrong in everything else.