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Scorpia and Baldur's Gate, a discussion from 2006

Infinitron

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Back in 2006, legendary RPG reviewer Scorpia opened a blog (which was shut down three years later). Last night, I randomly came across a discussion about her from back then on the QT3 forums, with a few of her former co-workers from Computer Gaming World in attendance. There's some interesting gossip about her, and an interesting look at the impact that Baldur's Gate had back in the day.

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?28150-Scorpia-is-back

Here are a few quotes:

I think she got eased out at CGW. Desslock sort of took over RPGs at CGW back then, but he's at PC Gamer now. I think she gave a major RPG a bad review, a game that everyone else loved (Baldur's Gate maybe?), and CGW posted a dissenting editorial or sidebar to sort of say, "Hey, it's only her -- not us."

Or maybe I'm just imagining all this. I think the games changed and she didn't, is what it comes down to, and CGW wanted to go in a different direction.

She did have a pay-per-view site but I don't think it did that well.

Asher's summary is pretty much correct. The Baldur's Gate review (she hated the game) was kind of the last straw. The feeling was that she had just kind of lost touch with the audience and with PC gaming in general. (For example, we had to twist her arm to upgrade from DOS, among other ongoing problems.)

And, really, her relationship with the magazine was a relationship with Johnny. Those two went way back. He was the only one who even knew her real name or what she looked like. She was incredibly unfriendly to the point of hostility to all the rest of us (I was her editor for years and she never had one nice thing to say to me), so she essentially had no one on her side once Johnny left. That's what happens when you operate that way.

Concerning Scorpia and her departure from CGW and all that, I'm reminded of a little idea that's been kicking around my noggin for a little while now. Jeff's comment that she "...just kind of lost touch with the audience and with PC gaming in general" is probably as accurate as can be and I have no point in particular with which to debate. I also can't comment on her departure or her disposition or anything of the sort, since I only read her stuff and never knew her outside of her work I'd read in the magazine each month.

I'm sure Scorpia did lose touch with the audience, from one point of view. The other point of view, and it may be an entirely invalid PoV because it's just something I've been toying with personally, is that the gaming media is far more influential than one might suspect.

What do I mean by this? Let's pick on G4 for a second, or maybe X-Play in general. One of their big demands seems to be that every game simply must have multiplayer. If a game comes along that doesn't include a multiplayer component and isn't a critical hit type of game (which they always rate well, regardless of the fact that similar games are usually trashed, but that's a whole other can of worms), they will knock it severely for its lack of the feature. It doesn't matter if the game lends itself to a multiplayer mode or not - they've come down firmly on the stance that multiplayer is the future and the now and they make the claim, repeatedly, that it's what gamers want.

That's really what I have issue with - the "it's what gamers want" idea. We all know how easily the general population is told by the media at large what they are supposed to approve of, disapprove of, want, and not want. The same goes for the gaming population and the gaming media, I think. It's far from Fox News levels of dragging the dog's leash, but I think it's there and I often wonder just how much the gaming media saying "gamers want feature X" is accurate and how much is the bias of the one doing the speaking.

Let me try and condense my stream-of-thought ramblings by posing a simple question: Did Scorpia lose touch with the gaming audience or did she lose touch with the gaming media? I'm sure it's a little bit of both and a whole heap of other things, but I myself remember not caring for Baldur's Gate, either. I was a big fan of story and world driven RPGs (think Ultima) at the time, and the whole while I was being innundated with how Baldur's Gate was reviving a dead genre, was the wave of the future, and one of the best RPGs yet made, I couldn't help but feel like I was more or less being "forced" to like the game by both the fact that there weren't many other RPGs out at the time and by the strong-arming of the gaming media telling me that I was so very wrong with my feelings about the game. I even remember trying to play through BG1 several times, many of such times having been motivated by reading yet another article or review praising the merits of the title. I felt like I just didn't "get it" and if only I could, I would understand and enjoy what had to be a wonderful game. After all, it re-launched the genre and spawned a slew of copycats, all of which were designed in this new RPG style that I just did not like. I was lost.

