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Cliches you can't stand

Triggerhappy said:
On that note 'Choice' systems with narrative but no (or minimal) gameplay consequences. A minimal example would be Bioshock where choosing to spare little sisters nets you less ADAM, until you fill out your frequent savior card and get a plushy full of a ADAM in gratitude.(...)
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On the other hand, you can have the opposite - gameplay doesn't translate into choices. You could be a good guy for the entirety of the game, help the opressed, refuse more profitable options if they harm someone, donate to poor the and so on. A living saint - well, if we ignore that you usually slaughter hordes of mooks along the way, but who cares about them.

Then the end game comes and you have the final decision to make. Except for some reason, the obviously evil option isn't grayed out. Something that should logically disgust the character to their very core is casually available, as if it was any other choice along the way. No questions, no limits, just a simple click.

Jade Empire did that. Your final choice can end up killing half of your party who tries to stop you from an obviously evil act. And you probably doomed a ton of people to slow death, too. Sure, your alignment turns into pure evil - like it obviously should - but really?

Eh, moral choices are often a total mess in many games. Witcher does it pretty well, by really mudding things up and avoiding the usual "Child Eating Evil" and "Paragon of Humanity". Oh, and the "Neutral" guy, who's usually a boring nobody that wusses out of most decisions (until they consult gamefaqs for optimal rewards).
 
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Fernandel said:
...Can you please name an example of a story where this happened?
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It happens a lot in video games, really. 'Blasting all those nameless, faceless goons was fine, but the villain? YOU MONSTER'. Dishonored, as noted, is one of the more obnoxious examples. Bioshock is similar; saving Little Sisters is Good, harvesting them is Bad and running around shooting insane junkies is... morally neutral? Even the most Paragon Shepard or Grey Warden will have killed enough randos to erect their very own corpse mountain by the end of the game.

Though in the video games case its usually more a matter of gameplay and story not seeing eye to eye (ie the story wants the 'do you kill bosses y/n' thing to be a moral choice but the gameplay wants faceless goons running around until you kill them because action setpieces) and winding up contradicting each other.
 
Guessmyname said:
It happens a lot in video games, really. 'Blasting all those nameless, faceless goons was fine, but the villain? YOU MONSTER'. Dishonored, as noted, is one of the more obnoxious examples. Bioshock is similar; saving Little Sisters is Good, harvesting them is Bad and running around shooting insane junkies is... morally neutral? Even the most Paragon Shepard or Grey Warden will have killed enough randos to erect their very own corpse mountain by the end of the game.

Though in the video games case its usually more a matter of gameplay and story not seeing eye to eye (ie the story wants the 'do you kill bosses y/n' thing to be a moral choice but the gameplay wants faceless goons running around until you kill them because action setpieces) and winding up contradicting each other.
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Wait, but I thought if you kill nobody except the villains, you can still get a reasonably positive ending? I thought there was some sort of meter where the more you kill, the worse. So you can totally do a 'No kill except villains' thing and get a good ending, I think.

You can play the person who thinks that the only justice for the monsters at the top is death while not wanting to kill any other innocents, or people who are guilty of nothing but loyalty to an evil regime.
 
Fernandel said:
...Can you please name an example of a story where this happened?
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foamy said:
Well, there's a nonlethal Dishonoured run...
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As pointed out, you get rewarded at times for going with a less-lethal run in Dishonored compared to killing them but staying low chaos overall (even if half of the targets end up dead anyway via the non-lethal methods).
The Laurent said:
Wait, but I thought if you kill nobody except the villains, you can still get a reasonably positive ending? I thought there was some sort of meter where the more you kill, the worse. So you can totally do a 'No kill except villains' thing and get a good ending, I think.
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Yes, killing the guards brings up the chaos score, the higher it is the less optimistic the ending is, low chaos everything is mostly fine, medium and a friendly NPC hates your guts, high chaos and everything goes to hell.
 
