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googoogjoob

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Everything posted by googoogjoob

  1. I don't think game design's evolution is teleological; rather, I think it is like a drunk random-walking away from a lamppost (where the lamppost is bad game design). Over time, I think game design has gradually gotten better overall in that designers have a greater knowledge of what does and doesn't work, based on the experience of the past. Designers today have much more knowledge about what not to do than someone working in the 1980s. Control schemes are a good example of this: older console games (especially action games) often have awkward control schemes which force you to contort your hands painfully, whereas now, generally anyway, they're relatively standardized by genre into workable configurations. In areas where modern games are worse than their predecessors, it's usually because of perennial issues and design fads. Writing is a perennial issue: I don't think video game writers working today are really any better than those who worked in the medium 20-30 years ago. Many are inept non-authors who rustle up plots and dialogue on the level of bad 40s pulp fiction. The ones who have more talent are usually people who've worked in other media- film/TV or literature- and don't really know how to properly communicate a story using the medium of video games. Everyone in the mainstream games industry seems to want to make games more "cinematic", and awkwardly import techniques from film, which really do not work in the medium of games, and at best result in games that alternate gameplay with overlong windy cutscenes. Even the supposedly best-written video games released today tend to be clumsy, emotionally manipulative, and unimaginative. Conversely, video game music has never really been bad; at worst it's forgettable wallpaper, at best it's memorable and adds substantially to the game. Procedural generation/randomization is a design fad. It feels like half the games coming out on steam use randomized or procedurally generated level designs, which superficially creates "endless replay value", but mainly just creates dull, forgettable, lifeless level designs. It may save on design effort for the developer, and it might artificially inflate the theoretical amount of "content" in a game, but the end result isn't usually very interesting. There are a lot of things that are now common in video games that will eventually be considered horrible, I'm sure. But on the whole, I still feel that- at least partially because as an art medium, video games are inextricably intertwined with their mechanical functioning, even more so than film- game design will improve over time, on the whole. This kinda turned into a design philosophy essay, but I didn't really intend it to. Oh well.
  2. I don't necessarily mean everything about CRPGs made at that time were bad... I just mean that there are certain features which developers tend to no longer use because they're not very fun (mazes), are frustrating for the user (excessive inventory juggling), or never really had much point in the first place (hunger/thirst systems, at least in non-survival-oriented RPGs). Even the best games of the era, while still good, usually fall prey to what would today be considered atrocious design, and I'm not sure most players enjoyed these things even at the time: they were just included in games because that was part of the genre, and inertia is powerful. Spiderweb games show a pretty clear willingness to adapt and change with the times, while still evoking that prior era of CRPGs. Exile I (or even Avernum 1) compared to A:EFtP is like night and day: the reworking of the inventory system, the addition of fast travel, the rewriting and additions that try to make the plot more than just an excuse for a dungeon crawl, the addition of combat skills which make melee combat more than just extended blow-trading, the (almost total) deprecation of light sources... and so on. I don't mean that Exile I is a bad game per se, but a good number of its features and mechanics aren't terrifically exciting, and cutting them reduces the amount of busywork/technical management burden on the player, without really making the game overall less compelling or fun. I'm sure there are people who miss some or all of these things, or don't like some of the additions, but Jeff Vogel does not appear to be one of them. (I kinda have to admire his almost hard-hearted lack of nostalgia for his own games, and willingness to rework them, sometimes brutally, to be more fun: A:EFtP isn't just "good for a remake of a 1990s RPG", it's good period.)
