When I make a game, I'll make sure that there are no cisgender playable characters. I wonder how much that will piss people off?
Baldur's Gate EE: Siege of Dragonspear - Writing
- Thread starter Naldan
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I remember seeing Bioware talk a little bit about that. Writing costs, especially if it is something that a character would react strongly to so you can't just leave it as a hanging option for the PC. They actually have a word budget.MarsAtlas said:
I think the point was that there should be a diversity of responses to everthing, a good, a bad and a neutral. That's not really the way it's usually done, considering how many NPCs you run into, but that's what I got.MarsAtlas said:
Here's a better question; does your alignment change the dialogue and to what extend? Would an 'evil' character respond with "thanks for sharing your story with me"? This isn't just for this exchange, but exchanges in general.
What, you mean for the Baldurs Gate EE?
The glitchy, unplayable edition?
How do you release an expansion for that mess?
The glitchy, unplayable edition?
How do you release an expansion for that mess?
Yeah, gonna need to see an actual link to this, the closest thing I could find was screenshots from the game info page on r/kotakuinaction saying that it was a reference to Anita because Amita was fighting sexism in the golden path. Given that the consensus there was that the writer of FC 4 is apparently some kind of SJW, I seriously doubt he wrote Amita to be a reference to Anita. So as far as I can see, the writer of Farcry 4 said no such thing.Naldan said:
Which actually brings me back to the on-topic portion of this post.
The writing in this expansion is, in my opinion, blatantly inferior to BG2, conversations aren't as interesting, the plot is only passable and while I would have enjoyed it even back in the 90's, its not fit to be on the same level as BG2, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale, I would say just play Pillars of Eternity if you are looking for more BG2 style games with an enjoyable story.
Beyond that, some of the examples of "SJW" dialogue are just people looking for things to be offended by, the mansplaining thing is not mansplaining at all, its a perfectly acceptable conversation where an NPC doesn't want to deal with the PCs shit. A lot of it also isn't really social justice gone wild, its just mediocre writing making stuff that would have fit in just fine look worse than it is because its just not written well. homosexual and transexual characters would fit in just fine in the setting where a cursed belt can reverse your gender and no one even really comments on it or even acknowledges it in conversation.
That said, while it would be an average game and story by itself, I will fully admit that it is a noticeable step down from the quality of writing from the original BG2, and I'm one of those people that thinks the original BG2 story is a little overrated by CRPG gamers with nostalgia goggles. Save yourself the trouble and just pick up Pillars of Eternity, or Divinity: Original Sin if you want a game with a so-so story but at least has a slick CRPG combat system.
By making it glitchy and unplayable of course.BarryMcCociner said:
Not to mention declare yourself a Social Justice Warrior, announce your ambition to write many "social justice games", shoehorn virtue signaling lectures and juvenile "Gamergate is dum!" memes in the game, retcon characters while decrying the vile "sexism" of the classic originals, ban people who are complaining for "propagating a false narrative", beg for positive reviews and run crying to FemFreq and Jezebel with a suggested "Muh Horsemint!" headline to "signal boost".
Good show, Beamdog. Showing the major publishers how it's done teh Independent Way!
One has to wonder, if Feminist Frequency thinks players can't help but murder strippers for all them "rewards" in Hitman, what will they make of the consequence-free XP boost for killing the transgender vendor in this one?
Oh, right. Beamdog folks are BACKERS. So, an example of brave diversity then.
Oh well, one expansion I am going to ignore. As long as they don't corrupt the original game with their SJW stuff, no hard feelings.
What truly upsets me is idiots who jump on the identity politics bandwagon and expect a high five for their brave decision to profit from a franchise and fanbase they've publicly declared their contempt for. Beamdog is already playing with fire by having the nerve to call their repackaged mod pack an "Enhanced Edition", largely against the wishes of the community that dutifully preserved the viability of the series for over a decade with bugfixes and restored content.DementedSheep said:
Oh, but yikes! Some of the dialogue is criiiiiingey~ What's the genuinely ethical response here? Is it really, absolutely, crossing out someone else's work and re-writing this medieval romance fantasy world to have somehow benefited from the insights of Tumblr in between dealing with dragons and shit? Create a lifestyle product for people who are "ashamed" to be associated with those horrible, reactionary gamers, largely at the expense of the communities which made your product lucrative in the first places? So brave. Revolutionary!