I did enjoy BG2 a great deal, though. I'm not sure why I liked it when I hated BG1 so much, but its story hooked me and its world and the exploration of it was more interesting, I guess. I'm not sure what it was, actually. Go figure.

I never met Scorpia personally, obviously--even when Wilson brought in a large grouping of CGW writers for a conference, she did not attend--but I always respected her work. I was never as impressed with her replacement.

As for who dissed what/who? She was a reviewer. They're opinionated people by nature, and dissing is half of what they do. And no one person can ever be right 24/7, 52 weeks a year. Even Shakespeare got some bad reviews.

So long as a reviewer disses intelligently and with some kind of rational explanation for their opinions, I have no problem with it. As for whether she was "wrong" about this game or that--meh. For my point of view, it takes real stones to stand up to the masses (or to massive marketing campaigns) when writing a review. Scorpia was old school--she didn't let anyone dictate her opinions to her, or give "star ratings" which could be wiggled based on how many advertising dollars any given corporation had to spend.

She played each game through and assessed its strengths and weaknesses on its own merits, standing alone. She wrote detailed reviews about the experience of playing, and gave excellent hints and tips for games she was enthusiastic about.

If the gaming world "moved on" from her style of reviewing? The industry has been poorer for it.

I don’t think the gaming world moved away from her style of review as much as the style of games changed and I think that she developed a bit of a negative bias against the newer crop of games.

You have to review a game based on its own merits, not whether it’s good because it’s like the old-school RPGs or not so good because it belongs to the newer style.

And really, I sympathize. I am disinclined to like some of the newer games simply because they’re not more like the older games I loved. Clearly, I don’t represent the target audience anymore for many of the newer games being made.

I think Mr. Green may have come frightfully close to living a videogame nerds ultimate fantasy.

"What? You didn't like Baldur's Gate? Here's something else you might not like; You're fucking fired. Clean out your desk, you dumbshit plebe."

I can't speak for Mr. Green per se, but I don't believe that's exactly what he said. I believe he was trying to say that Scorpia really had only one contact at the magazine, which was Johnny Wilson; she worked for/with him personally, had a long-standing relationship of trust with him, and found it very difficult to find common ground with other staffers when he was gone.

This happens to professional writers all the time when editors switch jobs, especially if they have a strong personal style. Most editors develope a "stable" of writers who they trust and respect; it is often difficult for a new editor to run a previous editor's stable, so often they "clean house" when their predecessors leave. For that matter, writers also have been known to jump ship with their old editor to new publications; it's actually not all that common for any writer to be more loyal to a masthead than they are to the individual editor.

In Scorpia's case, I believe that there were additional problems. But speaking as someone who was there toward the end of her heyday, I am not so sure that she was "full of herself"--I've never met a writer yet who would refuse a free expenses-paid trip to San Francisco out of arrogance. There was something else going on there; I have no idea what it was, but it was all very mysterious. I would suspect that she was pathologically shy, or there was some issue with her privacy or identity. Heck, for all I know she was a pseudonymous female alter-ego for Johnny Wilson. Lol...which would explain why she never wanted to show any pictures of herself! I don't think Johnny would have made a good drag queen.

Arinn's assessment is pretty much the truth here. This is what it boiled down to. The "you hated Baldur's Gate so you're out!!!" thing is really misleading and not what it was about. Every single writer/editor who's ever written for CGW (including me) has liked/hated a game that went against conventional wisdom. That in itself is of course not a bad thing.

It's really what Arinn said, and what I said in a previous post: Scorpia's relationship to CGW was a relationship with Johnny Wilson. Even though I was her assigned editor for many years, for example, she'd email her stories to Johnny. Just one small example.

When George Jones took over as EIC, there was simply no real relationship to anyone on the staff except for an extremely vague and sometimes hostile/annoyed one (though, as Arinn says, some of the personality stuff could *possibly* have been attributed to shyness rather than diva-ness, which, unfortunately, is often how that comes across), and so it just made sense to cut that tie.