  3. Things I have read recently: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman: a very good biography, which won the Pulitzer... there's not a lot to be said about it. It's an excellent biography. Chronicles of the First Crusade (ed. Christopher Tyerman) and Chronicles of the Crusades (Villehardouin + Joinville): reread these, actually. Primary sources on Crusades Nos 1, 4, and 7/8. The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer: a biography of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, the insane protofascist who somehow ended up running Mongolia briefly in the early 20s. A good book, despite some embarrassing errors (I think he refers to the Estonians as Slavs? which is not right.) Life's Lottery by Kim Newman: a "literary" (or at least, non-child-oriented) gamebook/choose your own adventure novel. It is a hell of a thing, and also I'm sure I've missed a bunch of it. The Arabian Nights: a cheapo "Barnes and Noble Classics" reprint of a public domain translation of the core stories + Aladdin and Ali Baba from the Victorian era. Inevitably bowdlerized, but there are some very nice engraved illustrations. My Ears are Bent by Joseph Mitchell: a compilation of the newspaper reporting Mitchell did in the 1930s before he moved to the New Yorker and became the greatest American nonfiction writer of the 20th century, and probably ever. Good, but only really of interest if you want to see where he came from pre-New Yorker. The Northern Crusades by Eric Christiansen: an underwhelming, short, over-broad survey of the Northern Crusades. Much too light on detail about the personalities involved, on details of major battles involved, on details of the diplomatic wrangling with Poland et al... unfortunately this is, as far as I can tell, the only book-length English work on the subject. From the late 70s, revised in 2000 I think? I looked at the bibliography and one of the first sources cited (on Baltic paganism) is by Gimbutas, which makes me profoundly leery. Presently reading: Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic by John French: the autobiography of Captain Beefheart's most-usual drummer/guitarist/arranger. Very interesting in places (insights on band dynamics and personalities, interviews with rarely-interviewed band members, the track-by-track commentary on every album in the back of the book), but inevitably patchy (not a lot going on when he's not actually in the band). The story of one man's relationship with Captain Beefheart, rather than the story of the Captain's career. Over 850 pages of fairly small print: a doorstopper. (Also has some very groan-inducing stuff... I skimmed towards the end a bit and there's a profoundly embarrassing bit where the author and his wife (now Evangelical/Charismatic Christians) undergo a horrible exorcism/faith healing thing where he's LIBERATED FROM THE SPIRIT OF WITCHCRAFT or something.) (Also the author met his wife when he was like 18 and she was like 12/13? and he describes her as beautiful and "jailbait" then... I mean, nothing against them? I'm glad they're happy together after so long. But also: that's super-creepy, dude. Don't lust for kids like that, even if it's for your wife, in retrospect.) I Am Legend by Richard Matheson: the vampire/zombie novel all modern works of vampire/zombie fiction rip off either directly (Night of the Living Dead took a lot from the first film adaption of the novel) or indirectly (the million NOTLD clones). (eg: any work that has zombie-ism or vampirism caused by a contagion as opposed to magic is lifting from this novel.) Terse and snappy like the best 50s pulp sci-fi, it is amazing how badly the Will Smith film botches everything about it. To read: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccacio: the Penguin Classics edition, which features over 150 pages of introduction where the translator explains his methods and decisions and the themes of the novel and stuff, I guess. Very exciting. Some book about the history of gold... it's one of those books on a semi-topical subject (the popularity of gold following the 08 economic crash) by a journalist: one of those books that has suspiciously wide margins, and 1.5x spacing, and is still only about 200 pages long, and which really probably should have been a series of magazine articles in Smithsonian or NatGeo or something, and where you KNOW half the book is gonna be interviews with people interspersed with bits of cursory research into the history on the subject. But hey, it was on clearance for $2 at Half Price Books, and I had a gift card from Christmas. Probably gonna reread Dracula, because it's so good, and because I got a new copy, because my old copy was evidently based on a horrible OCR or the text, replete with horrible typos. Typos, in a public domain book that came out over 100 years ago. At least nick the Project Gutenberg text, guys, it's not that hard. The "new" copy of Dracula I got is a BANTAM CLASSICS edition, probably from the 80s (the introduction is copyright 1981), but I suspect this is one of those lines of public domain books that the publisher never lets go out of print, so realistically it could've been printed any time between 81 and about 2000 or so. There is an ad on the back endpaper of the book from the Ad Council. It warns that unless we do something, the literacy rate of the USA could be down to 30% by the year 2000. God forbid.