The people who support this nonsense are giving the industry permission to continue to produce bland, mediocre trash under the cover of a shallow false consciousness that says its perfectly okay to define yourself by your consumption as long as the product ticks a few representational boxes. This is just the old Starbucks thing. "It's not what you're buying, it's what you're buying into", etc.
What ought to make you cringe isn't a twenty year old game with some questionable content mostly enjoyed by a tiny hardcore crowd that wants nothing to do with mass market games anyway, it's companies like Microsoft manufacturing a fake gamer culture that no one but marketing hacks thought needed to exist in the first place (Here's your GAMERtag! Why dont you crack open a GAMERfuel and use it to share your GAMERscore on your GAMERprofile with all your GAMERfriends) and a bunch of twits with no real background in activism or dissident politics giving a deeply cynical industry permission to curate that culture and guide it to a safer, more profitable mainstream sensibility which will basically never have any interest in revisiting games like Baldur's Gate in the first place (too hard!).
Well, this thread has taught me one thing - a great number of people seem to consider Beamdog's additions to the BG games as anything other than low-quality mods. This saddens me somewhat. People, it's not like Black Isle suddenly reformed with all the original crew and put this out. This is a small-time dev who managed to (clumsily and barely adequately) refit an old game for newer systems, and then got delusions of grandeur and started shoving their fanfiction into the game. Just ignore it...
From the arguments and descriptions I've seen of the game and its universe, those dialog options actually seem realistic in both the real world and the game world.
The NPC blurting out her life story to what appears to be total strangers(?) otoh, doesn't appear to be realistic in either the real world or the game world.
I see the argument being made "it's a world with magic and dragons, and people are complaining that the existence of a trans character isn't realistic" or something to that effect.
Agreed, it's a fantasy world with magic and pretty much anything can go. So a character - be they an NPC or the player's character - should be able to magically change their sex or gender and everyone else won't bat an eyelid because in the context of the game's reality, that's the norm.
So wrt any complaints about the dialog options not being realistic because they lack any conflict or negative reaction, sorry to say, but they read pretty realistic to me.
However, in response to a character talking about their past as if their story is a total anomaly in that world, as if they are unusual when it's a world with magic and such things are apparently possible... The lack of a response that indicates the character herself is not actually an anomaly, and it was a bit odd for her to say all that in the game's reality, is a touch unrealistic.
Idk about anyone else, but the thing that actually helps me get thoroughly immersed in a world is the behaviour of the people in that world and how they relate to what I know of and have experienced of human behaviour in this world.
So I've seen that people who are part of groups that aren't "the norm" in a particular setting in real life, don't tend to highlight the fact that they're different straight away if it can be helped. It can be unsafe to do so for some, for a start.
And when they are in a situation where they are accepted as part of "the norm" most don't feel the need to "other" themselves in that way unless it's relevant to the conversation (ref. Girl Gamers vs gamers who happen to be girls when relevant).
So a question here would be: is that character explaining her backstory taken completely out of context and it was actually realistic for that setting?
Or was it as has been presented and she just talks about her totally normal past as if it's not the norm, to complete strangers, unprompted?
Or somewhere in between?
----
People are getting hung up on what's realistic or not wrt this character and Minsc with the "ethics" line. That's a bit of a red herring tbh.
Things like this can break immersion because instead of the player getting totally lost in the story and the world itself, they're getting sucked in so far and then suddenly the writer or author is making their presence known.
Like, I got totally absorbed in the first two Kingkiller chronicles books, because the story was being told through the main character and not once did the author do anything to break that, even during the third person bits where it's more obvious narration is coming from an external source.
Then I read The Laundry Files series, which is also told from the main character's perspective, and every so often (more often as the series goes on), the main character breaks out of character and makes a comment totally out of context, like a potshot at the Daily Mail or its readers. And suddenly, as a reader it's obvious that the author has been reading over my shoulder the whole time, and is now nudging me and pointing out the immersion breaking quip, going "you see what I did there? Aren't I a good [political identity]?". And the character I've been relating to and empathising with quickly becomes little more than a Gary Stu.
That text from the game as it has been presented, coupled with what people like Amber Scott have said about the direction they wanted to take with the game, looks to me a lot like the same immersion break I get in The Laundry Files books.
The creators look to be putting their hand on the player's mouse to get them to pause a second, and are pointing to the screen going "look how enlightened we are! Look, looook! WE CAN HAZ COOKIEZ NAO?"
So in terms of the game's writing that has been presented, from an outsider's perspective (sorry OP!
), that's what the complaints about the writing and the quality of it seem to come down to...
