Reply 20 of 24, by shamino
- Rank
- l33t
TheMobRules wrote on 2021-04-30, 18:36:[*]Dragon Age: absolutely loved the first one, the second one was probably the biggest disappointment I've ever experienced in gaming, a truly wretched game in my opinion. I managed to finish it somehow, but by the end I was wishing that every character would die in horrible agony.Didn't bother playing the third one, all I saw was a clip of the characters having a discussion about modern social issues, and at that point I decided that I was fed up with nu-Bioware trying to force their morality lectures on the player, and that's not what I seek on medieval fantasy RPGs.
This is something that diminished GTA:Vice City for me. The radio in that game is generally fun, but the somewhat frequent injection of modern political attitudes against the 1980s setting were grating and anti-immersive. If I'm playing in a fantasy or historical setting, I want the setting to speak for itself in it's own words. I don't want to hear the developer's sarcastic opinions about it.
That's one of the reasons I think Apollo 13 is a great movie. It puts you in the culture of 1969/70 without any judgement. Most directors would feel required to make a social argument based on present-day beliefs and attitudes, but that movie didn't touch that. It's like 1970 made the movie about itself, instead of being made by a neighbor who wanted to show why it was superior.
That's the way I think most movies and video games should be made. The setting should be depicted according to it's own culture. I'm going into a fantasy world to escape to there, not to look at it through the glasses of today's contemporary world.
One of the most repelling games I've seen for me personally is Bioshock. I don't like most FPSes anyway, but this one pushes me away *hard* by being built around an absurd political caricature dreamt up by the devs.
Skyrim presented a compelling opportunity to join a rebellion against the Empire. That to me was the most interesting part of the game. "Politics" in a fantasy setting can add texture as long as the developers avoid taking sides and it isn't portrayed in a way that tries to connect it to anything in real life.
I was disappointed that Bethesda couldn't depict both sides with equal degrees of thought. Instead they clearly favored the Imperial perspective over Skyrim's. I pretty much had to read between the lines to side with the Stormcloaks, while the developers emphatically spelled out why they wanted me to do the opposite.
My "team" was depicted as stupid, racist, etc. not so much by opposing NPCs but by the writing of the game itself by the developers. They basically wrote the Stormcloaks to be dismissable via the typical one-word arguments we hear routinely in real life and to give them no ability to speak effectively for themselves.
I wanted to see stronger arguments for the Stormcloak side, arguments I could have written so I don't see why Bethesda couldn't.