  4. This is true, but I mean modern CRPG-standard, basically. The same holds for Eschalon's mapping system: in "old-school" CRPGs automapping was an exception rather than a rule, but to play a CRPG made in the past 15 years or so which doesn't have a tolerable automap system is... well, intolerable. Eschalon adds insult to injury in both cases by forcing the player to spend precious, precious skill points to get their hit-rate and automap to reasonable levels. Also, I kinda glossed over exactly how Eschalon's combat system works a little cause I didn't feel like explaining it in-depth in that post, and I felt like what I said communicated what I meant reasonably well. In Eschalon, the default hit-rate is 50%, but, confusingly, it isn't substantially effected by your skill with the weapon you're currently using, or WHICH weapon you're using, or even by your Dexterity stat. The one stat that affects hit-rate the most is "Concentration", and unless you're pumping skill points into Concentration every single level, you will very rapidly encounter enemies who are fast enough (or at least dodgy enough) to bring your hit-rate down to 25% or less. Even if you're pumping Concentration, you'll still encounter enemies who can bring your hit-rate down pretty low, and combat always seems to degenerate into a long series of misses punctuated by lucky hits. Further, IIRC, Concentration doesn't affect your own dodge rate against enemies, and since you're pumping all your points into it you won't have much chance to spend points on other skills like Strength or Dexterity; thus, the only really viable build in my experience is a big bumbling tank that can slowly chip away at the enemy's HP, unless you want every battle to be wildly luck-based. (In the first game, actually, another viable build is what I guess you'd call "assassin": the game has an extremely broken stealth system that you can abuse extensively. You can hit an enemy- even the final boss- then instantly disappear into half-shadow, without said enemy having any idea where you are, and not even the AI to try to bump into you.) Anyway, I guess you could say Eschalon tries to accurately hark back to the late 80s/early 90s of CRPG design... but you could say, perhaps equally validly, that CRPGs are not made like that any longer for a reason.
  5. Uh. Hm. Strom Thurmond split to form the Dixiecrat party in 1948, 16 years before the Civil Rights Act. After the 48 election, he returned to the Democratic party until leaving in 64 to join the Republicans, a few months after the Civil Rights Act was passed. Both parties had a significant number of racist members at the time, but the Democratic Party had a firm hold on the extra-racist "Solid South" ever since the Civil War. Thurmond left the party because, as the Civil Rights Act (and then the Voting Rights Act) were championed by LBJ (the de facto party leader), and much of the party leadership favored more civil rights legislation. This wasn't a sudden thing, but part of an ongoing realignment in the parties going back to the 50s, with the previously-solid South drifting away from the New Deal coalition over racial issues. They didn't go Republican because the Republicans were especially more racist, but because they were no longer able to prevent the Democrats from moving towards civil rights. The end of the New Deal coalition was cemented by Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968. Contrarily, Blacks, who had supported the Republican party, generally, since the time of Lincoln, were drifting towards the Democratic party. I don't think it's quite fair to blame either party (as opposed to individuals) for opposing the Civil Rights Act at the time, but the people who opposed it who weren't already in the GOP generally joined the GOP after it had passed, and the GOP proved itself perfectly willing to accommodate racists if it helped them and hurt the Democrats. In general too, the American political parties are both so old that I think it's unfair to criticize either party as a body for its positions outside the current party system: they're both so entrenched that political realignments tend to happen inside the two-party system, rather than via the formation of new parties.
  6. The Amish generally don't vote because, since the President is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, they feel it would contradict their pacifism and conscientious objection, and make them complicit in war. I don't necessarily agree with their choice but I can see and respect the logic behind it. I think it's disappointing that Obama proved to be an outlier in terms of voter turnout rather than the sign of a trend towards greater, broader participation.
