nasteypenguin said:
deadish said:
Why does she "doesn't know what she is talking about"? You are saying she doesn't know her own preferences?
She hated the gameplay, her personal solution is to just skip over it. Problem?
My problem is not with her idea but the ideology that idea represents. If she was passionate for this thing she was helping to create her goal would be to fix it, not avoid it. It shows her disregard for the medium as a whole that she would choose to avoid a problem she sees in something, instead of having the passion to want to change it. Her personal opinion is not at fault, but she is in the position to do more harm than good with her lack of enthusiasm.
She doesn't want to avoid it, she wants an alternative to shooting.
It's shocking that, given the history of games, one thinks that the absence of shooting/murder/combat is somehow the absence of gameplay. The earliest of games were text based adventures and one of the most popular genres of the Late 80's and early 90's were Point and Click Adventures, which seldom, if at all, focused on action. Peoples obsessions now with blood drenched combat is what is damaging the industry, not some writers innocuous stance on what MANY consider boring ass action segments in games.
What's killing the industry is Tedium and Sterility. A dissenting voice is better then conforming to the status quo that is quite literally suffocating the industry and any potential growth.
Suppose ken Levine had the balls not to turn Infinite into a stock shooter just to prop up a solid narrative (after all, the narrative was practically the primary focus in all of the pre-marketing reveals). Would he be considered a negative influence on game design? NO, he would be applauded for taking an initiative and actually putting his money where his mouth is. Elizabeth was the focus of Infinite? So why do we have to wait for the 2nd half of DLC to be put into her shoes? Because Elizabeth is WRITTEN not to be violent or use guns.
Imagine if the Designers of the Last of Us could make as engaging an interactive adventure without the highly regular brutally violent segments. Not even completely remove the violence, but emphasise scarcity with dwindling populations... would that have damaged what makes The Last of Us good? NO!
Her position is pretty fucking minimal in terms of influence. She writes characters and a few quests and 1 or 2 DLC. The reason why she got publicity was, what a surprise, because people LIKED her characters.
She is NOT Project Lead.
She is NOT a game designer.
She is NOT a programmer.
She has NO input on game assets.
She is JUST a writer in a industry that still seriously undervalues its writers. She wasn't even a lead writer.
Her "ideology" is exactly what we need. We don't need more of the same but with minor deviations or more reasoned excuses for violence. We NEED things to be COMPLETELY different. If you have issues with annual shooters appealing to the lowest common denominator then you SHOULD be completely on her side on this sentiment, even without appreciating her work as a writer.
ZiggyE said:
Neat. Maybe post-EA Bioware will put out some games worth playing now.
Christ people, where the fuck are you getting your information. What has she done? I'll tell you:
*She wrote most of the Dwarven characters in Orzammar. DA:O
*The Anvil of the Void quest line, which was a pretty fucking good quest, with the exception of an awfully tedious dungeon crawl (which was the fault of level designers not writers). DA:O
*She wrote Anders, Bethany, Leandra, Elthina, Cullen and Sebastian. DA2
*She wrote most of the "Legacy" DLC for DA2
*She wrote a few characters and questlines in TOR.
So enlighten me as to how her absence will change anything that has gone wrong with Bioware since the merger, since she had very little to with any of the projects and nothing to do with the most egregious controversies.