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Played it a few hours more through the first town and I must say I need to beg Josh Sawyer for forgiveness; Pillows while banal, shit and boring were at least playable as game... this... horrible UI... performance... Moon logic driven quests... dialogues which you click without reading them cause they are that boring and meaningless... lack of agenda... atrocious combat... 6/10 so far hitting the refund button and buying Sanctus Reach instead. Seriously this is such letdown after AoD or even California part of W2 which was occasionally funny that is not even funny.
Played it a few hours more through the first town and I must say I need to beg Josh Sawyer for forgiveness; Pillows while banal, shit and boring were at least playable as game... this... horrible UI... performance... Moon logic driven quests... dialogues which you click without reading them cause they are that boring and meaningless... lack of agenda... atrocious combat... 6/10 so far hitting the refund button and buying Sanctus Reach instead. Seriously this is such letdown after AoD or even California part of W2 which was occasionally funny that is not even funny.
I love the contrast between this post and your previous two. Now you feel our delicious pain. The game is so uneven it's not even funny, yet so close to not having been shit. It's a digital tragedy.
Yeah, it's stated as being legal. Unfortunately, it gets extremely little exposition beyond that, so it's hard to tell. And sure, they don't have to like it, in fact I liked how the thugs (if you have the quest before finding Rhin, some thugs show up) are explicitly reluctant to haul the kid back to the slavers (this is only explicit if you've got Sense Thoughts).
The annoying part lies in that the default assumption is that it's evil and reprehensible, despite the fact that we're dealing with a post-apocalyptic/pre-civilization feudal-level society/setting, in a country/city where slavery is legal, and we're practically a newborn consciousness that literally fell out of the sky less than two days ago.
Some verisimilitude and contextual moral flexibility would've been appreciated, to say the least. Most European societies that have kept slaves didn't do so out of malice, and didn't recognize it as malicious, nor as a "necessary evil", but often as a kindness, nevermind that there's other types of de facto slavery, such as voluntary indentured servitude, other viewpoints such as keeping people that would de facto be worse off "in the wilds" or "in the gutter". In fact, in many cases, slavery has been considered a step up, despite the fact that you lose your freedom.
There' a ton of ways for slavery to be handled in interesting ways with varying degrees of historicity or moral judgements and philosophies, the least interesting of which are "It's evil". Fuck, the slaver didn't even try to argue with us that she'd have a better life as a slave than as an orphan. The entire thing was written by someone that didn't even try to put themselves into the situation, but instead created an unapologetic strawman devoid of character, with all the depth of Skeletor but without the relevance.
Also, why the fuck can't we ask them where they got her? After talking to Rhin before talking to the slavers, the fact that she's been lobotomized and comes from a different world are things that I'd expect to ask, especially if you resolve the situation peacefully.
It's good that you can't that just overpower the Sorrow, like you would in most other games. I'd have liked a more detailed ending for this option though. It's treated as a failure at the moment.
She also tells you that the corpse should be eaten completely and leaving hands or blood is some kind of "playing with food" which mostly "young members" do
She also tells you that the corpse should be eaten completely and leaving hands or blood is some kind of "playing with food" which mostly "young members" do
A young member of her species. Even if it wasn't, that's an incredibly suspicious thing to do, telling an investigator that only young members do that, trying to divert attention away from yourself. If the head cannibal had said it, then sure.
There' a ton of ways for slavery to be handled in interesting ways with varying degrees of historicity or moral judgements and philosophies, the least interesting of which are "It's evil". Fuck, the slaver didn't even try to argue with us that she'd have a better life as a slave than as an orphan. The entire thing was written by someone that didn't even try to put themselves into the situation, but instead created an unapologetic strawman devoid of character, with all the depth of Skeletor but without the relevance.
The Ottoman empire immediately comes to mind. They took young, handsome and strong Christian boys to become Janissaries, effectively enslaving them, but giving them education, training and a high stature in society.
As if the BG2 beginning or even the PST mortuary were much better. The beginning of PST was its weakest point in my opinion. The mortuary was also misleading about the tone of PST as a whole: it's fun and imaginative, not grimdark and morbid.
Taking credit for Otero, the "I'll explain everything to you through dialogue, no need to go and actually explore" NPC is like taking credit for inventing the gas chambers at a hanukkah celebration. I stopped watching shortly afterwards.
That sums up what is wrong with this game. People who are “disproportionally proud of the writing” at the expense of gameplay because they doesn’t understand what it is good writing in games in the first place.
The Ottoman empire immediately comes to mind. They took young, handsome and strong Christian boys to become Janissaries, effectively enslaving them, but giving them education, training and a high stature in society.
