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Jeff Vogel vs Pillars of Eternity

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
But now we're back to square one. :( I can deal, but it feels goofy to be doing bad things solely to stop people from mistaking me for a hero.

That's how it is, you have to mod the game to be able to play a bad rep char without being a psycho. You don't get much reactivity for having low rep either way (besides more expensive prices in shops), afaik there are only 2 things that change besides the cutscenes - you don't get a quest from Sorcerous Sundries and a random paladin in a random area attacks you. There's also another paladin who attacks you, but he does it if you have an evil companion in the party regardless of anything else.
 

Azarkon

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I think there's a disconnect between the way contemporary CRPGs treat adventuring, and the vocation as it existed historically, in inspiration.

In medieval history, the closest equivalent to the adventurer was the knight errant. This was typically a member of the lesser nobility, but could occasionally be a commoner, who trained in combat and who, not having any land, wandered around looking for opportunities to gain actual land. This he did through performing services for local lords, and possibly attaching himself to such a lord; naturally to gain the attention of a lord, he had to first build a reputation, perhaps by helping peasants or fighting bandits or campaigning in a war. The motivation was ultimately wealth and upward mobility. Being a hero was incidental and only served as the moral propaganda for an otherwise practical endeavor.

Another possible analogy is the - usually foreign, since the feudal hierarchy had a monopoly on local armed forces - mercenary, who fought mostly for coin, but at times could also be given land and title. The kind of people who would join mercenary groups varied, but most of the times it was also, like the knight errant, people who did not own land and who sought to advance themselves in an otherwise rigid hierarchy.

From the two above examples, we see that the primary motivation for this kind of work was personal advancement. The existence of crises facilitated this process only in the sense of providing more opportunities for ambitious men to prove their worth, so to speak, to people further up the hierarchy or, in certain circumstances, to depose and replace them. This was done, typically, through martial endeavors because the aristocracy of medieval times was fundamentally a warrior aristocracy; and it was one of the very few ways by which a man could actually advance himself in medieval society, since social classes were static, otherwise.

It is this sort of historical role that inspired the fantasy CRPG concept of adventuring; and indeed, many of the same tropes can be observed. Just like the knight errant, the CRPG protagonist might look forward to gaining wealth, status, title, land, and stronghold. His endeavors are likewise told in heroic narrative with a whole lot of moral propaganda. And more often than not, he collects a group of allies who in historical times would have become his vassal knights, and even though he will almost certainly not marry one of them, romance does exist in the context of the knight errant eventually being offered the hand of a noble lady or princess and that, too, becomes his reward.

So up to now, we have a natural analogy between the CRPG protagonist and the knight errant. Here is where it breaks down, however: the modern CRPG protagonist is almost never motivated by self advancement. Perhaps it's because self advancement is too crass of a goal, lacks 'dramatic appeal', or whatever else modern writers look for in compelling protagonists. Or perhaps it's because self advancement has become equivalent to "evil" and so cannot be the natural motivation of a social justice loving hero. Whatever the case, self advancement is near the bottom of motivations for player characters today. Instead we're held to "deeper" goals like saving the world, saving the soul, or just saving our own ass.

This kind of set up is fundamentally different from that of classic adventuring, and it doesn't surprise me that, as a consequence, the same plot structures no longer fit. You don't take time off to do random tasks for people when you're trying to save the world or survive. It doesn't make any sense because your central motivation is no longer to advance your fortunes through adventuring, and so the adventuring tropes we've ran with for so long in the CRPG genre should no longer apply to you. Yet, because CRPGs are so deeply intertwined with the tropes of adventuring, so built around it, developers simply can't let go, and so end up trying to combine the two, which simply makes it even more confused.

The solution seems simple: either abandon the classic CRPG structure and come up with a new one, or start motivating players through self advancement again. Only then can we get back on track with well-motivated quests and logical plot structures.
 

ilitarist

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IIRC Darklands was a knight-errand simulator, i.e. you were indeed focused on advancement. Another good example is Witcher world where witchers have a real job of monster-slaying and are usually greedy and selfish.

Bioware usually invents various reasons for you to seek allies and Dragon Age 2 was more traditionally about getting money, land and friends.

I guess the worst examples are open world games a la Elder Scrolls/Fallout 3-4. In theory you *can* roleplay and only care about sidequests when there's a direct benefit or you really like a person but as 92% of those games are sidequests it'd be very strange thing to do. Curiously, Morrowind didn't have this problem as during main quest you are explicitly told to make something out of yourself to be more effective Blade. It's discouraging when reviews say somethign like "you can be whoever you want in this world!" meaning that in case of Fallout 4 you can either be a sane person who is curious about who killed their spouse and kidnapped their son - or you can focus on another settlement that needs help and assisting insane robots on a ship. This problem would be easily solved by soft plot gates a la (sorry) Dragon Age Inquisiton. Give me an NPC who holds critical info and says you need a certain level of karma/fame/power which you get from quests for him to trust or fear you; give player an option to bribe/persuade said person or maybe do a little sidequest. Set up several "gates" like that. Voila - now your character doesn't look like a Dragonborn/Father/Son with the shortest attemption span and memory problems, now you have sort of motivation to behave in a way the game really wants you to behave.

Now that I think about it - it's what Baldur's Gate 2 did and partly what Pillars of Eternity attempted in act II, only in PoE it was just a series of specific quests for one of the sides.
 

Azarkon

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IIRC Darklands was a knight-errand simulator, i.e. you were indeed focused on advancement. Another good example is Witcher world where witchers have a real job of monster-slaying and are usually greedy and selfish.