The Laurent said:
Wait, but I thought if you kill nobody except the villains, you can still get a reasonably positive ending? I thought there was some sort of meter where the more you kill, the worse. So you can totally do a 'No kill except villains' thing and get a good ending, I think.

You can play the person who thinks that the only justice for the monsters at the top is death while not wanting to kill any other innocents, or people who are guilty of nothing but loyalty to an evil regime.
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I was under the impression it was 'Chaos' (ie how many dead people are found and so on). Yeah if you kill literally everyone things get worse but it gives a lot of leeway for murdering random city guards and so on.

Admittedly, I don't know the specifics of how Dishonored's 'High/Low Chaos' system works exactly. Some of the non-lethal takedowns really aren't morally... virtuous though (Lady Boyd, anyone?) or result in death indirectly rather than directly.

Equally admittedly, this may have been personal frustration with the quality of Dishonored's writing (and lack thereof).
 
Guessmyname said:
I was under the impression it was 'Chaos' (ie how many dead people are found and so on). Yeah if you kill literally everyone things get worse but it gives a lot of leeway for murdering random city guards and so on.

Admittedly, I don't know the specifics of how Dishonored's 'High/Low Chaos' system works exactly. Some of the non-lethal takedowns really aren't morally... virtuous though (Lady Boyd, anyone?) or result in death indirectly rather than directly.
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Yeah it does. Chaos is how often you're seen, if your body piles are found (even if they are unconscious) if you kill people, etc.

The thing is, it's a bit of a fuck up in the writing, Chaos is directly correlated with Good and Evil in some respects, when it wasn't intended that way, but they still did it. Basically they took something they intended to be divorced from good and evil, and slapped it onto a good evil axis any ways.

(Which is a Cliche I hate)

Basically, the more food the rats have the worse the plague is. The more afraid the city is, the harder it is to keep order. The more murderlacious you are (or even people thinking you're a murderer), the more frightened your allies get.

Also, Corvo was tortured for 6 months in Coldridge, I would not blame him for being more than a little sociopathic to the assholes who put him there.

Guessmyname said:
Equally admittedly, this may have been personal frustration with the quality of Dishonored's writing (and lack thereof).
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I actually think D1 has pretty good writing, and excellent...mmm, don't know how to put it exactly, but the way they controlled your emotions at times with level designs. Flooded District. D2 canon is that you didn't kill Daud, and floating into the Flooded District I could viscerally feel the disgust, and the sense that Corvo would be sick to Death of Death in that level is quite realistic to me.
 
One of the perks of Silent Protagonist Corvo is that you can read him however you like; if you choose to go the Clean Hands route, then it can be to defy the Outsider, in recognition of the fact that like it or not, Dunwall needs those asshole guards and doesn't need anyone else fed to the rats, or because death's too good for your targets. Hell, you can cast sneaking past Daud as prolonging his torment, making it clear that his defenses are less than nothing and that (as in his DLC nightmare) you can come for him at any time.

That being said, I'm not a fan of the canonical sparing of Daud, because while almost every Corvo could go either way on most of the targets, you need to be either unnaturally saintly or unnaturally bastard-y to let him go. In my first playthrough, going to the Flooded District was where I decided "Fuck this, fuck everything, I am going to stab motherfuckers until my [strike]daughter[/strike] empress pops out."
 
Robert Liguori said:
I mean, if you're going to be telling stories about immortals as anything other than code for Cool Adults from a YA teen lit perspective, I think you should stare squarely at the 985-year age gap, and reflect on how much better it really becomes when it's a 980-year gap or a 975-year gap instead.
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Teenagers haven't finished developing the decision-making part of their brain, and quite a few other parts. The fact that it has finished developing would make them significantly more tolerable than any other difference in age (70 to 90, etc.), from my point of view.
 
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The Laurent said:
Wait, but I thought if you kill nobody except the villains, you can still get a reasonably positive ending? I thought there was some sort of meter where the more you kill, the worse. So you can totally do a 'No kill except villains' thing and get a good ending, I think.