That didn't immediately come to my mind at all, which I think just goes to show how many facets there can be when it comes to slavery beyond that of our contemporary modernist society. Simply taking modern western morality and culture and transposing it upon a setting that is radically different and in a game that is supposedly exploring muh philosophy is just so incredibly weak. The slaver even just rationalizing the servitude of Rhin as training her to be her second or something, before getting a new child-slave, would've been an incalculable improvement, provided we as players also got the option to react in other ostensibly "good" ways other than "slavery is bad!".
What's a paladin? Seriously, this is the 5th time that question has come up. It's just so incredibly annoying, not to mention that the context of the conversation is completely different.
Played for about 30 minutes this evening. Geez, that intro is a slog. The writing seems p. banal and there's zero downtime between walls of texts. I probably won't play anymore. Disappointing.
As if the BG2 beginning or even the PST mortuary were much better. The beginning of PST was its weakest point in my opinion. The mortuary was also misleading about the tone of PST as a whole: it's fun and imaginative, not grimdark and morbid.
Waking up in a mortuary was a great beginning, plus the mortuary itself was interesting and I wanted to explore it further. And PST is in fact dark and morbit, AS WELL as imaginative an fun. Sorry but you're just a dumbfuk.
Jesus, I just got through the first twist and the only thing I can say is:
It is just plain amateurish writing. I would expect this from fanfiction writers not from professional writers (not that distinction is clear on the video game world anyway). My God, the main plot of this game is just awful and I don't say awful in comparison with the original Torment but just awful, awful on its own right.
The game is super short too, DragonFall and Hong Kong extended edition short but there were real quests on those games with decent combat, what I can't say here. You only have the impression of being a longer game because of the verbosity of it all but take Shadowrun Hong Kong lore dump NPCs, multiply them by 10, make them all special snowflakes on a much inferior setting in comparison with shadowrun and force you to go through a ton of loading screens talking with those douche bags, there you are Sagus Cliffs and pretty much all content until you reach the Bloom.
Only experienced three legitimate quests on all this time wasted on this game so far, Ashen Imitation, Sorrow's Prey and the only one I can say is legitimate incline and that was really well done and that goes beyond the banal fetch quest was that Endless Horror quest on the Valley of the dead heroes. Man, I'm really liking the Bloom so far but it is an area that deserved a much better game and I dunno if I will continue, especially as the main story just fucking died after the twist, don't feel there is much reason to continue. Waiting this thing since 2012 and they dump a mangled corpse cut on half...
Man, all the kickstarter games got problems but they got something right, HBS shit on the bed with Shadowrun Returns but they recovered their reputation with a big apology that was Dragonfall and Hong Kong extended edition, PoE was on a deplorable state at launch but patches fixed alot of stuff and Obsidian got their shit together on the expansions that are actually well designed areas, D:OS had an awful storyline and frontloaded content but had awesome combat encounters... This game though...
I got to know MRY made that Endless horror quest, please son, convince Ziets to leave this joke of a company and go you and him make an incline game because I won't give a cent to Brian Fargo anymore.
It is just plain amateurish writing. I would expect this from fanfiction writers not from professional writers (not that distinction is clear on the video game world anyway). My God, the main plot of this game is just awful and I don't say awful in comparison with the original Torment but just awful, awful on its own right.
The problem with most writers involved with cRPGs is that they really think they are writers in the traditional sense of the word, instead of developers that provide game content tied by a narrative structure. I see some posters accusing the writers of not playing cRPGs, but in reality they must not be playing any games at all. Hell, even most triple-A games have better writing than most cRPGs, not just storyfag cRPGs. When “God of War” has better writing than one of the most expected narrative cRPGs of the decade, you know cRPG writing is going down the toilet.
Heh, every area in Sagus Cliffs has some container where there is the exact same amount of money. This made an impression on me, because there are pretty much no random or just-for-flavor things in any area, and this single container with money always stands out. I pretty much expected it the last time I found it.
The journal is one of the worst things about this game. I don't really know if the game gives you enough information to be able to complete the quests without it, but with it you really don't feel like you're doing anything. Might as well have "solve this quest for me" buttons.
Is there a side-effect of keeping the Words of Qra instead of using them on the Adversary? I"m on two minds about Almas The Soul-keeper, it's the first time I felt I made the wrong choice, but he didn't give any indication of what would happen if I did. I don't know if that's good or bad, I lean towards good because it's better if you don't know what would happen (it still needs to be logical though)
Just finished up the Bloom, then my game crashed and all the saves got corrupted. So now the game is uninstalled and I feel I can give my review.
Planescape: Torment is Deus Ex, and Tides is Invisible War. It's a middling-to-bad game that gets points taken off for having a much better game's name attached to it.