Bioware usually invents various reasons for you to seek allies and Dragon Age 2 was more traditionally about getting money, land and friends.

I guess the worst examples are open world games a la Elder Scrolls/Fallout 3-4. In theory you *can* roleplay and only care about sidequests when there's a direct benefit or you really like a person but as 92% of those games are sidequests it'd be very strange thing to do. Curiously, Morrowind didn't have this problem as during main quest you are explicitly told to make something out of yourself to be more effective Blade. It's discouraging when reviews say somethign like "you can be whoever you want in this world!" meaning that in case of Fallout 4 you can either be a sane person who is curious about who killed their spouse and kidnapped their son - or you can focus on another settlement that needs help and assisting insane robots on a ship. This problem would be easily solved by soft plot gates a la (sorry) Dragon Age Inquisiton. Give me an NPC who holds critical info and says you need a certain level of karma/fame/power which you get from quests for him to trust or fear you; give player an option to bribe/persuade said person or maybe do a little sidequest. Set up several "gates" like that. Voila - now your character doesn't look like a Dragonborn/Father/Son with the shortest attemption span and memory problems, now you have sort of motivation to behave in a way the game really wants you to behave.

Now that I think about it - it's what Baldur's Gate 2 did and partly what Pillars of Eternity attempted in act II, only in PoE it was just a series of specific quests for one of the sides.

Urgency in the main quest usually - though not always - breaks the spirit of adventuring. I'll use Mass Effect as an example. As soon as Shepard discovers that the Reapers were coming to kill everyone, it stops making sense for him to go around helping random people with their problems. Not that his original motivation - investigating Saren - left much room for side quests, either. But when you know that civilization itself is ending, there's just no justification for playing space sheriff.

Pillars of Eternity is, of course, the other popular example. Your motivation for going after Thaos is pretty thin, to begin with, but just exactly why are you going around Defiance Bay and Dyrwood helping random people, when you're slowly losing your sanity? Is that what people do when they're about to go mad? Help other people with their problems and go treasure hunt? It's hard to believe no one ever brought this up during development.

But we can, in fact, nit pick many more games for doing this to various degrees. Torment: Tides of Numenera had you playing carnival with the Sorrow hot on your ass. Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer had you chasing thieves while you were being consumed by spirit hunger. The Witcher 3 allowed you to take your sweet time pursuing contracts while utterly ignoring Ciri and the Wild Hunt. Developers can get away with it because most of the times, it's not a deal breaker. Rather, it simply compounds narrative problems that the game already has - in this case, the poor quality of most of Pillars of Eternity's side quests.
 

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer had you chasing thieves while you were being consumed by spirit hunger.

Technically you don't need to rush as long as you have spirits to eat, the curse is such that only when you stop feeding do you start to degenerate and eat yourself. There are stories of some people carrying the curse for decades. MotB also didn't have a lot of side quests and most were tied to whatever it is you are doing anyway. Two, if not all, of the mask fragments were actually side quests. I hate to bring up Bioware as a positive example again, but DA:O does this well because you are incentivized to help the people you want as allies, though you also aren't an "adventurer". It also has some side quests that most people don't realize are such, like the whole of Redcliffe village. You don't have to do anything for it, you can leave, the town gets destroyed by undead and you can come back and do the castle anyway.
 
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Morkar Left

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I don't think it should matter whether you are the lord of a castle.

It's just not appropriate to approach a group of heavily armed adventurers with tasks that can be performed by the average person. No sane individual would've even considered the idea.

It's like going to Blackwater headquarters and saying, "hey guys, want to deliver this family necklace for me???" But actually, it's even worse, because at least Blackwater wouldn't likely rob you blind, while you have no guarantee of the risks you're taking with a group of traveling adventurers.

Being hired by the mayor of a small town to kill a local monster. Yeah, I can see that. Being hired to escort a merchant caravan through a dangerous area. Sure, that makes sense. Being paid to assassinate a political rival, to rescue a person from a dungeon, to capture a nearby castle... Those are tasks I can expect to be bothered with as I gain reputation.

Not "hey go and deliver this potion to my uncle who lives two villages away" or "hey I need these materials to make a sword, can you go get them? I won't sell anything to you until you do." Although, in this case, presentation does matter, as I can see a blacksmith telling you that he'll pay well for quality iron and to keep an eye out for it. But personally, I don't think that should be presented as a quest.

A good RPG quest should have:

- Proper motivation. As in - offer an adequate incentive/reason to do the quest. Either the chance to receive something cool (good loot, nice cash, abilities, land deeds, etc.), go somewhere cool where there's bound to be stuff that will make it worth your while, or a quest that will further your personal agenda (if you have one). This is another reason why many PoE starting quests (like Calisca's pregnant sister) were bad - you only did them for the XP.

- Thematically fit the setting. In the Forgotten Realms, you have so many adventurers crawling about you can afford to give them silly menial tasks like "Please rid my garden of a (normal-sized) bug infestation. There's 5 shiny GP in it for you." Players expect them. In PoE's setting, which doesn't really have an established adventuring tradition, it makes less sense to have random people give you menial, meaningless tasks like that, yet many still do. Even if you're a nobody at the start of the game, you're still heavily armed, and, most likely, traveling with equally well-armed companions. People should recognize this, and not bother you with useless shit. The funniest thing about this is there are occasions in the game where you meet the equivalent of an adventuring party, and the narration tells you just how tough-looking they are, and that you probably wouldn't want to fuck with them. So the game recognizes this in others, just not in you :D


It's a dark age / medieval setting. Even in real world medieval times it was dangerous and uncommon to travel from one village to another. It's not like people could afford to abandon their homestead unsecured for several days/weeks not to mention the farm animals and the crob.