And , hey, she's back, she has her own website, so yay.
 
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Lhynn

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Sounds like she was a fucking hero.

Nvm, shes retarded. Thanks bubbles
 
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Self-Ejected

Bubbles

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Sounds like she was a fucking hero.

Here are some snippets from her article:

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And here is the dissenting sidebar where the editorial staff publically stabbed her in the back:

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Mustawd

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This reviewer is retarded. Even I know BG had redeeming qualities, and I thought alignment and part dynamics was one of 'em.
 

Space Insect

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I agree with some of the stuff she said, but it sounds like she wanted to min-max without anything getting in her way. She probably would have liked it more if she had used the multiplayer to create her own min-max party.
 

MRY

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I've always been kind of underwhelmed by her analysis -- it was certainly more nuts-and-bolts and informed than many mainstream reviewers, but if you compare it to the similar review style on the Codex, her work seems really lacking. She seemed incapable of thinking of how others would play the game, and things that to me seem quite small (or simply incorrect) would be of intense importance to her. For example, her comments about the RNG in BG -- the combination of self-aggrandizement and certitude about something that is almost certainly incorrect is pretty lame: "The RNG is cheating!!!!" is one thing to exclaim in the privacy of your own home when you a point-blank burst in X-Com or Fallout, but it's kind of dodgy in a formal review.

My exposure to her was mostly through the CRPG Addict, where her reviews almost always seem to miss the forest for the trees -- her bottom line is often right, but for the wrong reasons. I think she also commented once on an article I wrote for The Escapist, and it seemed to me she hadn't actually read the article but had very firm opinions about what was wrong in it. So maybe I'm biased.
 
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Bubbles

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The same issue of CGW also contained reviews of Alpha Centauri (5/5), Starcraft: Brood War (5/5), Myth 2 (4.5/5), and King's Quest: Mask of Eternity (4/5). The only real stinkers were Return to Krondor and Quest for Glory 5 (both 2.5/5). Maybe Scorpia's 4/5 review seemed even worse because it was crowded out by so many all-time greats?
 

MRY

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Ah, here we are! Full text behind spoiler.
Death And The CRPG
by Scorpia in Editorials/Essays (Wednesday February 14, 2007 at 12:32 pm)
Over at The Escapist, Marty O’Hale has written an interesting article on death in CRPGs, and how the combination of constant death/constant saving ruins the story and turns CRPGs into something of an arcade game.

He definitely has a point there. Just about every CRPG these days, including Neverwinter Nights, warns you to “save early, save often”. After all, if the main character, or the entire party, dies, it’s “game over, man”. Then you have to go back to your last save, which you hope wasn’t too long ago, to avoid losing much progress.

At the end of the piece - which is certainly worth reading - Marty makes five suggestions on how this cycle can be broken. I have a quarrel with two of those, which I’ll detail later.

The essential problem with every CRPG is that the game is stacked against you from the start. While you can gain experience from completing a quest, the primary form of advancement is experience through combat.

CRPGs have far more fighting than a PnP game, particularly in short periods of time. That’s the nub of it. As Dale said to me once: “You have to win every fight; they have to win just one“.

With that situation, constant saving does become a must. Almost all enemies exist for the sole purpose of providing experience points and what the designers consider a “challenge”.

However, those “challenges” often reduce to “win or restore”. How many times have we been through tough fights - and not necessarily with a “boss” enemy - before succeeding?

In a PnP game, losing a fight might mean death for everyone. But there we have a living DM who can change things on the fly. And really, the DM’s first job is keeping the players alive, not killing them off.

For that matter, the DM has a huge advantage in being able to tailor situations and combats to the party, knowing their abilities as both characters and players.

This is not possible in a CRPG, especially one where the party can be of any mix, and everything is controlled by one player, about whom the designers know little, if anything.

So the save game acts as a stopgap measure, too. Perhaps not the best one, but it serves the purpose of keeping the party, and the game, going.

