Showing Posts For crawlkill.6174:
Besides crawlkill nearly having an aneurism while chastising the imperfection of a fantasy universe he paid to be a part of
yeah, my mistake, huh? I’d been playing TSW and had forgotten how normal MMO writing works. good to’ve been reminded what the fanbase is like.
an antagonist you can’t sympathize with is a failed antagonist. why do you think you know the name Loghain? why do you think anyone ever read Song of Ice and Fire?
@nonsensicles
that's my entire kittening point. and the problem is that THAT'S EXACTLY HOW THE DREAMERS BEHAVE. the Nightmare Court are -more tablety- than the Dreamers. the Dreamers become insanely murderous to defend themselves against the perceived "incurablle!!!" threat of the Nightmare Court, but they know of no way to resolve their conflict with the Nightmare Court other than to murder All of They!!.meanwhile, the Nightmare Court uses rational persuasion (and, admittedly, dumbkitten torture! why? because the people who wrote this game are idiots!) to convert disciples.
ugh ugh ugh
You can’t cure Nightmare corruption. You can’t. It’s been stated, flat out, in the lore.
You can’t. The end.
oh my. well as long as someone in charge said so that TOTALLY makes it an interesting and legitimate plot element, ey? ey? this thread is a criticism of the way the Guild Wars setting is being handled, babygirl. consider that “BUT THE SETTING SAYS SO” is not a legitimate response. I’m not saying the sylvari are wrong in-universe; I’m saying the universe is super dumb.
Edit: The nightmare corruption is not the flu. They say it is an illness metaphorically.
If it’s something that causes a fundamental change in a person, then yes, it is an “illness.” That doesn’t mean it’s a bacterium, but if it’s something that apparently for some fiat mystical reason can’t be reverted from, then YES, it is a DISEASE. If it writes absolute and permanent changes on your person, it’s a PATHOLOGY. It’s clearly not just some kind of political or religious statement, because apparently, for magicable reasons, you “can never come back.” It breaks you. Therefore: Illness. Feel free to google “basilisk hack” and get back to me.
]In general the Sylvari only kill foes that are hostile to others.
Like Caithe murdering prisoners who’ve surrendered, huh? Peaceful recruiters whom they tricked into wandering into the woods to have a civil conversation with them?
The Courtiers do kill Dreamers and anyone else on a regular basis.
Uh, you HAVE done the heart that is the first encounter you have with the Nightmare Court, right? The one where you wear a disguise and talk to Courtiers, and they say “You should never kill; if you kill someone, they can’t come to understand the Nightmare?”
How they convert Sylvari to nightmare is horrific to say the least.
Only they totally do it through just talking to Dreamers, too, and expressing their tenets in a clear and direct way—a thing Dreamers NEVER attempt to do with Courtiers. We witness this multiple times. Considering what Dreamers do to Courtiers they “take prisoner” that is to say “murder after they’ve surrendered,” it’s pretty kitten strong to say that what Courtiers do to Dreamers they catch is terrible. I think if you gave me a choice between being murdered after I’d surrendered and having my perspective changed to a more emotional point that my decision would be clear.
The consensus in this thread seems to be “but arenanat has sad that court am evil bade also no killin babby!!” Not too impressed.
(edited by crawlkill.6174)
I’ll admit, he was entertaining at first. Then I realised I was stuck with him for pretty much every Order of Whispers mission, which automatically gave them a much more light-hearted theme than I would have liked.
But this is the problem with the whole game, isn’t it? It tries to present this really epique!~~ tone, but then undercuts itself constantly with cartoonish buffoonish characters and plot elements. I mean…Star Wars quote jokes? Seriously? Not just one, but three in gradual succession? From the Order of Whispers plot character? There’s nothing WRONG with Star Wars quote jokes, inherently, but GW2 doesn’t seem to divide clearly between the moments when it’s taking itself seriously and the moments when it isn’t.
Again, the comparison to Secret World is apt: almost every character in TSW is funny, but it’s with a very dark, dry wit that the character is sometimes unaware of himself (look up Andy’s Kingsmouth monologues if you need an example). It’s not the banana peel slipping that seems to pervade Guild Wars. It’s not that it’s -bad,- as such, but it’s -childish,- and the game hasn’t set itself up to get away with being childish. If you wanna be childish and doofy, embrace it, the way Warcraft has (uh, mostly). Don’t pretend you’re some big involved plot one moment and then have exaggerated characters saying “Aren’t you a little short for a pirate?” the next.
the really sad part is that some of the incidental dialogues really are kinda funny, if mostly in a sweet deliberately-antihumor kind of a way. I grinned when I was interviewing the experiment skritt in Whatever Province. I don’t think the people who were writing Guild Wars weren’t good at their job; it just seems like somewhere along the line the marketing department decided, “Okay, we’re gonna play this one as safe as possible.” it’s a lowest common denominator thing.
and the really REALLY sad part is that if you lament this kitten in mapchat you’ll get shrieks of “THEN QUIT THE GAME.” really, Guild Wars 2? there are things about this product I don’t like, so I must hate it? sigh.