It's natural to ask actual travellers to deliver or search things for them. Sure, strangers could just take the letter and maybe get some small payment and after that throwing it away. I'm sure that was a problem back in the day, too. But not so much either.

A traveller had a reason to travel because it was a dangerous endeavour. Foreigners often got mistrusted, too. E.g. delivering a message would often literally be a door opener to allow to present their own business (travelling, work, entertainment). And geting at least a meal I guess. Having food back in such times was big thing I heard.

And here's some curse going on in the whole country, you could get robbed (especially in such severe times) and kobolds/saurians/cursed monster children/whatever are out there in the wilderness to eat people. Of course are travellers heavy armed. You probably wouldn't even bother to ask them if they were only wearing shorts because you would consider them lunatics.
 
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FreeKaner

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Knight-errants aren't a thing that actually existed in any accountable or sizeable fashion as "adventurers", especially not in medieval period. They didn't go around saving damsels and fighting evil, those are romanticised folk tales. There did exist lesser nobles without landed titles that served local gentry or lords, in hopes of getting landed titles for their service but that's about it. This was most common in Italy, especially northern Italy where it culminated into full blown mercenary companies lead by lesser nobility fighting each other at pay of landed lords. The term free lancer also refers to these type of people, who could afford arms and armour but didn't have lands to attend to.

There also did exists some nobles that went on what could be called adventures after discovery of Americas by Europeans. A lot of Spanish conquistadors were basically lesser nobility with either no land or low revenue land that hoped to go on adventuring and get rich. They would assemble few men, a ship and set sail for the "New World", sleeping in their armours and interacting with native people to find themselves a place. These would be more fitting to the type of adventuring that seems to be more common in cRPGs but even then it's a bit of a stretch. Especially since they were just expeditionary forces in the end, doing little more than fighting, scouting, exploring and acting as local officers.

However looking for the counter-part of adventurer in real world is a futile exercise because it doesn't really matter. The book Don Quixote criticises this romanticised and on the whole silly view of knights of old, and that book was written while New World was very much still active conflict zone and most of Africa was not touched by Europeans. So by value of playing a fictional character with a motivation for adventure, you are given a certain context for adventuring that you are going to have to take at face value. So I think it's better to accept that it's part of the setting and hope that the writers will make it internally consistent within that setting. I think it's better that way too because there is not much mercenaries did except fighting and looting, nor knight-errants who were officers for armies and would take part in battles, or as personal guards of lords. Those are better fitting in a strategy game or turn-based tactics game than a cRPG. They are not going to be anything more than background that gives the protagonist the context of their adventuring, as per character building or roleplaying, choice amongst many.

Ideally of course this invented context would be provided to the player with other motivations that personally involves your character, where quests you take interest you as more than just mere vehicle for giving you a direction to kill more goons to get paid but that's about quality of writing essentially. Setting can justify armed adventurers doing work that is not just killing people for money. A quest about delivering an amulet can be interesting, even though it's basically menial busywork, even though by merit of real world background it is not entirely logical. Meanwhile a quest about killing some bandits for just some coin can be very boring even if it befits an armed group of adventurers. So I think the critique shouldn't be about whether being a courier fits an armed adventure group but whether it's interesting, someway, to deliver that amulet and whether it aligns with general narrative direction of the game. This is I think best covered initially by letting main story of the game allow some side-stepping and perhaps even encouraging it as part of it, where the plot at points leaves MC to proceed at their own pace.
 
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Jacob

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BioWare is too deep into trying to emulate Joss Whedon. They turn every character into a walking one-trick pony and then it turns out those characters all have playful sarcastic personality, tragic past and unexpected appreciation for the player character. Seriously, BioWare seems unable to produce a companion from other template, the only exception would probably be Vega from Mass Effect 3 because he respects Shepard from the very beginning.

I like PoE characters. Only Durance and that mage dude follow standard formula. And maybe Devil golem from expansion. And Durance manages to not be secretly like everybody else. They have little reason to follow Watcher apart from maybe Sagani and mage, that's sad. But they're great otherwise.
I brofisted this post because of the criticism of Whedon fanbois
 
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Apart from the detachment of lore with gameplay mechanics, there is one another factor why PoE is so bland and dry with uninteresting lore dumps which fail to motivate the player at all. That is the personality/mentality of the guy who is calling the shots.

Take Spiderweb for example. Jeff used to make great games like Geneforge. After his exile triology, he tried to experiment a bit with nethergate and it didn't do well commercially as he expected. He then did the first Avernums (which is a remake of exile itself); which sold better than his exoectations that he decided to risk and vreated the amazing gem known as Geneforge. He then derped a bit with Avernum 4-6 with removing the overworld exploration layer. Somewhere alomg the way that old fart got impressed by Mass Effect and he wanted his games to be like that: Mechanically shallow and lacking complexity, with emotionally engaging companions and immurshun. Even after upgrading his graphics/tilesets with the Avadon/ nu Avernum series; he butchered the mechanical complexity and shoehorned character progression with auto stat allocation at levelups and other things. He thinks that he can emulate ME/ME2's sucess on a smaller scale if he copies their stuff. Not that he lacks talent ( which he might); but he has himself deluded with what his core audience is.

Then there is Josh. From the hostory of his projects, it is clear that what he excels at is getting half-baked mess working just enough for a release. He is also a history buff who enjoys reading oages after pages of dry logs. Also an aspie control freak like him absolutely cannot stand if anything that goes out of his expectations. Thus PoE ended up being continuous unintersting lore dumps with tedious combat having hp-bloat and negligible increments +1% damage/duration due to core philosophy of Josh. Josh works best if an already compiled ruleset is dumped at him and told him to make a game engine work with it. He lacks the maturity to decide what to implement in a game; but does a passable job of how to implement if something is handed to him.
 