  7. This actually isn't really the case. “A major study from Gallup’s Jonathan Rothwell confirmed this. Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people. Trump supporters were less likely to be unemployed or to have dropped out of the labor force. Areas with more manufacturing, or higher exposure to imports from China, were less likely to think favorably of Trump.” “Even in the general election, while support for Trump is correlated most strongly with party ID, the second biggest factor, per the analysis of Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner, was racial resentment. Economic pessimism and income level were statistically insignificant.” Trump didn't win because he appealed to the disaffected poor- Clinton actually won more votes than Trump among the poor. He won because he appealed to the racial fears of the white majority that fears losing its majority. There are real economic concerns. And Clinton wasn't tremendously better on them than Trump. They just aren't what decided this election. The problem, I think, is that it's very easy to use economic problems in combination with, or as a smokescreen for racial fears and insecurities: "the Mexicans are taking our jobs!" "China is taking all our manufacturing!" "Welfare queens!"
  8. This is true, but what I mean is that the concerns of that war are so remote from today's concerns (in our postimperial world) that it's difficult to relate to them immediately: if a Bourbon personal union of France/Spain had happened, the consequences would've surely meant a lot to the people of the time, but in retrospect it's hard to say things would've been very different. The everyday lives of the average non-noble people of Europe wouldn't've appreciably changed, unlike they did during the Napoleonic Wars or World War II. Things would only have changed on a grand scale, in a system that is now essentially irrelevant. Same with Lynaeus, mostly: the Tawon ruled most of the continent once before, and there's not really any indication that they were particularly cruel or demanding overlords. They certainly didn't accomplish much in the way of eliminating local national identities. If they conquered much of the world again, what should that matter to the player? Why should it matter to the player which overlord the people of the Kva pay homage to- their king or the Tawon emperor- unless they have an anachronistic belief in the rightness of an order of nation-states? Essentially what I mean is that the stakes in the Avadon series are much too high: that is, on too high a scale. You never get any idea of what's at stake on a personal, immediate, sympathetic level, so the conflicts become cold and intellectual. In Avernum 2, it's clear that what's at stake is the Avernites' fundamental rights to dissent and creativity and individualism. If the Empire conquers them, they'll be lucky to survive as slaves, and even if they were given amnesty and allowed to return to the Empire, it'd be a return to the stifling conformist political order that ejected them in the first place. I think the Geneforge games (mainly the earlier ones) have a similar problem: you just don't get to know enough people to care about the issues on anything but the most abstracted level, like a philosophical thought experiment. Only with 4/5 do you really get a feel for the personalities behind the issues. In Avadon, the personalities behind the issues are essentially Redbeard and Dheless; Redbeard gets shallower rather than deeper over the course of the series, and you spend like ten minutes with Dheless and all he gives you is some vague national revanchist pride stuff. Maybe Redbeard's methods are justified; maybe Dheless's rebellion is justified; but we just don't get enough information to make this decision.
  9. America gets the president it deserves, I guess.
  10. I had this problem a lot with the games. It's like reading about something like the Seven Years' War or the War of the Spanish Succession: the issues at stake are so remote from my experience in the present, the alliances are so arbitrary, the causes so nakedly realpolitikal and self-interested that, while maybe interesting intellectually, I can't really bring myself to identify with either side, or to root for either, or even just to think one side is more "right" than the other. The Pact doesn't really have any ideals it stands for. It's just an entity desperate to preserve its imperial hegemony over the Farlands. Some of the constituent nations are maybe more admirable than others, but on the whole they're all in it out of self-interest. You aren't just fighting to defend the Pact nations, which would at least be sort of sympathetic; you're also fighting to restore the overbearing, nearly master-colony relationship between Pact and Farlands. Redbeard is a man with a powerful vision, but it's a very short-sighted vision incapable of inspiring. And then the ending straight up says that nothing you fought for mattered in the end, anyway: maybe you bought another few decades before the Pact tore itself apart for good, or maybe you made it happen a few decades sooner. Whatever. It's hard to care about the internal disputes of the Pact nations either... the Beraza Woods thing is like viewing the Alsace-Lorraine issue as an American: who cares? Why should I care whether the semifeudal mageocracy or the clannish, feud-ridden tribal collective gets this terrible forest?
