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That might actually fit the game worlds premise about mysterious return of mankind 1000 years before.
Whatever caused it wasn't presumably a natural event.
I don't care about his politics (not in this thread at least), I just like using that quote paraphrase from Full Metal Jacket when I'm pissed.
That being said, Chris Keenan shit the bed because I like to roleplay my roleplaying games and I don't want my character to be either a silver tongued buttlicker, nor a sneaky shadowy faggotmaster, nor a retard walking through a world where nano-bots inhabit the very air while carrying a shield strapped to my hand and a garbage can on my shoulders. I want to be a hot-tempered mage that solves his problems with offensive magic. Considering that mage is one of the 3 classes, is it unreasonable for me to ask for a mage related focus ? Is it Infi ? IS IT ?
Those two statements contradict each other. If art is ALWAYS subjective (hint: it isn't), then it's always perfect and it doesn't need improvements. It would be impossible to judge its quality at all actually, to the point of quality not being a thing that can be prescribed to it at all, and every point is a moot one.
All right, I finished Oathbreaker. My impressions:
The knight training being unisex struck me as odd. This is one of those in-vogue grimdark fantasy settings where brutal things are happening to people all the time so it's weird to me that women would get this equal opportunity to be soldiers and receive the same harsh training as the men. Even stranger is that three women passed the finals and proving themselves superior to many of the best men. I guess this can be waved by it being fantasy. It feels a bit like inclusion for the sake of inclusion rather than an inclusive world that's been thoroughly thought-out. I'm sure this is some nice ragebait for the misogynerds though.
So, it seems that T:ToN has elected to mollify my longing for virtual prostitution! As it turns out, if you
drag Rhin back to Tol Maguur and, cheerfully ignoring the protests of your companions, hand her over to slavery,
you can subsequently buy her straight back in exchange for an hour of Tybir's favours, without a hint of sanctimonious wheedling about how enslaving and abusing little girls is wrong ever being needed. In fact, it appears that Tybir's chocolate delights cured the poor woman of her magical child abuse addiction too, since she apparently doesn't need the girl after all, despite how much she insisted in the earlier conversation. I am mildly impressed. The Practical Incarnation might've enslaved Dak'kon and consigned Xachariah's corpse to eternal servitude to the Dustmen, but at least he never turned either one into a gigolo. This isn't exactly what I had in mind, but hell, I'll take what I can get.
Setting aside mild sarcasm, T:ToN is starting to grow on me bit by bit. I felt a twinge of despair when I saw the Circus Minor with its convenient quest repositories arranged in colourful little tents all over, but the other areas are more successful in providing you with some excuse to talk to people, and the quests dealing with strange alien creatures are at least interesting, if simplistic. I kind of appreciate that the game has the occasional puzzle, too - nothing amazing, but in combination with the Effort mechanic (gimmicky as it might be), it offers a welcome break from pestering people for no well-established reason.
This slave-searching business is kind of illustrative of a problem that I have with the "quest hub" structure, though. I don't mind that the quest had, by and large, a slavery-is-bad morale, any more so than I did with the Nychthemeron quest, and a bit of emotional manipulation is fine too. Here's the weird thing, though - if I am playing the sort of noble soul who opposes slavery out of the goodness of her heart, and I am not, in fact, in the market for a lolita slave, why exactly did I go out of my way to talk to the filthy slaver scum in the first place? Just to see if, just in case, they happened to need my help to find a missing lamb so I could guilt-trip, bribe or stab them into releasing them? One might consider this a little bit contrived.
The dangers of hand-holding aside, I think that these kinds of hubs could be greatly improved if the game provided more reasons to talk to different characters. The best thing here would be if quests intersected enough that another quest I was taking would give me a good reason to go there, but just a generic fig leaf like PS:T's excuse that you were looking for Pharod or your journals would help quite a bit. A lot of the mental dissonance of being thoroughly appalled by slavery in a world in which slavery is at least tolerated wouldn't be there if you hadn't deliberately and freely offered to deliver a slave back to their owner like ten minutes earlier perfectly out of your own volition for no well-established reason.
In any case, I'm pleased that Tybir's bed-heroism offered a way out of this particular dilemma, and he has clearly earned his current position as MVP in my party.