Saying “you can’t cure Nightmare corruption” is ridiculous. Again…does the real world give up on the ill, mentally or otherwise, after twenty-five years? It’s clear the sylvari DO see Nightmare membership as an illness. Its being irreversible is just some fiat declaration to make it okay to murder them by the M&Mly handful (and you can just bet there’ll be “redeemed Nightmarers” showing up somewhere down the line, since no nerd can resist the temptation to reenact Drizzt).
It’s really kind of ambiguous to me how the relationship between Dreamers and Courtiers has come to be what it is. Courtiers convert Dreamers, but Dreamers just murder Courtiers, and we see frequently that Courtiers recruit through persuasion just as they do through, uh, hands-on methods.
I don’t know. It all just seems pitched at that grade school level. “THEY ARE THE BAD GUYS WE ARE GOOD SEE WE BELIEVE IN CENTAUR MOSES.” Then any act is suddenly excusable, because, well, every eight-year-old knows you have to shoot the bad guys til they fall down.
And the murdering of prisoners? And the writing off people who join the Nightmare Court as somehow “irredeemable?”
My favorites so far have been “Death…good…” from zombie NPCs and the king in AC actually saying “Hahahahahahahaha!”
Even Robotnik didn’t say hahahahahaha.
Coming from the mindblowing monologues of Secret World, it’s been a little painful, yeah. Or…agonizing. I still remember every single NPC I ever spoke to in TSW, everything they ever asked me to do, lots of the jokes and little references they made, the way their voices sounded. In GW2 I never even know what I’m doing at a heart.
Sometimes GW2 pulls off cute, but the problem with being all "epic"y is that you need to take yourself seriously sometimes, and then…stilty stilt stilts. It makes me rull sad.
I’m not usually all that big on examining the reasoning behind illogical nonsense in fantasy settings, but the whole sylvari experience is so jarring that I feel like there must be something I’m not getting.
There’s all this focus on this mystical Centaur Moses tablet or whatever that was meant to be the inspiration for sylvari -being,- and the sylvari make reference to it constantly. I mean, the Nightmare Court EXISTS because they feel the sylvari need to reject Centaur Moses’ teachings and come over to Shaitanism or whatever. And yet the only tenet that it’s explicitly clear and possible to break,
IV. All things have a right to grow. The blossom is brother to the weed,
is violated -constantly.- I mean, apart from the fact that we ourselves as player characters slaughter people by the thousand just because, well, it’s inconvenient that they should exist (skritt stealing tools deserved to be butchered and have their homes collapsed? really?), Caithe is far and away the most overtly murderous NPC I’ve ever seen in an MMO. Christ, in one of the intro stories she -takes a man prisoner, pumps him for information in exchange for the promise of his life and then murders him so he doesn’t warn the others.- Seriously, Caithe? You didn’t think maybe you could put one of those empty prison cells in the Pale Tree to use? In another, she beats down a Nightmare Courtier and then checks to make sure the Courtier’s really, really dead, the implication sort of being that she slit the woman’s throat. This kind of behavior is reprehensible, and I get that MMOs aren’t really supposed to be, like, ethically sensible constructs, but why is so much time spent TALKING about ethics that are then flagrantly ignored? I get that Caithe is being super soggy about her converted girlfriend or whatever, but seriously? Does that mean she goes and murders the sand person village, and the women, and the children?
As far as I can tell, the Nightmare Court actually sticks by Centaur Moses’ tenets MORE than the Dreamers do. Most significantly, they don’t kill people, they reeducate them to their way of thinking (ie ‘all things have a right to grow’ rather than ‘we don’t like you so we’re gonna blend you’). I’m not saying kidnapping people and torturing them until they convert to your weird Sith religion is cool, but at least it’s showing some kind of respect for the other person to exist. Meanwhile the Dreamers gleefully murder any Courtiers they get their hands on, because—this is my favorite part, this here—“there is no cure once you have fallen to the Nightmare.”
Excuse me? Sylvari have existed for twenty-five years, yes? Assuming the Nightmare Court was spawned on sylvari hatching day, that’s given these people no more than a quarter century to attempt to “cure” Nightmare Courthood, as though political/religious affiliation were a disease. Let’s compare that to the amount of time it’s taken us to pursue cures for polio, rabies, HIV, schizophrenia, amputated limbs, blindness, deafness. Many of these ailments are still with us, and some make people dangerous to others in various ways, but does that mean we say “nah, there’s no cure, shoot ’em in the head?”
What is UP with the ethics of this game, basically? If you’re gonna have a product be about slaughtering countless stacks of dudes because you disagree with them, that’s fine, but to then ham it up about what tranquil and loving people you are puts you on the ethical level of a Saturday morning cartoon. Is that the truth of it? Is that the target audience here? Am I missing something? Some footnote that says “IV (Section 2): Unless you don’t like the weed, then stomp it out utterly, take no prisoners, salt the earth, and kill all sand people for what they did to your mother?”
Eesh.