  11. AVADON 4: you play as a young man/woman toiling at a dead-end job in an obscure corner of Lynaeus... then you get attacked by assassins seemingly at random! and find out you're one of Redbeard's children!!! Then it turns out that the bad guy... is Miranda's son/daughter who she mentioned in passing once!!! And you gotta travel the world seeking out Redbeard's other secret families, and your half-siblings!!! And team up with them to save the Pact again, or something.
  12. You meet those Svorgaldi settlers in Botan's sidequest... which isn't really the same, but was actually one of my favorite parts of the game because it showed a group of people with human concerns in a setting not stereotyped by their nationality. I was really disappointed by the lack of more development on Redbeard in 3. The entire series is essentially about him: Miranda's betrayal, the Farlands war, the spiralling internal disputes inside the Pact, are all kind of his fault, stemming from his black-and-white view of the world and lack of empathy. And yet, at the end of the series, it's hard to say you know more about the man than you did at the start. Part of the problem is that he's a profoundly static character: almost all of the time he's just slouching around in his current bunker and waiting for you to take the initiative. You don't get to see him interact with other characters enough- how would Redbeard treat a nominal equal or superior (eg, a council member) to their face? How does he cut the deals that lead to the deaths of innocent people in return for political favor? How does he keep going so intensely for so long? (And "magic" is a pretty unsatisfying response to this.) What does he do in his off hours? Where did he get the apparently unique magic he uses to stay strong and youthful? We never get to see any of this. We don't even actually see Redbeard interact directly with Miranda except briefly in 3- and the relationship between them is one of the main threads of the series. Also w/r/t the world getting exhausted: the super-linear nature of the Avadon games and the immediate series of tasks you're ordered to do means that you basically get railroaded through most of the areas of Lynaeus, and it's hard to get much more impression from them than a name, a biome, and an unusual local cultural quirk that the local elder/leader/commander can explain to you. Further, since you travel directly to flashpoint areas by portal, the world feels claustrophobic and small. (You don't use portals so much in 3 but the point holds true because the levels are spread in-universe hundreds of miles apart on the overworld map.) Each area is too homogeneous as well. There's supposed to be a temperate northern reach of the Kva, but we never see it- just the cactus-strangled desert hellscape of the south. The Tawon Empire is meant to have great marble cities filled with rich, cosmopolitan citizens- but all you see is a lot of swamp and some remote temples and a provincial village. It's a shame. Semi-related: I think part of the problem with Avadon's characterization, contrasted with Exile/Avernum's, is that everyone has to be part of a "faction". Nobody gets to have really unique desires other than your companions, and everyones' needs are framed by their faction... It's very genericizing. Exile/Avernum, on the other hand, has a world full of dissenters, rebels, oddballs, weirdos, etc, each of whom has their own angle. It makes for less macro-scale drama, obviously, but allows for more and more interesting micro-scale drama. In Exile/Avernum: That woman in the fort at the start of the first game wants to know if her sister is okay and where she is. The Nephil bartender guy whose name I also forget sometimes has issues with racism from humans. Blacksmith man has a nonfunctional copy of Demonslayer as a conversation piece, and dreams of one day seeing the real thing. In Avadon: Some shamaness woman wants you to fetch her some comfrey seeds, because she's a nature woman and of course she does. Other shamaness woman wants you to remove squatters from a magic stone circle... because of course she does. OTHER shamaness lady wants you to stop a local drake from upsetting the balance of the Green Refuge... because of course she does. I still like and enjoy the Avadon series... just a lot of the time it feels like a lower-budget Bioware RPG. (Sorry for the long aimless post but I gotta lotta thoughts to put down here.)