The NPC blurting out her life story to what appears to be total strangers(?) otoh, doesn't appear to be realistic in either the real world or the game world.
I see the argument being made "it's a world with magic and dragons, and people are complaining that the existence of a trans character isn't realistic" or something to that effect.
Agreed, it's a fantasy world with magic and pretty much anything can go. So a character - be they an NPC or the player's character - should be able to magically change their sex or gender and everyone else won't bat an eyelid because in the context of the game's reality, that's the norm.
So wrt any complaints about the dialog options not being realistic because they lack any conflict or negative reaction, sorry to say, but they read pretty realistic to me.
However, in response to a character talking about their past as if their story is a total anomaly in that world, as if they are unusual when it's a world with magic and such things are apparently possible... The lack of a response that indicates the character herself is not actually an anomaly, and it was a bit odd for her to say all that in the game's reality, is a touch unrealistic.
Idk about anyone else, but the thing that actually helps me get thoroughly immersed in a world is the behaviour of the people in that world and how they relate to what I know of and have experienced of human behaviour in this world.
So I've seen that people who are part of groups that aren't "the norm" in a particular setting in real life, don't tend to highlight the fact that they're different straight away if it can be helped. It can be unsafe to do so for some, for a start.
And when they are in a situation where they are accepted as part of "the norm" most don't feel the need to "other" themselves in that way unless it's relevant to the conversation (ref. Girl Gamers vs gamers who happen to be girls when relevant).
So a question here would be: is that character explaining her backstory taken completely out of context and it was actually realistic for that setting?
Or was it as has been presented and she just talks about her totally normal past as if it's not the norm, to complete strangers, unprompted?
Or somewhere in between?
----
People are getting hung up on what's realistic or not wrt this character and Minsc with the "ethics" line. That's a bit of a red herring tbh.
Things like this can break immersion because instead of the player getting totally lost in the story and the world itself, they're getting sucked in so far and then suddenly the writer or author is making their presence known.
Like, I got totally absorbed in the first two Kingkiller chronicles books, because the story was being told through the main character and not once did the author do anything to break that, even during the third person bits where it's more obvious narration is coming from an external source.
Then I read The Laundry Files series, which is also told from the main character's perspective, and every so often (more often as the series goes on), the main character breaks out of character and makes a comment totally out of context, like a potshot at the Daily Mail or its readers. And suddenly, as a reader it's obvious that the author has been reading over my shoulder the whole time, and is now nudging me and pointing out the immersion breaking quip, going "you see what I did there? Aren't I a good [political identity]?". And the character I've been relating to and empathising with quickly becomes little more than a Gary Stu.
That text from the game as it has been presented, coupled with what people like Amber Scott have said about the direction they wanted to take with the game, looks to me a lot like the same immersion break I get in The Laundry Files books.
The creators look to be putting their hand on the player's mouse to get them to pause a second, and are pointing to the screen going "look how enlightened we are! Look, looook! WE CAN HAZ COOKIEZ NAO?"
So in terms of the game's writing that has been presented, from an outsider's perspective (sorry OP!
), that's what the complaints about the writing and the quality of it seem to come down to...
The main writer for Siege of Dragonspear has a history of exactly what you said (preachy, out of place postmodern tone). She's done quite a bit of writing for Paizo in the past, though she only has cover credit for one module, the part of the Worldwound Incursion Adventure Path where effort is put to laying out that one character is a M2F trans lesbian despite that being wildly unlikely to actually come up in the course of running the content.aspotlessdomain said:
She's not quite "Gen Zed" levels of cringe-worthy, but she actively tries to be.
It's also worth noting that as ridiculously high magic as Forgotten Realms is, there's really no excuse to be "trans" in a meaningful way if you are at least skilled labor. There's literally magic to fix that, and if you do some math a skilled laborer could afford to have it done if (s)he was careful with their money for about a year, a bit more if they need significant travel to find someone to take care of it.
It's not like real life, in AD&D 2nd "transitioning" is literally a wave of the wand or putting on a "cursed" belt and no one is the wiser. That would seem to remove the need for a "trans" identity, since the ability to transition is so complete and so quick and in a high magic setting like the Forgotten Realms so available.
Heck, there was one of the gender swapping belts in the original BG, and the trans NPC doesn't react to it in any way.