So we come to Marty’s suggestions, and the first one is to allow saving only on quitting, as in Diablo 2.

I loathed that feature, and having to run back to your body to get your stuff, with the same deadly critters hanging around your corpse. Quitting to bring the body back to town wasn’t fun, either.

This is the sort of thing that makes me look for cheat codes, trainers, or my hex editor. That type of save is very much anti-player, despite his next points.

The second is that “The player should receive significant long-lasting penalties much more frequently than he should die. Small permanent penalties should be frequent and essentially unavoidable (but seldom imposed due to pure chance), to accustom the player to weathering setbacks rather than undoing them”.

Where did he get that idea? Significant? Frequent? Long-lasting? Unavoidable? Does he really think that would work? Would you really want to spend a lot of the game looking for ways - if there are any - of undoing these “penalties”? He doesn’t, by the way, mention what they might be.

No, thank you. I want to run heroic characters, not some also-ran burdened down or crippled by who-knows-what deficits, created by designers who probably wouldn’t know how to handle that properly, given what I’ve seen from developers over the years.

And with only one save position a la Diablo 2, I can see this rapidly becoming frustrating, bringing on either rampant cheating or tossing the game aside as unplayable.

His next three points, however, have merit to them. The third is that the player should not die or be penalized for anything but an elected risk, although he doesn’t define what an “elected risk” is.

That leads to the fourth suggestion: there should be ways of ending combats besides “everyone on one side or the other dies”. Typically, that occurs now only in a “boss” fight, where the enemy, near death, tries to bargain for his or her life.

His final suggestion is: “Failure should create possibilities rather than merely foreclose them”. Alternate paths can be a good thing, although again, we have to know what “failure” means.

Of course, he’s just making these suggestions in a very general way, and leaving it to designers to come up with specifics. In some respects, that’s a terrifying thought.

The trouble here is, he’s trying to simulate PnP elements in a format that can only do so mechanically and with severe limitations. Unlike PnP, there is no DM to make changes, there is no real flexibility.

Here is an example from a chat game I ran years ago, in the GURPS system. The players were on a ship being pursued by enemies who closed in for combat. Neither vessel had any weaponry (catapults, etc.).

When the enemy ship had gotten close, the mage attempted a fireball and rolled a critical failure (that can happen with magic in GURPS). Oops.

In a CRPG, there would be a table to consult, and likely the entire party would have been fried, followed by a game restore. However, with a real DM who certainly didn’t want the players to suffer (too much ;) just from a bad die roll, things were different.

Instead of fire, the spell went off as a brilliant flash of light. Everyone in the party rolled a save; those who failed were temporarily blinded. And being fair, I rolled for the enemies, too, and not all of them made it.

So then we had some rather hectic combat as the enemy closed and some of them jumped over to the players’ ship. It was a very tough fight, and the players just managed to squeak through it, with help from the ship’s sailors.

What they didn’t know, is that I had expected them to take out the enemy with a lot less trouble, and there were reinforcements belowdecks on the other vessel. Since there was no way the players could have handled that, those other enemies just vanished. In a CRPG, they’d have swarmed up and killed the party, and it would be restore time again.

Try coding for that in a game, for more than one instance. The complexity would be horrendous, and games are released buggy enough as it is.

On the other hand, substituting those “frequent and unavoidable” penalities is not the answer. To use a trite but true phrase: “There are fates worse than death”, and who really wants to keep coming across them?

Which brings us to the ultimate question: do we really want to change from save/restore at the player’s discretion? No.

Because save/restore is our last defense against designers who don’t do it right, and that’s something I don’t want to lose. I never trust any developers, however good they may be. They’re only human (well, I think they are ;), and make mistakes, too.

On the other hand, implementing some of those suggestions, such as alternates to the “win or die” combats, could add some interesting situations. Read the article, and see what you think.
This seems quite a vindication of the min-max point: "I want to run heroic characters, not some also-ran burdened down or crippled by who-knows-what deficits." What is most striking to me on reading this is the major hole in her knowledge: the entire rogue-like genre, despite my repeatedly referencing it in my article. The only example she can come up with of only saving when quitting is Diablo 2. Overall though I remember being more annoyed at the time about her commentary than I am now.
 
