The Dusky Ramblings
(by Kilarith Duskleaf)
Rant #II : Story Time
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
When the time cometh, the song ringeth!
Now let's imagine a world in some
sort of stasis - and no, not a stasi - where things are repeating themselves
for eternity. Always the same'ol-same'ol, see? Well in a way that's what the
eternal battlegrounds are about… But that's another matter for another day. So
in this world we have quite a few sentient races, some
idiotic-barbaric-brainless gits that pass for fauna and plants, lots of plants…
And then there are big scary bastards - I rest my case, they have no parents! -
that most call "Dragons". Oh, and some of the bastards are old, you
know the sort of elderly dragons they put in retirement homes so they don't
forget to be nice and end up wrecking things?So now we add another layer of DrWhoyness to this brain purée and get science-fictional: this world is actually influenced by greater beings. Yes, let's get cocky, these beings are great, intelligent, sexy, and just perfect… well at least I am, I don't know about you… So now we’re faced with a subdivided multi-layered globally influenced cyclic micro-evolutionary storytelling system. Or, to stay short, Events. What I want to understand is in which way such a system is influenced by and influences it’s parallel linear story; which, to be precise, should actually be called a History, or Lore.
Yes, you got it, I’m trying to analyze
the correlation between the segmented storytelling that Guild Wars 2 offers via
Events and the overarching (hi)story told by both the personal story and
overall lore.
Living a day-to-day life
Me: So, Silee, What is the result of having a large part of a story told through constantly repeating events taking place in real time and each with multiple outcomes?Silee: Well, You must understand that due to the cyclic nature of the event, and since we are linear beings, the final outcome is bound to end up mapped out and the most calculatory of races, that is to say us Asura, being the brightest, will be able to foresee the outcome of each possibility. In simpler words Bookah, this situation clearly makes it easy to tell the future.Me: You mean to say that the important part of each event is predicting the outcome and outsmarting fate (aka. ArenaNet), not enjoying the present moment for what it is?Silee: You’re stupid, you know that? What counts is outsmarting fate and changing the outcome to your advantage. If a dragon threatens your laboratory and you can tell your cannon is too small, just make a bigger cannon I say!Me: Hacking then?Silee: You can hack at it all you want, a dragon’s got tough skin, too tough to beat it without my help!
So now we know what an Asura would
think, we can ignore it and get to the point: How good are Events at telling
stories? My belief is that they’re not very good at telling a story, but they
are a good way to make lore more accessible and friendly. As a potato would
say, the problem is that by taking down the wall (of text), you get a pile of
rubble; it’s still stone, but not quite a house. So enjoy what you have, and hope
for more.
History Lessons
Having proven that Guild Wars 2 will
be slightly unsatisfactory for all of you lore maniacs out there, can we hope
for the overarching story and the flavor dialogues to help us survive a while
longer?
The personal story is not about the
world; it is not about building a potato-cannon either, it’s about giving a
sense of reality to a story taking place in a virtual imaginary world. To do
this, one is bound to use the traditional “Initiation, Quest, Shit Happens,
Happy Ending” scenario. But this is where a RolePlayer gets frustrated: “I don’t
want to die!”
So the Personal story is nothing to
a RolePlayer but a way of getting crucial information about factions, the state
of the world, NPCs, if the Sylvari have Sex and if the Charr fart after eating
beans. Yes, it’s that simple: “I don’t give a shit about you, just lead me to
the cool bits of lore!”
And as far as flavor text, the
tidbits you find when talking to people around you, well that’s the place to
get the good stuff!
I’ll stay simple: learn your Tyrian
lore like a pro with the Wooden Potatoes and you will discover how amazing each
piece of dialogue can be. Just do it.
Conclusion:
Conclusion:
Guild Wars 2 is not as good at
giving out the most complex and obscure bits of lore as its predecessor, but it
does a fair job at getting the common player interested into what it offers -
up to a certain point.
And if you didn’t understand half of
what I just wrote about, well Silee must be right about you then: you’re an
idiot compared to his far-superior mind.
PS : Thanks to Illeander for Silee's portrait !
PS : Thanks to Illeander for Silee's portrait !
Rant #I : Deep Down
Monday, May 21, 2012
Hello there reader,
This is a first Dusky Rambling, the idea is that I pick a theme, pop out my phone in the bus or the train and start writing anything that comes to mind. Though I will not only be talking about RolePlaying, I'll try to find the problems and possibilities my subject sets for RPing.
Get ready, hold on to your dentures and put your hands in front of your children's eyes, it's about to get messy !
Call me "Bubbles"
Now I am probably the only one in this case, but have many of you spent
more than a few minutes underwater in the lands of Tyria ? Oh, Yah !
That reminds me... I spent over an hour happily swimming about... It's
like I forgot to breathe !Calm down, I'm not stupid, I saw the inventory slot and the little "Hey Look Listen" style pop-up that says "Oh god, you're entering water... You might get a cold !" - lucky my mother didn't design the UI. But I just can't accept it : a world where science is at a cross between the industrial age and the year 2042 (when we'll be capable of making artificial gills), but with everything in the Middle-Ages !? I'm fine with a techno-magical heroic-fantasy world (who didn't love Arcanum ?), but this is about a nanometer away from having big blue remote-controlled space-monkeys invade Tyria to suck Thundershrimp out of the sea with tractor-beams !
Now I know this is one of those "it's just like that" kind of things where people pour molten iron down their ear-canals because we're just too much in love with the game to want to criticize it. But I have a way of convincing any good RolePlayer that they would have done better to let us drink 6-packs of gillyweed juice before diving than instantaneously attaching a futuristic looking gas mask to our sweet customizable faces :
Now RPing is all about getting the right balance between a fantasy world, personality and staying plausible ; you can't Yell at someone for trying to turn you into a frog, because there is magic, but that doesn't mean you can conjure up a cloud and fly it off to another planet. So Yes, "real" physics are applicable to Tyria, with a few exceptions. But the physics of fluids do apply, don't they ?
So why is it that I had whole conversations with dull-minded repressed blowfish - aka. Quaggan ? Yep' they justified the breathing... But they forgot it turned us into TELEPATHS too !
(Note to people who are bad in physics : you can't speak underwater due to the fact that our vocal cords are adapted to the properties of specific gases.)
A "Friendly" AbodeNow that we have discovered our new-found telepathic abilities - which totally justify using /w and /g for IC chat ! - We get to the fishy business ->drum roll<- ; now Quaggan are a peaceful, cute, bunch of nice fish with a bad temper. This means they have a hard time defending themselves from the many murderous species out there... Talk about an easy way to create events !
The real problem though was that the Quaggan Refugees guarding the place I visited must have been something like 8 levels below the bad guys ! So the Mean-Stingy-Angry-Poisonous-Spinning-Gellyfish would attack me whenever I tried to telepathize to anyone on the village's outskirts ! That would be fine if they were weak, but those idiots had one attack where they charge at you spinning, if they got to me, I would die in half a second ! Unless I dodged the attack, I died.
This gets really problematic when the fact that enemies are in every direction (all 6 of them in a 3D environment) attracts a new mob whenever you doge the previous one !
Big Conclusion
So my big conclusion is that between the huge consistency problems and the uneasy movement caused by strange gellyshark, underwater RolePlaying might be like trying to play video games on an Apple computer : stupid.
0 Reactions :
React