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But we can, in fact, nit pick many more games for doing this to various degrees. Torment: Tides of Numenera had you playing carnival with the Sorrow hot on your ass. Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer had you chasing thieves while you were being consumed by spirit hunger. The Witcher 3 allowed you to take your sweet time pursuing contracts while utterly ignoring Ciri and the Wild Hunt. Developers can get away with it because most of the times, it's not a deal breaker. Rather, it simply compounds narrative problems that the game already has - in this case, the poor quality of most of Pillars of Eternity's side quests.

It's pretty hard to avoid. The player wants some feeling of emergency for teh drama, but not too much or it feels like he's not really in control (which might be realistic depending on the plot, but probably not fun since you want to explore that nice countryside in peace). Best you can do is not constantly ask the player to hurry, because you usually don't notice the issue until the game reminds you, like a movie trying to explain why X isn't a plothole but not doing a good job.

FNV assumes you are playing as a person who was never a proper fighter (he works as a courier after all) but for some reason decided to go after mob boss who shot him in the head. You need a very, very specific character to follow this plot. Why doesn't Courier just settle in Goodsprings or waits till he can get back? Why does he have to involve himself with murderous factions? Just because he's a terminator. Meanwhile a cowardly farmer would still work as PoE protagonist as he has no choice but to treat his condition or go mad.

Same reason the protagonists of the previous games go on a quest for the water chip/GECK/daddy, because you're supposed to care about your vault/tribe/family even if you are the worst person on the planet. That's pretty much all that's estabilished though, the bare minimum to have a coherent story.

Also, you're a courier in a shithole world with raiders and mutants and giant ants, it's not unreasonable that the PC would know how to defend himself just enough to survive your average trip between towns. Besides, you're not given a specific reason for chasing Benny, so it's left somewhat open - maybe you want simple revenge because you're a hothead and some pompous fucker left you for dead in a shallow grave, you want the chip to deliver it because neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays you from the swift completion of your appointed rounds, you're the heroic type who realizes there's something more sinister about this than just a robbery, you fell in love with him because you're a psycho bitch, maybe you never really cared about him but you figure he can lead you to his employers and you always dreamed of leaving that banalshitboring job and joining the Legion, etc.
 
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Beastro

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PoE was obviously too ambitious in terms of writing. Obsidian didn't allow enough time/money to connect the dots in-game so it mattered. They just rushed to release. I have to agree with that business decision; it would've been a shit game even if they took another year to polish it, and people bought it anyway.

Vogel is the opposite. Play it safe, don't attempt anything that'll take more than a year or so, don't run out of money. He's a better manager in that regard. But he's shooting himself in the foot when it comes to marketing.

Manager? He's one guy working to support a family, not one employee amongst many in a company.

I don't like the way he's taken his games, especially the remaking antics, but I can see why and understand - Making great games pales in comparison to providing for his family in a way only a self-employed parent could understand.

I think it's also behind his "old and tired" shtick.

I don't think they need to kill all the extra stuff like subraces, but what's wrong with using a manual for the backgrounds exposition?

A manual in today's digital age?

I'm not disagreeing with you, you're just showing your age - when was the last time you read a manual for a game you bought online? When was the last time you bought a physical copy and flipped through the booklet?

Manuals and physical copies go hand in hand, but if you're getting a game off steam it just doesn't work that way. Hell, if you want to look something up about the game the instinct now is to look up a forum topic or a wiki about the game loooong before you decide to right click on the games name in Steam to hit Manual or look up the pdf that came with the bundle DL.

I don't understand what's wrong with text that gives you background information just being there, if you don't want to read it then read it, what's the difference if they remove some text you need to hover over to read in the first place? People just dislike the mere choice of being able to read now?

"Show, don't tell"

In games that becomes "Interact with, don't dump. Player control should be taken away as little as possible and if you can work details into the game in passing as they go about playing the game do so before inserting a paragraph about it into some abstract area like character creation.

If two races can't stand the sight of one another then hint at it through passing quips of dialogue, or better yet, have the player come across some of X race in the process of lynching a member of Y race and the resulting choice the PC then has to make. Like if he's a member of X race who agrees with the lynching but pisses his party off, or disagrees and catches flak from his people for it (and effecting in game faction standings and therefore opportunities or even outcomes), or he agrees, but lies to placate his party members in a cold, calculating way because you've decided their help in your quest is worth more than what your people think of you at present, something you can patch up once your problem is solved.

Just as you begin character creation in PoE you are bombarded with lore dumps. PoE was written by amateurs.

It depends on what you mean by that word.

RPG making amateurs? No
RPG makers effectively doing their first bit of original world building not tied to any other licenses? Yes

Before PoE there was only Alpha Protocal which was still build upon real life. PoE is their first take on it from ground up. Part of that dumping seems to come from a worry that people wouldn't quickly "get" the world, feel lost and drop the game while the other half feels like many of them felt really proud of the world they built and really wanted to share the nuances or the history and culture in detail in a way that overcame their better judgement, because all the other games they did had backgrounds already in place for them to add to or fit into the story they wanted to tell (Example: KOTOR 2 given that almost no places come from them beyond the beginning and ending ones and this comes from someone who thought a setting like Onderon/Dxun was an Obsidian addition until he flipped through Wookiepedia years later).
 