So, let's get this straight, MCG gave you emphatic feedback that instead of having a range of skin-colours, everyone in the Ninth World is expressly non-white in terms of skin-colour?
And if the idea was that "it's not that it's 'too white', it's that everyone is mixed", ignoring how absurd that is, it's clearly not true - did you get similar feedback on the wealth of other writing and characters that are already clearly non-whites? Of course not. It's only "problematic" if it's "too caucasian".
If you worried more about the quality of the game and the portraits, and worried less about conforming to political correctness and pushing identity issues onto others, the game might've been better than it was. Clearly it was more important that the portraits fit a politicized narrative of diversity and marginalization than actually looking, y'know, good, or like something people would feel like they could relate to, whether white or black or purple.
The most absurd notion is that somehow, for whatever reason, evolution in this post-apocalypse/pre-modernity/science-fiction setting took a billion-year-long holiday. The idea that all of humanity would somehow have a collective gene-pool that would somehow meld together, and then remain melded together without crystallizing into distinct populations and evolutionary subgroups, is utterly insane. It's straight-up cultural marxist nonsense with no basis in reality, pushed in order to establish a narrative in which the creolization of mankind can be spun in a positive light, rather than the very real-life balkanization that is unveiling in front of us.
This gets even more absurd considering that abhumans and genetic offshoots of humanity is an established facet of the setting - but apparently, this evolutionary variance does not apply to humanity itself, other than when it explicitly results in something that can no longer be categorized or immediately recognized as entirely human. This level of cognitive dissonance and mental gymnastics is certifiable insanity.
This game had a lot of potential as there were many interesting things about it. Unfortunately the game really does look like a fan project from 1997, the unfinished state is very clear and reminded me of Dink Smallwood, which was also a very short game but seemed more polished than this one.
Dragon Age 3 is a better game than this in every way, and I couldn't play that for more than 30 hours without finding it a chore.
I do have to offer Numenera one thing; it takes a rare game to make me not want to be a hero in a hopeless fight. Granted that likely has more to do with Miel Avest completely ruining whatever sense of momentum and verisimilitude I had going until then, but hey. The game had earned plenty of eye rolling before that, but whatever-her-name-was with the mere-caster was horrible. Now I want to side with the Sorrow, it's doing everyone a favour.
Right at the doorstep of the Bloom, too. I want to get into it, but I just don't care anymore.
The Castoff concept has become unbearably dull, too. It's not enough that they're boring by themselves, but they ruin the fun of anything they touch. I instantly didn't want to know anything more about them the moment the Cannibal Cultist cast-off guy turned up.
The most absurd notion is that somehow, for whatever reason, evolution in this post-apocalypse/pre-modernity/science-fiction setting took a billion-year-long holiday. The idea that all of humanity would somehow have a collective gene-pool that would somehow meld together, and then remain melded together without crystallizing into distinct populations and evolutionary subgroups, is utterly insane. It's straight-up cultural marxist nonsense with no basis in reality, pushed in order to establish a narrative in which the creolization of mankind can be spun in a positive light, rather than the very real-life balkanization that is unveiling in front of us.
I'm not an specialist on biology but in terms of the colour someone can have, if somehow all people of all colours came together and had children, the result would still be a far ranging spectrum of colours and not everybody being slightly brown. There would be white people, black people and in between people, this is how genetics work but demanding SJW to actually know anything beyond their petty grievances is to ask too much.
Second, populations disperse on an uneven and random pattern, some groups have more melanin and others less melanin and they will spread on such a way that on some places there are more whites and on others more blacks and on others there will be alot of miscegenation, especially on points where different people travel alot. So, everyone being brownish is retard.
Another thing, mutations happen all the time, I totally belief humans a billion years would be so completely different, especially after genetic modification made on all this period. They would transcend races because they wouldn't be limited to ole Mother Nature and design themselves as they see fit. Imagine all kinds of different "human" races that could exist on this setting, at this point they would be more different species and race would lose any meaning and just become the percentage of meanin on body but you know NumaNuma is a bullshit setting barely developed setting where its flaws are waved away with space magic. So, if evetything is retard bullshit of low quality, why not escore some points with hysteric SJW and be a cuck avoiding this way their hatred?
At a rough estimate, 63% are of the dolichocephalic type. The rest are a mix of brachocephalics and clearly unrealistic fantasy types. Also some have unrealistic hair colour. Purple. Or green.
