Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[Mongrel]

We're even having pizza tonight, too. ( ._.)

[Esperath]

sup

[Yoji]

Yay! I saved Kharak! Not really, kinda sorta. The Khad'Sajuuk was right in his doomsday prophecy, if only in a broken clock kind of way.

...wow, that was a wimpy ending. I think we spent more time watching Jacob's crappy webcam videos.

Still, yay for Homeworld. I should replay it on easy difficulty with a decent computer. Then I can actually enjoy the spectacle and forget I'm garbage at RTS games.

[Yoji]

I just realized, the Light Attack Vehicle is kind of amazing compared to any ground combat vehicle 21st-century Earth has to offer.



The tires alone are taller than a man, it sits several feet off the ground, and it's overall bigger than a medium/heavy-duty truck. The guns on top seem about the same caliber as Terran tank guns, but fire rapidly and can even take on aircraft. Given the material science advances made possible by the discovery of Kharak's orbital debris ring, it's a safe bet the thing is armored as hell. All-in-all, these things would mop the floor with any main battle tank on Earth.

But in the face of other Kharakid weapon systems, they die in droves.

On second thought, let's not go to Kharak. 'tis a terrifying place.

[Brantly B.]

In trying to use the "you will never play any if these, you basically don't play anything any more" argument to not drop money on every Humble Bundle that I see and it is not working.

[François]

Might as well crank up the charity slider then. :D

[Brantly B.]

That's... actually not a bad point. Thanks!

[Brantly B.]

Good thing too because IT KEEPS HAPPENING

[Mongrel]

There's a quest in Skyrim where you go to help a reasonable guy out with a reasonable request (devil-hunting warrior monk investigating haunted/cultist house... and I was already helping that guy's faction anyway) and then if you do, then an evil god locks you in a house and the only way out is to beat a more-or-less innocent old priest of a different god to death repeatedly. Like the evil god will resurrect the old priest over and over so you can continually beat him to death until he's satisfied (multiple beatings and priest-lives are required). There's no other way out, no other options, no choices at all, just you getting suckered into repeatedly beating an old man to death with satan's rusty spiky mace of evil. You don't even get options between several different awful choices, you just get railroaded to the beating.

My response to that was to just go download a mod that lets you tell Satan to fuck off so he curses you pretty bad instead and then you have to go do stuff to get the curse lifted. Which is actually a reasonable outcome! Fuck your bullshit Kobayshi Maru!

Anyway, what I'm wondering is, Jesus Christ, who in the fuck at Bethesda wrote that quest? Are they under police surveillance? Cause they probably should be.

[Smiler]

Bethesda isn't very good at writing or making quests.

[Mongrel]

Sure, but "incompetent plotting" and "legitimately worrying levels of creepy sadism" are not quite the same levels of bad.

[beatbandito]

Have you seen the mod scene? That's playing to the base.

[Sharkey]

Holy shit, I remember that one. It's right up there with "We demand that you go kill that repentant dragon who helped us save the world ten minutes ago." Nah. How about I see how many arrows I can put in your head before I get bored with it? At least that one gave you the option to just ignore the blades for the rest of the game and didn't, you know, lock you in the fucking room until you killed dragon Mister Rogers with a nail bat.

[Mongrel]

Have you seen the mod scene? That's playing to the base.

My current Skyrim playthrough has over 150 mods installed at the moment, so just maybe yeah.

Vanilla Skyrim would be an okay game but honestly wouldn't be worth the time investment. Mods are what make it really fun.

Also Inigo might just be the greatest mod I've ever played with for any game as well as being possibly one of the greatest characters ever made for any vidja game I've played in the past two decades. He's got over 7000 lines of spoken dialogue (!) and they're pretty much all great (!!!).

[Mongrel]

Holy shit, I remember that one. It's right up there with "We demand that you go kill that repentant dragon who helped us save the world ten minutes ago." Nah. How about I see how many arrows I can put in your head before I get bored with it? At least that one gave you the option to just ignore the blades for the rest of the game and didn't, you know, lock you in the fucking room until you killed dragon Mister Rogers with a nail bat.

I was gonna ignore the Blades when it came to that point, yeah (haven't advanced the main quest much... hunting vampires at the moment), but there's a mod that let's you tell the Blades to go pound sand about Friendly Dragon without you never being allowed to see them again (I don't mind mods like that because it's legit dumb that you can't tell them off and makes no sense in the context of the story).

Like I said, fuck your Kobayashi Maru, Bethesda - I'll take the Captain Kirk school of problem solving all the way (punch it until it goes away, or blatantly cheat, or sometimes both).

[Thad]

Red Dead Redemption's quests involve no element of choice whatsoever; you follow the script or you fail.

You don't bring the man who's running away back to the slavering cannibal who's asked you to find him? Quest fail. You punch the abusive boyfriend? Quest fail. (Where "success" is defined as following a series of events that end in him killing his girlfriend and you killing him.)

[Sharkey]

Yeah, the missions and plot are completely on rails, which stands out a bit next to the complete freedom to just do whateverthefuck the entire rest of the time. It makes for some incongruity when you hog tie nuns and leave them on railroad tracks, but as soon as you approach a capital letter on the map and you're back to being loner with a past trying to do the right thing and redeem himself for past misdeeds. Sure, I'd love to help you herd some cattle, Miss Bonnie, gimme a second to wash off the blood of all those dogs and ranch hands I shot just outside your front door. Well, gracious, Mister Marston. You sure are a peculiar man, but you've got a good heart.

[Mongrel]

Rock Star Games is also not exactly known for spectacular game writing either. :/

[Büge]

There's a quest in Skyrim where you go to help a reasonable guy out with a reasonable request (devil-hunting warrior monk investigating haunted/cultist house... and I was already helping that guy's faction anyway) and then if you do, then an evil god locks you in a house and the only way out is to beat a more-or-less innocent old priest of a different god to death repeatedly. Like the evil god will resurrect the old priest over and over so you can continually beat him to death until he's satisfied (multiple beatings and priest-lives are required). There's no other way out, no other options, no choices at all, just you getting suckered into repeatedly beating an old man to death with satan's rusty spiky mace of evil. You don't even get options between several different awful choices, you just get railroaded to the beating.

My response to that was to just go download a mod that lets you tell Satan to fuck off so he curses you pretty bad instead and then you have to go do stuff to get the curse lifted. Which is actually a reasonable outcome! Fuck your bullshit Kobayshi Maru!

Sounds like a Molag Bal quest. In Oblivion, he wants you to force a paladin to break his vow of non-violence, and does this by having you attack the paladin while he's praying at his dead wife's grave so that the paladin will beat you to death with a cursed mace.

Then there was the one where the reigning champion of the Arena asked you to find proof that he's got noble parentage. If you do, you learn that his father was a vampire from an old journal. If you tell him, he goes into a depressive state... and then, when you rise up in the ranks to challenge him, he'll stand there quietly while you murder him. And it does count as murder, with a Dark Brotherhood quest trigger and everything.

Basically, a lot of quests in these games involve making someone die.

[Mongrel]

Oh yeah, it's a Molog Bal quest alright. But "Let's make the player do a quest for the devil-god of rape and domination!" as a justification still ignores the fact that these are all written by some Bethesda staffer for a game normal people have to play.

Suckering players into a Kobayashi Maru might be a legitimate storytelling tool - if there were actually meaningful choices you could make between equally bad outcomes. Instead the game removes all player agency at all and forces you into playing out someone else's snuff fantasy. That's both awful and lazy.