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Dayyālu

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Knight-errants aren't a thing that actually existed in any accountable or sizeable fashion as "adventurers", especially not in medieval period. They didn't go around saving damsels and fighting evil, those are romanticised folk tales. There did existed lesser nobles without landed titles that served local gentry or lords, in hopes of getting landed titles for their service but that's about it. This was most common in Italy, especially northern Italy where it culminated into full blown mercenary companies lead by lesser nobility fighting each other at pay of landed lords. The term free lancer also refers to these type of people, who could afford arms and armour but didn't have lands to attend to.


The variety of the miles is frankly astounding: there is no such thing as a "knight errant" (if not in the self-representation of the knightly class itself). Mount&Blade murderhobos were a thing (we have documents proving the actions of fighters who merely had a horse, an armour and a whore running around being employed as mercenaries, being considered extremely useful during conflict and a social danger in peacetime). Depending on the era, being a knight went from merely having weapons&armour to be a member, centuries late, of a specific social class that could not even bother with weapons: it's a fascinating change to look upon. Plus, if we consider the difference between miles from cities and miles from outside cities (particularly common in Italy, where urbanization was kinda huge) we also notice interesting difference in social class, social role (governance, both military and "civil") and equipment. Cities complained a lot in having to pay for their own knights, ya know.

To summarize, the tale of the knight is "from murderhobo to paid soldier to member of a self-styled class to title". "Adventurers" as we understand them -fighting bandits and the like- didn't exist: most commonly, they were the bandits, rapin', pillagin' and killing priests, particularly if we consider that the "law", varied, conflicted and haphazard as it was, rarely extended a few stone's throws from the closest city wall.

Why the fuck I am saying this? Autism, goddammit.
 

FreeKaner

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"Show, don't tell"

In games that becomes "Interact with, don't dump. Player control should be taken away as little as possible and if you can work details into the game in passing as they go about playing the game do so before inserting a paragraph about it into some abstract area like character creation.

If two races can't stand the sight of one another then hint at it through passing quips of dialogue, or better yet, have the player come across some of X race in the process of lynching a member of Y race and the resulting choice the PC then has to make. Like if he's a member of X race who agrees with the lynching but pisses his party off, or disagrees and catches flak from his people for it (and effecting in game faction standings and therefore opportunities or even outcomes), or he agrees, but lies to placate his party members in a cold, calculating way because you've decided their help in your quest is worth more than what your people think of you at present, something you can patch up once your problem is solved.

"Show, don't tell" refers to a narrative technique in written text to begin with, so they are necessarily in paragraphs and would likely bloat the text out more if anything. It mainly refers to pulp fiction novels of old, where traits of people were literally told as descriptions, like some sort of criminal profile. An example would be: "He was rude and cynical" compared to, well, the person in the book being rude and cynical through his actions. A long paragraph about two races hating each other is not necessarily opposed to "Show, don't tell".

If a game is shallow enough to apply that sort of general cultural trait, such as people of one group hating another group, on an individual basis as an isolated accident while there is no other references to it whatsoever then it's badly written anyway. The issue here isn't that there is background information, the issue is when the background information (I.E lore) has no corresponding elements in the game itself and is literally just there as nothing but world-building. It wouldn't be a problem for example if you come across people of group X lynching a member of group Y, then obviously if you are not part of either of group you would be inclined to ask what the hell that is about, after which someone could or would explain. It starts becoming a problem when this background information is "canonical" where every member of society treats it the same way with no variance, no opinions, no interpretations. There are no cultures where every member of it uniformly believes the same thing and this should also be reflected. So problem isn't about "long paragraphs" or "prose", those are techniques, problem is writers not utilising those properly, or just failing to make it compelling.
 

Beastro

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Knight-errants aren't a thing that actually existed in any accountable or sizeable fashion as "adventurers", especially not in medieval period. They didn't go around saving damsels and fighting evil, those are romanticised folk tales. There did existed lesser nobles without landed titles that served local gentry or lords, in hopes of getting landed titles for their service but that's about it. This was most common in Italy, especially northern Italy where it culminated into full blown mercenary companies lead by lesser nobility fighting each other at pay of landed lords performing mock battles to avoid harming one another while working together to extort as much money as they could from their employers with the least amount of effort. The term free lancer also refers to these type of people, who could afford arms and armour but didn't have lands to attend to.

To summarize, the tale of the knight is "from murderhobo to paid soldier to member of a self-styled class to title". "Adventurers" as we understand them -fighting bandits and the like- didn't exist: most commonly, they were the bandits, rapin', pillagin' and killing priests, particularly if we consider that the "law", varied, conflicted and haphazard as it was, rarely extended a few stone's throws from the closest city wall.

MB needs to put more into that angle.

I know you can do it, but I mean for the game world to quickly adapt and recognize you as that sort of person in the way it does when you join a kingdom and become ennobled.
 

FreeKaner

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Knight-errants aren't a thing that actually existed in any accountable or sizeable fashion as "adventurers", especially not in medieval period. They didn't go around saving damsels and fighting evil, those are romanticised folk tales. There did existed lesser nobles without landed titles that served local gentry or lords, in hopes of getting landed titles for their service but that's about it. This was most common in Italy, especially northern Italy where it culminated into full blown mercenary companies lead by lesser nobility fighting each other at pay of landed lords performing mock battles to avoid harming one another while working together to extort as much money as they could from their employers with the least amount of effort. The term free lancer also refers to these type of people, who could afford arms and armour but didn't have lands to attend to.

It depends but yes that also happened but it wasn't always like that, there are exploits of successful mercenary companies recorded still that fought decisive battles after all.
 