  13. Warning: this post is a bit long, and also obviously spoilery. A major problem with the Avadon games is that the world is very finite, and it's all basically sketched out in the first game- most of the codex entries are simply grandfathered into 2/3 from 1. By the end of game 2, you've already seen every major region of the world except Svorgald. You've already encountered all the exotic cultures of this world. You've already done great deeds all over. So in 3, you get what are very close to reruns of episodes from the earlier games: the waveringly loyal Khemerian village that must be dealt with (again). Delving into the Corruption to stop Miranda (again). Going into the Warborn lands to storm a big Titan fortress (again). (Though this time you don't get the option to betray your allies.) In each game you have to descend into the depths of the dungeons of Avadon (though for different reasons), and the essential layout doesn't change. The Eternal Prisoner is always there, and you can always free him, but he's always back again in the next game, with most of his dialogue copy-pasted but with the date changed. You always repeatedly encounter a recurring character whose motives are doubtful and who tries to get you to undermine the Pact (Tarkus, the Scout, Dheless/his crystal). The climax of each game is your choice whether to kill or remain loyal to Redbeard (but again, he's always back again anyway in 2/3). Maybe it'd've been better to have a larger world? Or to be more stingy with how much of it you see over the first two games? I don't know. Maybe it'd've been better to keep Miranda's betrayal back until the second game? Or to move the start of the war forward (as Jeff suggests he should've done in the manual)? There are so many ways this could've gone differently and I suppose it's pointless to speculate. Another major issue is the character writing. Jeff Vogel has always been a top-notch worldbuilder, and he's always been able to write memorable, funny characters, but he didn't start really trying to work at character development and character drama until Avernum 5/Geneforge 4. He's gotten better since then, but I think he's still not quite mature at it, and it's still a weakness. It's perfectly fine to have minor characters you only see briefly be memorable caricatures, but even the characters who get the most development- your companions- have a tendency to lapse into caricature. Maybe he spread his effort and skill too thin by trying to do 4-5 character arcs and character developments per game? I don't know. Redbeard and Miranda are the NPCs (besides your party) who receive the most development, and in the first game it really is pretty interesting to learn more about these people. But both gradually devolve into one-note caricatures: Miranda becomes a revenge-obsessed monster and Redbeard becomes, as he himself describes it, a force of nature, single-minded and paranoid and obsessed. Both of them could've made for fantastic tragic figures (Miranda ruined by her inability to put the Pact above her personal life; Redbeard ruined or near-ruined by his lack of empathy that drives the Farlands into a rebellion on his watch, that he is too late to stop). So many possibilities. In the end I think Avadon (as a work of narrative fiction) is good but not great (as a series of games it's obviously really good). It's like a pulpy high fantasy novel trilogy from the 70s or 80s. I think maybe after the next new Spiderweb game comes out, it might be seen retrospectively to be a transitional work, wedged between the high concept, high fantasy earlier Spiderweb games and whatever comes next. (At least, I hope it's a transitional work, rather than the mold any new games will follow. I'd still play the games even if they were all formulaic generic-fantasy romps, because I like the game rules, I like the writing, I like the creative settings, etc. But I'd much rather see Jeff advance and mature as an artist/writer as well as a programmer/designer, and do new and interesting things.)
  14. He doesn't advocate covering up your background, just things about it that might provide leverage to enemies. He openly admits that, for example, he used to paint as a hobby; he just stonewalls on any possible family(s) he might have or have had. The two mysterious portals in his tower certainly imply that he's hiding something though. I don't quite recall but he might mention which Pact state he's from in one of the games... IIRC Callan is from the Wyldrylm and Miranda is Kellem. (Incidentally, Miranda's shade lets slip that she has at least one child, who Redbeard never knew about. Sounds like fertile ground for fan theories to me.)