This has nothing to do with the topic, but I chuckled at the words "transgender vendor". Sounds like a name for some bizarre androgynous Batman villain who takes over Gotham via dominating the black market or something.StatusNil said:
OT: Yeah, I heard about this. At least I can give the writer props for being totally up front about pushing their ideology and world view, and not hiding behind condescending buzzwords or accusations of oppression. Anyhoo, I don't really have a dog in the fight. Old school RPGs like Baldur's Gate have never been my thing. And after all, this is just an optional (and apparently rather shitty) expansion which can be thoroughly ignored. Nothing to see here.
That depends largely on two things:Objectable said:
1. Are you making your own game, or are you co-opting an existing well loved franchise to inject that into?
2. Are you a decent writer, or is it going to be all preachy and cringeworthy "I'm trans, see how trans I am? Aren't I special snowflake? It's all about ethics in social justice virtue signalling!"
Hint: The first answer is the one people will complain less about, the second in both cases is what Amber Scott did with the new BG expansion..
@DementedSheep - "Saying it's "interesting" is more neutral. You can put whatever tone you want into that without them having to write a whole bunch more dialogue."
In terms of English lang at least, it's the other way around in this example.
"An interesting past" as opposed to say, "what an interesting past" or "you have an interesting past", and the lack of exclamation, does express neutrality or even indifference to what had just been said, but from the player perspective the possible tones of that line are limited without knowing the options that follow.
Following that up with what appears to be a demand to change the topic makes the whole thing lean towards disinterest e.g. "Interesting. So how about this weather huh?"
Although, if the "something else" that must be asked actually relates to the "interesting past" then the player has come across unnecessarily flip in the first part, and the whole option itself is actually not neutral in the slightest, it would be expressing a level of enthusiasm in finding out more about the NPC.
Whereas: "thank you for sharing your story with me" is simply a really polite response that the player can interpret how they like depending now genuinely thankful they feel that an NPC has just told them their history. The player can put as much enthusiasm or disinterest into that sentence as they feel suits the conversation and their feelings about the conversation.
"Thanks" and "thank you" are used to express genuine gratitude, but also used to avoid the appearance of being rude, while not actually feeling gratitude.
Following "Thank you..." up with what again appears to be a change in subject, but one that is less demanding and is more polite than "now I must ask you something else", this first option - without knowing what the next set of options and questions would be - is the more neutral of the two in the sense that the player is free to interpret it how they like.
In terms of English lang at least, it's the other way around in this example.
"An interesting past" as opposed to say, "what an interesting past" or "you have an interesting past", and the lack of exclamation, does express neutrality or even indifference to what had just been said, but from the player perspective the possible tones of that line are limited without knowing the options that follow.
Following that up with what appears to be a demand to change the topic makes the whole thing lean towards disinterest e.g. "Interesting. So how about this weather huh?"
Although, if the "something else" that must be asked actually relates to the "interesting past" then the player has come across unnecessarily flip in the first part, and the whole option itself is actually not neutral in the slightest, it would be expressing a level of enthusiasm in finding out more about the NPC.
Whereas: "thank you for sharing your story with me" is simply a really polite response that the player can interpret how they like depending now genuinely thankful they feel that an NPC has just told them their history. The player can put as much enthusiasm or disinterest into that sentence as they feel suits the conversation and their feelings about the conversation.
"Thanks" and "thank you" are used to express genuine gratitude, but also used to avoid the appearance of being rude, while not actually feeling gratitude.
Following "Thank you..." up with what again appears to be a change in subject, but one that is less demanding and is more polite than "now I must ask you something else", this first option - without knowing what the next set of options and questions would be - is the more neutral of the two in the sense that the player is free to interpret it how they like.
In regards to the transgender thing, I dont think Baldur's Gate has any spells/abilities based on gender, but screwing with those is where I would draw the line. If you have a male character who wants to live their life as a female, that's fine. My character might even be supportive of that. But if some siren/nereid/etc. uses an ability that affects all the men, that character better damn well make a saving trow. Otherwise we cross from social stance to absolute lunacy.
Yeah, funny how people suddenly get upset at writing that isn't stealer (again! so fucking unusual) when it was politics they don't like. You completely side stepped the fact that giving you the option to debate with a very optional minor NPC about their past isn't the norm in BG anyway so really the only thing you are complaining about with this is the inclusion of a transgender NPC. Character pieces and NPCs telling me about the unusual trials of their life in between killing dragons and shit? in MY BG? the horror.aspotlessdomain said:
Oh good, you're pulling the "if you like characters like these you're not a REAL gamer" card. Fun! I'm an old fan of BG and I'm not getting in a twist about this. I probably won't buy it for number of reasons (having a transgender NPC that I can't be an asshole to is not one of them) but that's it.