The last two paintings are of actually attractive people, in a traditionally fantasy context that is. In a post-SJW world? Inconceivable! The top right chick looks vaguely like Tarja Turunen, which is also incline.
Hey, it's a PnP RPG book. You don't get a five-mil budget for those, and there's a ton of art there. As production values go, the Numenera books are significantly above-par. Maybe not quite up to 2e AD&D standards, but still pretty good.
(There's something about the style that I find off-putting though. A lot of those expressions have a snooty smugness about them that I don't like.)
Watching these guys is like watching Beavis and Butthead :
- they are calling the red headed Calestiga;
- Aligern and Callistege are ex lovers;
- say that the backgrounds are painted;
- guy from the left that finished the game in 20 hours has no idea what the game is about, really didn't understand a thing;
- guy in the right is a lot smarter then the one in the left.
I think you guys are misunderstanding Colin's statement about that Aligern portrait being "too white". Looking at the concept arts, it indicates that characters such as Aligern and Tybir do have brown/black skin color. Of course it would not be ok to change the characters' basic features in a portrait. It's like drawing a blond Durance portrait.
Bullshit. Didn't you read what was actually said? Monty Cuck went in and gave "empathic feedback", in order to enforce the idea that in the future, nobody can be white. This isn't anything new, either. Monty Cuck Games have been known to enforce this in regards to the Numenera IP in the past.
Hey, it's a PnP RPG book. You don't get a five-mil budget for those, and there's a ton of art there. As production values go, the Numenera books are significantly above-par. Maybe not quite up to 2e AD&D standards, but still pretty good.
(There's something about the style that I find off-putting though. A lot of those expressions have a snooty smugness about them that I don't like.)
Yeah, I can shit on the Cypher stuff all day long, but the production values are top-notch. I get the feeling that they're really getting the best out of their deals with artists, really. There's some amazing art in some of the books, and I love ripping art out of them for use in games. I was incredibly shocked to see that I could pull character art straight out and preserve transparency, and there are maps in some of the .pdf:s that have been embedded even up to about 10k pixels. It's amazing. The maps I posted in the other thread were pulled straight out of the Numenera book, too. I'm used to the uneven standards of Black Industries and Fantasy Flight Games - this took me by surprise.
That being said, yeah, some of the character art, despite how well-made it is, just comes off as snooty and edgy, and is therefore unusable, and some of the art is also silly as shit, making you wonder what drugs they were on. But quality-wise? Great. They should've used Monte Cook's contacts to make the art. Couldn't have gone wrong.
I think you guys are misunderstanding Colin's statement about that Aligern portrait being "too white". Looking at the concept arts, it indicates that characters such as Aligern and Tybir do have brown/black skin color. Of course it would not be ok to change the characters' basic features in a portrait. It's like drawing a blond Durance portrait.
Bullshit. Didn't you read what was actually said? Monty Cuck went in and gave "empathic feedback", in order to enforce the idea that in the future, nobody can be white. This isn't anything new, either. Monty Cuck Games have been known to enforce this in regards to the Numenera IP in the past.
Hey, it's a PnP RPG book. You don't get a five-mil budget for those, and there's a ton of art there. As production values go, the Numenera books are significantly above-par. Maybe not quite up to 2e AD&D standards, but still pretty good.
(There's something about the style that I find off-putting though. A lot of those expressions have a snooty smugness about them that I don't like.)
Yeah, I can shit on the Cypher stuff all day long, but the production values are top-notch. I get the feeling that they're really getting the best out of their deals with artists, really. There's some amazing art in some of the books, and I love ripping art out of them for use in games. I was incredibly shocked to see that I could pull character art straight out and preserve transparency, and there are maps in some of the .pdf:s that have been embedded even up to about 10k pixels. It's amazing. The maps I posted in the other thread were pulled straight out of the Numenera book, too. I'm used to the uneven standards of Black Industries and Fantasy Flight Games - this took me by surprise.
That being said, yeah, some of the character art, despite how well-made it is, just comes off as snooty and edgy, and is therefore unusable, and some of the art is also silly as shit, making you wonder what drugs they were on. But quality-wise? Great. They should've used Monte Cook's contacts to make the art. Couldn't have gone wrong.