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Bubbles

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This seems quite a vindication of the min-max point: "I want to run heroic characters, not some also-ran burdened down or crippled by who-knows-what deficits."

She also wrote a class guide in the same CGW issue:

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Jrpgfan

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The same issue of CGW also contained reviews of Alpha Centauri (5/5), Starcraft: Brood War (5/5), Myth 2 (4.5/5), and King's Quest: Mask of Eternity (4/5). The only real stinkers were Return to Krondor and Quest for Glory 5 (both 2.5/5). Maybe Scorpia's 4/5 review seemed even worse because it was crowded out by so many all-time greats?

I always thought the score was too high considering she found the game mediocre at best. That's why I always had the suspicion some editor changed the original score. But I don't know if that's true or if other people thought the same at the time. Maybe Scorpia herself got a little intimidated to give a lower score for such a praised release.
 
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Bubbles

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Finally, here are her criticisms of Fallout 2 (also 4/5):

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Maybe that last line explains the BG1 score - she was judging by the standards of 1998, and even deeply flawed RPGs were better than average for that time.
 
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Grauken

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I've always wondered why I liked the old, early guard of game reviewers, while I rarely had any respect of those coming in after 2000. Some is clearly nostalgia on my part, but also I suspect some of it was that early writers for those magazines rarely planned to ever be game reviewers who kind of fell into it and planned to get out of it at some point, get back to a real career, whatever that means. Which also meant that they sometimes gave less a shit of whom to hype, ass kiss and in general just tried to write honest, objective-as-possible reviews. These days, some of those writers probably grew up thinking that this kind of job is the ultimate wet dream and if some of them get it, do everything to keep it. They have the moral backbone of a snail, and it shows

Also, I remember my original reaction to BG, it was like "if this is the savior of CRPGs, we're all so fucked"
 

Grauken

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It's funny, but these days I'm much less hostile to it given the depths the genre sunk to and also that I learned to like some of its aspects, but when it came out I really couldn't stand it
 

Severian Silk

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Is it just me, or was there something charming about an old school reviewer who might have been "too shy" to post pics? That's so great compared to today, where they are all trying whore themselves out on TV and youtube videos, and half of them are some cute chicks that barely know anything about games. Let's be honest here, I don't really want to see the reviewer, I just want to hear them say something interesting.
 

Infinitron

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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
I've always been kind of underwhelmed by her analysis -- it was certainly more nuts-and-bolts and informed than many mainstream reviewers, but if you compare it to the similar review style on the Codex, her work seems really lacking. She seemed incapable of thinking of how others would play the game, and things that to me seem quite small (or simply incorrect) would be of intense importance to her. For example, her comments about the RNG in BG -- the combination of self-aggrandizement and certitude about something that is almost certainly incorrect is pretty lame: "The RNG is cheating!!!!" is one thing to exclaim in the privacy of your own home when you a point-blank burst in X-Com or Fallout, but it's kind of dodgy in a formal review.

My exposure to her was mostly through the CRPG Addict, where her reviews almost always seem to miss the forest for the trees -- her bottom line is often right, but for the wrong reasons. I think she also commented once on an article I wrote for The Escapist, and it seemed to me she hadn't actually read the article but had very firm opinions about what was wrong in it. So maybe I'm biased.

Imagine your stereotypical new Codex poster. Somebody who has accrued a collection of observations and opinions about RPGs over the years but never had them critically examined via high-brow discussion with other people. With no pushback, over time those idiosyncratic viewpoints will grow out of proportion to their real importance. A more balanced, nuanced understanding of the genre will never have the chance to develop. That's what Scorpia seems like to me - a Codexer without a Codex.
 
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Zboj Lamignat

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As a potato it's the first time I hear about her, but that part where she refused to give marks so the staff decided to put 4/5 under a clearly unfavorable review cracked me up.
 

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