You can play the person who thinks that the only justice for the monsters at the top is death while not wanting to kill any other innocents, or people who are guilty of nothing but loyalty to an evil regime.
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That's entirely correct, though if you listen to the Heart basically half the population of Dunwall are complete assholes :p
 
The problem with Dishonored is that it feels like they designed the first level with the High Overseer, thought it was cool, and decided that the game needed a sub-Monte Cristo pay evil unto evil edge for the pacifist run.

But the ways it goes about it are kind of half-baked, hardly any of the targets have the presence in the story to make a punishment satisfying. Sure, the High Overseer one works, but what's next? The Pendletons? Who the fuck are the Pendletons? Oh, they vaguely support the bad guys and use slave labor, thanks for telling me that, game. Oh, so the ironic punishment is them being mutilated and turned into slaves themselves, but we're not going to see that huh? Thanks again for telling and not showing.

And then comes Lady Boyle. Who the fuck is Lady Boyle? Oh, she's just basically a financier for the bad guys, and you wanted a clever scenario where you have to find out which woman is the real target so it's three people. Okay, who are they then? Oh, so only one of them can be definitively be described as "evil" according to second hand sources, and one of them is pretty much totally innocent of any wrongdoing other than possibly being one of the conspirators.

Okay, so what punishment would fit for this character? Well, she's rich, maybe she can be impoverished! Wait, no! She's also a hot girl! So maybe she can... *scratches head* get raped? Woah, woah, back up. Okay, she gets kidnapped by a creepy stalker instead and is probably raped. That makes me look like less of a fucking weirdo!

Then the game just kinda gives up and has you take out Burrows in a much more just, and outright heroic method. Then the other Conspiracy pretty much dies off on it's own.

Also, the way it handles Daud's pacifist fate is kinda bullshit for the Monte Cristo anti-hero theme. This is the motherfucker who impaled the mother of your child with a sword, no ironic fate for him? I mean, that works if I'm supposed to be a straight hero, not so much as a vengeful anti-hero.

Dishonored was much better as a collection of playable vignettes in an interesting setting than was as a single coherent narrative.
 
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I'd feel more cliché'd by Dishonoured if it always presented evil ironic opportunities or always straight-modern-heroic ones. Life doesn't always give you thematically identical opportunities in a row, so the variety is a good thing to have in a game too.
 
Vyslanté said:
> Assuming space is the exact same thing as the West
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Of course it's not the exact same. No two things above molecular level are the exact same.

So where does one place a frontier-minded society, such as a libertarian one, when writing SF that is meant to include multiple highly diverse society types?
 
vicky_molokh said:
So where does one place a frontier-minded society, such as a libertarian one, when writing SF that is meant to include multiple highly diverse society types?
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...let me reformulate : Libertarians annoy me enough here, and thus I don't want them in my scify. Especially since the concept of a society based on individualism and each-for-his-own thriving in an environment actively trying to kill you seems dubious.
 
Vyslanté said:
...let me reformulate : Libertarians annoy me enough here, and thus I don't want them in my scify. Especially since the concept of a society based on individualism and each-for-his-own thriving in an environment actively trying to kill you seems dubious.
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It's just that your comment seems not so much as a criticism of a cliché of placing them in space (admittedly I've encountered a few such samples, e.g. Duncanites and New Attica) as a thinly-veiled "stop writing about THOSE PEOPLE" (even though it was possible to offer the alternatives of, say, Rapture or analogue of Galt's Gulch).
 
vicky_molokh said:
It's just that your comment seems not so much as a criticism of a cliché of placing them in space (admittedly I've encountered a few such samples, e.g. Duncanites and New Attica) as a thinly-veiled "stop writing about THOSE PEOPLE" (even though it was possible to offer the alternatives of, say, Rapture or analogue of Galt's Gulch).
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Well, there is indeed a good part of "I don't want to read things about that", but it's even more present when in space – like I said, I find the idea of a purely individualistic society thriving in space dubious at best.
 
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