Dayyālu

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Ahaha.

Beastro , there is somewhat of an historical kerfuffle about the supposed performance of Italian mercenaries: the complaint that they made "fake and theatrical war" has been done as a critique, but it wasn't particularly true. It was a form of controlled war, but the noble class even amongst rival factions in other european countries rarely dared to kill their own (even more when we got ransoms in the scene).

Lower-class soldiers died a lot and fought a lot. And there's no doubt about the professionalism of the mercenary princes and their skills: it's merely that their way of war was ..... outdated when they got to fight other european armies during the Italian wars.

But I completely agree about the extortion. From horses to soldiers to equipment, it was hilarious.
 

hivemind

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Knight-errants aren't a thing that actually existed in any accountable or sizeable fashion as "adventurers", especially not in medieval period. They didn't go around saving damsels and fighting evil, those are romanticised folk tales. There did exist lesser nobles without landed titles that served local gentry or lords, in hopes of getting landed titles for their service but that's about it. This was most common in Italy, especially northern Italy where it culminated into full blown mercenary companies lead by lesser nobility fighting each other at pay of landed lords. The term free lancer also refers to these type of people, who could afford arms and armour but didn't have lands to attend to.

There also did exists some nobles that went on what could be called adventures after discovery of Americas by Europeans. A lot of Spanish conquistadors were basically lesser nobility with either no land or low revenue land that hoped to go on adventuring and get rich. They would assemble few men, a ship and set sail for the "New World", sleeping in their armours and interacting with native people to find themselves a place. These would be more fitting to the type of adventuring that seems to be more common in cRPGs but even then it's a bit of a stretch. Especially since they were just expeditionary forces in the end, doing little more than fighting, scouting, exploring and acting as local officers.

However looking for the counter-part of adventurer in real world is a futile exercise because it doesn't really matter. The book Don Quixote criticises this romanticised and on the whole silly view of knights of old, and that book was written while New World was very much still active conflict zone and most of Africa was not touched by Europeans. So by value of playing a fictional character with a motivation for adventure, you are given a certain context for adventuring that you are going to have to take at face value. So I think it's better to accept that it's part of the setting and hope that the writers will make it internally consistent within that setting. I think it's better that way too because there is not much mercenaries did except fighting and looting, nor knight-errants who were officers for armies and would take part in battles, or as personal guards of lords. Those are better fitting in a strategy game or turn-based tactics game than a cRPG. They are not going to be anything more than background that gives the protagonist the context of their adventuring, as per character building or roleplaying, choice amongst many.

Ideally of course this invented context would be provided to the player with other motivations that personally involves your character, where quests you take interest you as more than just mere vehicle for giving you a direction to kill more goons to get paid but that's about quality of writing essentially. Setting can justify armed adventurers doing work that is not just killing people for money. A quest about delivering an amulet can be interesting, even though it's basically menial busywork, even though by merit of real world background it is not entirely logical. Meanwhile a quest about killing some bandits for just some coin can be very boring even if it befits an armed group of adventurers. So I think the critique shouldn't be about whether being a courier fits an armed adventure group but whether it's interesting, someway, to deliver that amulet and whether it aligns with general narrative direction of the game. This is I think best covered initially by letting main story of the game allow some side-stepping and perhaps even encouraging it as part of it, where the plot at points leaves MC to proceed at their own pace.
tldr
 

Beastro

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But I completely agree about the extortion. From horses to soldiers to equipment, it was hilarious.

It also seems to have been emulated to some extent by the lower classes, with simple soldiers capturing their equivalents and running their own ransom industry in much the same way as those above them did.

I've only solidly heard of it being done in the 100 Years' War, but I see no reason to think it originated then, ceased once it was over or was restricted to only the English and French.
 
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FreeKaner

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Knight-errants aren't a thing that actually existed in any accountable or sizeable fashion as "adventurers", especially not in medieval period. They didn't go around saving damsels and fighting evil, those are romanticised folk tales. There did existed lesser nobles without landed titles that served local gentry or lords, in hopes of getting landed titles for their service but that's about it. This was most common in Italy, especially northern Italy where it culminated into full blown mercenary companies lead by lesser nobility fighting each other at pay of landed lords. The term free lancer also refers to these type of people, who could afford arms and armour but didn't have lands to attend to.


The variety of the miles is frankly astounding: there is no such thing as a "knight errant" (if not in the self-representation of the knightly class itself). Mount&Blade murderhobos were a thing (we have documents proving the actions of fighters who merely had a horse, an armour and a whore running around being employed as mercenaries, being considered extremely useful during conflict and a social danger in peacetime). Depending on the era, being a knight went from merely having weapons&armour to be a member, centuries late, of a specific social class that could not even bother with weapons: it's a fascinating change to look upon. Plus, if we consider the difference between miles from cities and miles from outside cities (particularly common in Italy, where urbanization was kinda huge) we also notice interesting difference in social class, social role (governance, both military and "civil") and equipment. Cities complained a lot in having to pay for their own knights, ya know.

To summarize, the tale of the knight is "from murderhobo to paid soldier to member of a self-styled class to title". "Adventurers" as we understand them -fighting bandits and the like- didn't exist: most commonly, they were the bandits, rapin', pillagin' and killing priests, particularly if we consider that the "law", varied, conflicted and haphazard as it was, rarely extended a few stone's throws from the closest city wall.

Why the fuck I am saying this? Autism, goddammit.

What's funny to me mostly is these bandits themselves just being the unemployed mercenaries, when you have bunch of armed people with no skills but war it's bound to cause trouble. Spanish did the best sending all unemployed war veterans off to somewhere in Americas, making them problem of natives instead. So yeah, murderhobos did exist, adventurer knights didn't.
 