  15. Redbeard doesn't use soul jars if you fight him in 2, though. (Staying mum about fighting him in 3 cause maybe that's spoilers.) So, sadly, scotch that theory. The fighting Redbeard endings of 1/2 are obviously noncanon anyway. You DO find the potion stuff Redbeard uses to keep alive in both 2 and 3 in his tower, but you never figure out what it is. Also, Redbeard evidently simply doesn't remember his youth or young adulthood. He can't even remember whether he was involved in assassinating Keeper Telera. The second Dirk Gently book does the same thing, with the added feature that gods are created by belief: none exist before humans invent them. I think the necromancy thing is alright, and would be great... if it weren't so similar to the crystal souls. Maybe a better idea would've been to have the "gods" be essentially robots that just think they're dead sovereigns, rather than the sovereigns' actual ghosts imprisoned in a construct body. Oh well.
  16. (Bit of a digression here, but if these forums aren't for overanalyzing these games, what are they for?) As of Avadon 3, it apparently is not possible to step down as Keeper: in one ending, you (as Keeper) attempt to resign but are captured and restrained by your Hearts and forced to keep the job till you're murdered. It's been retconned that you can only leave the office in a body bag, which is very strange and conflicts with other information in the Codex. (For example, there were prior interregnums in the office of Keeper, and Redbeard was installed in the position by Hanvar's Council rather than by slaying his predecessor. He mentions in 1 I think that he can't even remember whether he was involved in slaying Telera, who held the office several holders before him.) In light of this, I'd argue that Redbeard isn't especially wicked or brutal per se, but is rather an inevitable product of the world and laws that produced him. The Pact is an essentially untenable proposition in the long term (mainly I think because of its constitutional incapability to incorporate new states, and also partially because of the essential unaccountability of the Council to the people at large), and Avadon (and thus by extension Redbeard) are the only things capable of holding it together. Killing Redbeard just means another like him will eventually seize control of Avadon, even with oversight by the Council (Redbeard maneuvered his way into the position by posing as a weak, ineffectual compromise candidate); and dismantling Avadon means either the Pact will fall, or the Council will recreate it under another name. If Redbeard did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
  17. Khalida's motivations are very confused, because 1) she deliberately lets many of the camp-dwellers escape in favor of slaying Trupo; 2) Trupo himself is not a deserter or a bandit, but she demands you slay him; 3) she seems to want to gain Redbeard's approval for her acts, despite being willing to rebel against him at the first excuse; 4) Khalida herself is a Hand rather than a member of the regular Pact army, and normally desertion would be an issue of internal military discipline- it's not her job and it might be outside of her legal powers to hunt deserters. I think it's perfectly understandable that Khalida might resent the deserters, and blame Trupo for sheltering them, but on the other hand she doesn't seem to actually care very much about punishing the deserters per se so much as pursuing a personal hate-driven vendetta against Trupo. She's made less sympathetic because of how irrational and illogical her acts are, how unclear her goal is, how she's willing to compromise Avadon's interests (Redbeard mentions the deserters might've been useful informers), and potentially how she's abusing her power essentially to murder a guy. She also pressures you into complicity with the act, and acts sanctimonious if you refuse- she just totally refuses to sympathize with you if you decide against murdering a man in cold blood. Contrast this with Botan, who wants to save the lives of people who are technically criminals, regardless of the cost; or Sevilin, whose target may have been technically pardoned, but who is still a criminal, personally murdered several Hands (who were Sevilin's friends), and is of no further use to Avadon; or with Alcander, whose motive is naked greed, but who doesn't really intend to hurt or kill anyone in its pursuit. None of the other Hands in any of the games pressures you to knowingly murder innocents in the same way, except arguably Rudow, who has his own, other problems. UNRELATED: but this seems like a good place for it since it's relevant to character discussions: anyone else notice/scratch your head at the apparent change in Avadon 3 of "you have to kill the Keeper to become the new Keeper" from being the de facto state of affairs to, evidently, the de jure? The Codex still has the grandfathered-in entry about the pre-Redbeard Keepers, and mentions interregnums and Keepers not succeeded by their assassins; but in the game itself, everyone acts as if it is The Law that you have to personally murder the Keeper to succeed them. In my opinion this pretty drastically changes part of Redbeard's characterization: in the earlier games his iron grip on power and paranoia were at least potentially self-serving, and he feared external assassins just as much as internal ones, but as of 3 his paranoia is more focused on his subordinates, and it's apparently justified by the law.
