Editorial The Digital Antiquarian on Darklands

[Latro]

Digital Antiquarian

The person who said that A Mind Forever Voyaging was a masterpiece and not preachy at all, but somehow Darklands is too religious for them. Because, like, maybe we'll all turn into 1400s Catholics if we're exposed to such dangerous thoughts. Really makes a person think.

Are we talking about the same blog? He didn't like AMFV that much, and his complaint about Darklands and religion is that including a "real" religion in a videogame is somehow "disrespectful", not that people would convert to it.

-how- the religion is represented is what counts, I don't think I've ever met another Catholic that was offended that you could attend daily Mass in this game. the Saint system is also really cool and encountering St. Dismas, St. Paul the Simple, St. Moses the Black in a videogame isn't necessarily disrespectful, but informative for even lay Catholics.

 

[vonAchdorf]

But Darklands is much more of a visual disaster, a conflicting mishmash of styles that sometimes manage to look okay in isolation, such as in the watercolor-style backgrounds to many of the textual vignettes. Just as often, though, it verges on the hideous; the opening movie is so absurdly amateurish that, according to industry legend, some people actually returned the game after seeing it, thinking they must have gotten a defective disk or had an incompatible video card.

I'm a fan and may be biased, but I never considered the game hideous or the watercolor backgrounds merely "okay". The only thing which was "conflicting" was the blue UI background, but it never overly bothered me.

 

[smaug]

I’ve heard this game is legendary from the amount of choices/roleplaying opportunities you have. I’ll add this to my list. Is this a good review to go off of?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nIp07F4iP_A

I haven’t watched the review as I don’t know how much it spoiles and stuff.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Well....how many historical RPG's have there been, really? Fantasy is pretty much 'history' with dragons to the everyday player so that isn't any kind of definitive proof that 'history' doesn't do well. It's more the case that 'realistic' RPG's don't do all that well, not historical ones per se as there is a greater difficulty in creating interesting mechanics based on 'real life' due to not much obvious variety.

The typical fantasy setting is pseudo-medieval with a sharply limited amount of historical verisimilitude, and as you've said more 'realistic' RPGs tend to be commercial failures. Most subgenres of RPGs are intrinsically unsuited to being stripped of their fantastic elements and shoe-horned into a setting that is not only historical but also fairly realistic --- imagine a Wizardry-like turn-based blobber or Dungeon Master-like real-time blobber with historical fidelity and no fantasy (or SF) elements. The success of historical RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance can be attributed to its being an Open World, first-person, fully 3D, real-time, narrative-focused, action-based (with reasonably good mechanics) RPG, something that wouldn't have been possible before the 2000s.

 

[Grauken]

To be honest I think Kingdom Come is just an outlier and it was a lot of "right time, right place, right game". I don't think you could easily replicate that level of success, even if another game of the same level of quality came along

 

[Nutria]

Are we talking about the same blog? He didn't like AMFV that much, and his complaint about Darklands and religion is that including a "real" religion in a videogame is somehow "disrespectful", not that people would convert to it.

I've used quite a bit of hyberbole here and there. But to be serious, I think Digital Antiquarian and people who share the same worldview are uncomfortable with history, especially non-US history. Maybe they aren't consciously aware of it, but they've got a very narrow comfort zone of ideas that they're willing to engage with. They're not going to be enthusiastic about a game that puts them in the shoes of someone with very different beliefs from theirs. So where I love Darklands because it makes me actually roleplay as a person different from who I am, that's not going to appeal to them.

It wouldn't even make me that butthurt except that these people have almost complete control over the conversation today, so anything they don't like gets suppressed. Well, that and the objectively incorrect claims that the gameplay mechanics are too complicated and that it's still unstable. If they didn't like the game, that's great, that's their right to say so, but they shouldn't be so biased that they make false claims about it.