Beastro

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Much the same conditions produced "a Viking".

Skills and arms or none, you get a bunch of idle people with no opportunities arising from home and the less well offs leanings seem to favour adventuring, pirating, gang running or undergoing "migrations".

The more well off seem to just revel in nihilistic hedonism instead.

Playing "social worker" (i.e. - getting shit done for people who can't/don't want to do it themselves) is the basis of most RPGs.

But the difference I'm talking about is tone and overall quality. Let's take a quest almondblight mentioned, the "help poor pregnant woman get prenatal vitamins" one.

In this mundane (it does flesh out the effects of the Hollowborn Crisis, but not in a very interesting way) fetch quest, you have two possible options - tell the woman the truth about the "cure", or let her believe it's the real deal. None of these options are especially satisfactory - it's realistic, yes, but you haven't really solved her problem, you've just played a delivery man, and either lied to her, or told her to suck it up.

Now, having depressing quests like this isn't that big of a problem in itself - after all, Raedric's Hold is a pretty bleak place, but thanks to a variety of options, it's one of the better areas in the (base) game - but having a quest that's both pretty dull, sad, and has you playing the role of a fed-ex employee who doubles as a bearer of bad news, isn't really the type of quest the game should have more of.

By contrast, TWM has quests that usually also provide a certain darker, more realistic edge to typical fantasy tasks, but they also give you a greater opportunity to play the hero (as in - a person who solves problems).

All of that comes down to the main quest and central themes/problems the game revolves around, which is that there are no answers to the great questions in life because it seems life is meaningless, so much to the point that people created a pantheon of gods to try to fill in the aching existential wound.

All, or at least, most of the side quests touch thematically upon this to underscore the point of the overarching story. This is a common thing to do in storytelling, the problem is it's a terrible one to center a story around as it just keeps pounding a bleak, depressing feeling into the player over and over and doing so in a sadly predictable manner.

I've mentioned it before, but once I completed a companions quest, namely Aloth's I could predict how the rest would end. Next came Eder's which is where it dawned on me and I realized how it would end before I arrived in the final place the quest involved. His quest ending abruptly with him shrugging his shoulders and admitting he'll never know exactly what happened to his brother only cemented things. Hiravias' quest was the only modestly surprising one. Why? Because it wasn't as crushingly depressing as the rest. As soon as I knew what Sagani was seeking I knew she was going to find it dead hours before that happened.

In the end, they should not have chosen such an issue to tackle for a first game in a series, especially in a newly introduced game world. Get people sucked in and caring about it before tackling something like the potential nihilism of existence and do it without being so fucking heavy handed about something that just makes you want to wither and sigh.
 
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ilitarist

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Knight-errants aren't a thing that actually existed in any accountable or sizeable fashion as "adventurers", especially not in medieval period. They didn't go around saving damsels and fighting evil, those are romanticised folk tales. There did exist lesser nobles without landed titles that served local gentry or lords, in hopes of getting landed titles for their service but that's about it. This was most common in Italy, especially northern Italy where it culminated into full blown mercenary companies lead by lesser nobility fighting each other at pay of landed lords. The term free lancer also refers to these type of people, who could afford arms and armour but didn't have lands to attend to.

There's so called problem of second sons. Knight-errants obviously came from younger siblings in places where firstborn inherited all the land. It was often assumed the second son would go and become a priest/bishop/cardinal/pope. But obviously not everyone wants to join clergy.

The real problem with adventurers is that there are better ways of earning money. Not just serving some other lord - if you go "adventuring" you are probably gonna become a bandit. I heard an interesting version of one of the reasons for crusades: all those 2nd and 3rd sons became so numerous by the end of 11th century and there was so few unclaimed lands that they had nothing to do apart from claiming some bridge or road and offering "protection service". Crusades, among other things, gave something to do to those guys. Even after the Crusade has ended Holy Lands had lots of things to do and lots of neighbouring infidels.

It sounds very much like a strech and something that happened accidentely instead of being planned. However it highlights the fact that if you want to go "adventuring" you are better to join some sort of organization and/or be on frontier. Another real-world example of adventuring would be Cossacks in Siberia. They had governmental approval of being there and very little support; they came in, allied or exterminated local tribes, hunted for furs and looked for gold. Can't think of anything closer to open-world adventuring in a real world.
 

ilitarist

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Same reason the protagonists of the previous games go on a quest for the water chip/GECK/daddy, because you're supposed to care about your vault/tribe/family even if you are the worst person on the planet. That's pretty much all that's estabilished though, the bare minimum to have a coherent story.

Also, you're a courier in a shithole world with raiders and mutants and giant ants, it's not unreasonable that the PC would know how to defend himself just enough to survive your average trip between towns. Besides, you're not given a specific reason for chasing Benny, so it's left somewhat open - maybe you want simple revenge because you're a hothead and some pompous fucker left you for dead in a shallow grave, you want the chip to deliver it because neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays you from the swift completion of your appointed rounds, you're the heroic type who realizes there's something more sinister about this than just a robbery, you fell in love with him because you're a psycho bitch, maybe you never really cared about him but you figure he can lead you to his employers and you always dreamed of leaving that banalshitboring job and joining the Legion, etc.

