Back when we discussed Fallout 3 as a possible candidate for Spoiler Warning, we talked about the fact that the open-world setting and focus on inventory might make it difficult to keep the story flowing. We knew going in that we’d have episodes like this one, where very little happens and where we spend a lot of time walking and looking at menus.
Still, we did manage to get a sliver of plot in there. I do hope you find something to enjoy floating around in the thin broth of this episode.
About a third of the way through we hit the point where I thought of my column for last Friday.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
The game is structured so that the epic quests (the “main plot”, if you will) are broken up into books. The first is the prologue. This is made slightly more confusing by the fact that there is more than one prologue. There’s actually one for each stating area. (Dwarf, Elf, Human, Hobbit.) We’ve just finished off the Hobbit prologue. It’s been a bit long because we took a detour to do part of the human section in entries 6 through 8, and in fact we’re going to do a little more of the human stuff in the next few entries.
A bit about the Golfimbul thing:
I can’t really tell if the writers at Turbine actually intended the skull to be Golfimbul’s skull or not. The logic behind it – as I pointed out in this entry – is howling LSD-driven bowl-of-cocoa-puffs brand madness. I want to believe that this is a story of a silly bunch of hobbits who happen to repel an invasion in the process of jumping at shadows and telling each other ghost stories. But I never detected the wink from the writers. Halros is, like most rangers, portrayed as very wise, patient, and circumspect. (And useless.) He takes the invasion seriously, but he never takes an official position on the authenticity of the skull.
One thing I do notice about the writing is that they are far more careful about language than writing. Which is understandable, considering the nature of the source material. There are a lot of different groups in the game, and each has a distinct style of speech which is clearly conveyed in the quest text. This is particularly evident in your dealings with humans, where there are at least four styles or accents: Commoner humans, educated humans, rangers, and ruffians. There may be more and I’ve either overlooked them or I haven’t reached them yet in the game.
But while they’re very careful with language, the writing itself suffers from a lot of the same blandness and Plan 9 logic that is common to all MMO games. I suspect they write the quests normally (“normal” in this case being “while in the midst of a self-destructive heroin bender”) and then hand off the dialog to a writer who will then “Tolkien it up”. It actually does a lot to make the quests seem less silly.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
My latest comic. The Team Fortress 2 announcer continues to run Breen’s show… with hilarious(?) results.
I have to say I’m really enjoying doing this this long-ish story arc / crossover thing. I haven’t had this much fun since my Strong Bad / Sam & Max crossover. Maybe it’s time to break down and admit this is my calling in life. I was put here to write fanfiction.
I wonder what it feels like to have self-esteem?
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Because spoiling is What We Do as well as Why We Do It, I’ll reveal that this is the last episode for Reginald Cuftbert’s glorious summer bonnet of murder and theft.
No fear. Rutskarn has given us the following likeness of Reggie’s bonnet, so that we may treasure it in our pants forever, like an unpinned grenade from a disgruntled radio repairman.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Warning: The video review below is going to send certain people into a toxic rage. I can tell ahead of time. This is exactly the sort of nitpicking that drove people up a wall in my own Mass Effect 2 review, and the comment thread on that one was arguably more combative than some of the rare political / philosophical discussions that have broken out here.
Aside: Congrats to the idiots at YouTube who broke or obscured half of the site functionality when they tried to give themselves the Facebook makeover a couple of months ago. Embedding a playlist no longer works. Which sort of defeats the purpose of having them. If you want to watch the rest of the series, go here and hunt around in the least intuitive place for the controls you need and you’ll probably be able to muddle through.
I disagree with a lot of the points made and I like a lot of the aspects of the game he criticized, but I really enjoy watching deconstructions like this anyway. I find it interesting to see where the game connected and where it missed. Note how some flaws in the game appear again and again in various reviews, while others seem to only show up rarely or are unique to the reviewer.
People said I was “looking for things to complain about” with regard to Mass Effect 2, and I’m sure they’ll say the same about Smudboy, but I think what really causes this is Plot Collapse:
Story Collapse
We all have different levels of attention and tolerance for flaws in a narrative. Some people skim the plot, or play in fits and starts, or simply don’t delve too much into the structure of the world. Some people are just having so much fun they’re willing to forgive and forget when narrative anomalies appear. But once you do notice a problem, the part of your brain that enjoys revelations and learning is going to be irritated by it. Once you start noticing plot holes, you end up thinking about them and trying to iron them out in your head, which only draws more scrutiny and exacerbates the problem. When a story is flowing smoothly for you, then you let unknowns pass and assume they’ll be explained later. But as you lose confidence in the story you end up just adding those unknowns to the list of stuff that’s getting on your nerves and ruining immersion.
A lot of the points people – myself included – made about Mass Effect 2 are minor annoyances that would normally get overlooked if they were isolated. The original Mass Effect had holes that I didn’t notice until after the game was over, and some I didn’t even notice until someone pointed them out months later. But this is because the overall story was sound enough to get me through.
As plot aberrations accumulate, you’ll eventually hit some sort of point of no return, and the whole thing will fly apart so that you end up going on a long tirade about it. (To friends, in a forum, on a blog, in a video, etc.) I think this is a kind of catharsis. We generally want stories to make sense, and if we can’t make the story coherent then at least we can can gather up all the problems and catalog them in an orderly fashion, dangit!
Since that breaking point varies on an individual basis, you end up with some people accepting the plot and others rejecting it. Add in the fact that some fans blow a fuse when they see people disliking their beloved, along with the anonymity of the internet, and you have a great recipe for people getting all pissed off and irritated at each other.
Do try to keep a cool head about this.
(I still have about 2,000 words I want to write about the best part of the game. (Mordin, and everything about his recruitment, loyalty mission, dialog, and outlook.) But it keeps getting bumped off by other projects. I need to do it soon before I lose track of it. My mind isn’t what it used to be. (Operational.))
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Part of this might be the rise of consoles. Console players aren’t less literate than PC players, but it’s not a lot of fun reading tons of text on a standard definition TV. As the RPG genre branched out onto consoles, developers needed to make the game more television-friendly. I’m betting very, very few PC players listen to every line of voiced dialog all the way through. The voice acting in Mass Effect is outstanding, but I still find myself reading and skipping.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
I did this on a very modest scale when I played Sim City 2000. I messed about with zoning patterns and searched for a simple, repeatable block of stuff that was efficient and self-contained. The resulting city would be sort of Borg-ish, with the city being efficient, dull, and repetitive. I can still remember the pattern I used:
For the uninitiated: Green is residential. (Houses and apartment buildings.) Yellow is industrial. (Tractor factories.) Blue is commercial. (Wal-Mart.) The gray is roads. The government buildings in the middle cost money to build and run, and have a maximum effective radius.
I would alternate the commercial and industrial placement in every other square, so that you wouldn’t end up with four industrial places all at one intersection.
This was a pretty good pattern in the early game. The city would grow quickly and blocks would rapidly fill to capacity.
But somewhere around the mid-game the whole thing would begin to unravel. Traffic would become so dense that it threatened to collapse and form a singularity. I tried doubling the roads between tiles, but that only delayed the inevitable. I also had trouble with money because I couldn’t quite balance my public services. Fire stations don’t need to be as dense as police stations, so there was a lot of waste by building them like this. I did manage to fill the map, but my city was primitive and shabby compared to Magnasanti.
Interesting project.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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