  18. They never leave: you just have to get them to say they'll return to their village, and then go tell the questgiver about it.
  19. I think that's always been a problem with the series. You get barely any interaction with others regarding your companions apart from reporting to Callan/Redbeard about their incompetence/treason. It'd add a lot to see Dedrick sparring with Kaede, or to have Polus accidentally let slip that Nathalie still has a teddy bear, or for Torch to get in an argument with Botan. As-is, their concerns and worldviews are very neatly segregated from the rest of the world, and they're all perfectly willing to follow your lead in the field without complaint (usually). It'd also be nice to see more of Redbeard interacting with others. He obviously gets by far the most characterization of anyone in the series, but you only see him talking to others when he's, like, intimidating insubordinate underlings, or screaming at Miranda's shade. I wanna see Redbeard give an LBJ-style "treatment" to a member of Hanvar's Council... alternating between wheedling, promises of future aid, vague threats, outright pleading. He obviously has to be a very canny politician as well as a brutal warrior, but you don't really get to see much of that side of him.
  20. The most interesting dialogue and character insights you get in Avadon 3 are from the remarks your companions make when important things happen in the field... but obviously you are going to necessarily miss 60% of these, and you're probably going to never really use one or two of your companions anyway, so they stay in the camp and remain blobs that constantly spout their concerns. Incidentally, I thought it was hilarious that you can repeatedly tell Rudow that you want nothing to do with his treason, and even snitch on him to Redbeard, and he always just laughs it off and assumes you'll still help him. (Which to be fair is true... need that super-good shaman jerkin.) It's true... but it's so blatant that it's absurd. ("Rudow... I think you're committing a crime of the highest order and I refuse to continue to help you." "Hand <GETPLAYERNAME>, I know you have passing doubts, but I know you'll help me when the time comes." "Rudow, I reported your actions to Redbeard. I advised him to kill you ASAP to stop the leak of information to Protus." "Oh <GETPLAYERNAME>, you always were such a kidder.")
  21. Khalida was interesting and sympathetic in 2, but in 3 she really crossed the line with her sidequest. Other sidequests in the series involve doing unpleasant or unwise things, but generally the (human) victims are legitimately bad people who have been protected or ignored by Avadon for political reasons (Xenophon, the Honored Forge clan, Cahil & co, the Gray Raptors, etc). Trupo and his followers are guilty of (at worst) sheltering bandits, and most of them are refugees and shell-shocked deserters. To retain her loyalty, Khalida demands that you murder them. She comes across as even more brutal and stiff-necked than Redbeard, but without even Redbeard's Machiavellian ends-justify-the-means logic, just violent hatred. Ironically, her character arc in 2 revolved around her memory loss and fugue states caused by the dungeons (whether it's mundane PTSD or something more magical isn't explained, but the effect is the same), but she has no sympathy for soldiers traumatized in the war who refuse to keep fighting. This massive lack of empathy on her part just sucks all of her sympatheticness right out of her and leaves her a barbaric mess.
  22. As-is I think the gods are too similar to crystal souls: spirits of the revered dead brought back into powerful temporal forms by the rituals of their followers to provide advice and guidance. The only real difference is that crystal souls don't need the intervention of their followers to create their physical form, but even then you only have hearsay that the gods' bodies are necromantic creations. The conception of the gods' existence and power fluctuating with their followers' devotion and attention is more interesting, I think, and could provide an interesting angle on the clear Roman-esque deified emperor thing.
  23. Vitality is automatically restored to max when you return to camp.
  24. Said opera also has exactly two named characters.
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