Vault/tribe/family saving is understandable motive. Finishing the job that will bring you 250 caps (you can earn more by doing couple of things in Goodsprings) doesn't feel like a good reason for coming after a gang that had already shot you in cold blood. Even if it costs you job. Yes, there are plenty of possible explanation but very little of those that I can project on myself; and roleplaying games are usually about imagining you are there. Of course, you also invent specific characters to play as but it's not the first thing most players do. Courier is a mundane enough job for you to imagine average Joe in his place and average Joe in this situation runs away. Even Skyrim did it better: in the beginning you're not sure about your legal status but it feels right to go tell people about a dragon; it also makes sense to ran away and look for new identity and job somewhere else.
 

Azarkon

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2,989
Knight-errants aren't a thing that actually existed in any accountable or sizeable fashion as "adventurers", especially not in medieval period. They didn't go around saving damsels and fighting evil, those are romanticised folk tales. There did exist lesser nobles without landed titles that served local gentry or lords, in hopes of getting landed titles for their service but that's about it. This was most common in Italy, especially northern Italy where it culminated into full blown mercenary companies lead by lesser nobility fighting each other at pay of landed lords. The term free lancer also refers to these type of people, who could afford arms and armour but didn't have lands to attend to.

There also did exists some nobles that went on what could be called adventures after discovery of Americas by Europeans. A lot of Spanish conquistadors were basically lesser nobility with either no land or low revenue land that hoped to go on adventuring and get rich. They would assemble few men, a ship and set sail for the "New World", sleeping in their armours and interacting with native people to find themselves a place. These would be more fitting to the type of adventuring that seems to be more common in cRPGs but even then it's a bit of a stretch. Especially since they were just expeditionary forces in the end, doing little more than fighting, scouting, exploring and acting as local officers.

However looking for the counter-part of adventurer in real world is a futile exercise because it doesn't really matter. The book Don Quixote criticises this romanticised and on the whole silly view of knights of old, and that book was written while New World was very much still active conflict zone and most of Africa was not touched by Europeans. So by value of playing a fictional character with a motivation for adventure, you are given a certain context for adventuring that you are going to have to take at face value. So I think it's better to accept that it's part of the setting and hope that the writers will make it internally consistent within that setting. I think it's better that way too because there is not much mercenaries did except fighting and looting, nor knight-errants who were officers for armies and would take part in battles, or as personal guards of lords. Those are better fitting in a strategy game or turn-based tactics game than a cRPG. They are not going to be anything more than background that gives the protagonist the context of their adventuring, as per character building or roleplaying, choice amongst many.

Ideally of course this invented context would be provided to the player with other motivations that personally involves your character, where quests you take interest you as more than just mere vehicle for giving you a direction to kill more goons to get paid but that's about quality of writing essentially. Setting can justify armed adventurers doing work that is not just killing people for money. A quest about delivering an amulet can be interesting, even though it's basically menial busywork, even though by merit of real world background it is not entirely logical. Meanwhile a quest about killing some bandits for just some coin can be very boring even if it befits an armed group of adventurers. So I think the critique shouldn't be about whether being a courier fits an armed adventure group but whether it's interesting, someway, to deliver that amulet and whether it aligns with general narrative direction of the game. This is I think best covered initially by letting main story of the game allow some side-stepping and perhaps even encouraging it as part of it, where the plot at points leaves MC to proceed at their own pace.

Knight-errants didn't save damsels or fight monsters in actual life, but boy, people sure dreamed they did, even back in historical times. We know this from reading all the fiction they wrote about it. It's a vital thread in Western literature through the ages, and that's how it eventually got spun into the cloth of CRPGs. Gygax didn't invent the adventurer. He took an existing trope and ran with it. Understanding the trope is key to understanding the role. Early Dungeons and Dragons pretty much assumed the player thought like a fantasy knight-errant. That's why the game was designed around treasure hunting, leveling, and combat. It sure as hell wasn't designed around dialogue, walls of text, or complex thematic explorations.

The problem with modern CRPG developers is that they can't, at a basic level, free themselves from this legacy, yet that doesn't stop them from trying. As other people have put it, CRPGs started off as attempts at emulating the classic pen and paper experience in a digital format. That's still what they are, when it comes to overall game play and structure. The whole concept of main quests, side quests, dungeon crawls, equipment, character progression... Those are all based on either Dungeons and Dragons or similar systems. As long as that remains the case, you can't get away from the principle motif of the game world, which is that of wandering parties of adventurers killing monsters, completing quests, and hunting equipment for the sake of self advancement or an excuse that requires it. Trying to avoid this in your story telling or world building is like trying to avoid the reason your game exists.

How might a completely different system look like? Well, it'd look like a separate genre, altogether. A game in which survival is the primary motivation, would probably look a lot more like Rust or The Forest. A game in which you always had a mission to complete, would probably be more similar to action games. Indeed, that's one of the observations I made about Nier: Automata - most of the side quests in that game felt as poorly motivated as they do in Pillars of Eternity - even though they were thematically relevant - and the game would've been better off without leveling mechanics. It goes back to trying to do too much within the confines of the genre.

So to get back to the argument: a quest about delivering an amulet can be interesting content, but for it to fit the logic of the game world, it has to be motivated within the context of the adventuring trope. Otherwise, it'll always feel disconnected and relatively out of place. Fortunately, most people are willing to forgive flaws of this sort, or in Jeff's words, they're willing to tolerate the story to get to the game play. Had that not been the case, Pillars of Eternity would've never sold a million copies.

But since we are talking about this specific flaw, I just have to keep on stressing that the reason it exists is because developers either cannot or refuse to grasp the central importance of the adventuring trope in CRPGs. For the typical CRPG game structure to feel properly motivated, the player either has to be driven by self advancement, or the side quests have to be requirements for the main quest... And in that case they aren't, to be a dick about it, side quests.
 

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