I can't think of any game that lets you, the character (or people operating under the instructions of the PC) rape people. Obviously I'm excluding porn games, but the only major game I can remember at all that even mentioned rape is FEAR, which actually had reverse rape if I recall correctly.

 

It's called hyperbole. I'm implying a very binary choice - evil mustache man. Rape (unless under some extremely contrived circumstance) has no redeeming moral characteristics.

 

Dude, rape never has redeeming moral characteristics.

On topic, I can't see--and I hope we never do--see rape as a playable choice in any mainstream video game. It would undo years of work, and give credence to every hack who gets up on their bandwagon every time video games are linked in any way to any sort of crime.

 

The only reason I can see someone putting it in is to deliberately defy the social justice warriors who are constantly calling for censorship and inventing new things to be offended over. Other than that I don't see much value in it. You can already murder people and otherwise humiliate them in a lot of these games. I never play straight evil anyway, so even if there were an option I wouldn't take it.

Back on Dragon Age, I've reinstalled it and sort of skimmed my way with a slapped-together character to Lothering. This is something of an extension of what I was saying before about companion armors, but jeez the art design is inconsistent as fuck. Sometimes it looks good, other times it looks like WoW, which is awful. Massive armor almost makes me think I'm playing Warhammer, and all the weapons, even the damn daggers, are huge. I really hope they look more closely at realistic weapons and armor, or at least examples like the Witcher or Game of Thrones (and considering how they kept saying ASoIaF was an inspiration for Dragon Age back when Origins came out, especially the latter -- as much as I dislike it, it has a good aesthetic).

Also, modding. Unfortunately the DAO modding community isn't nearly as good as say, Fallout's or The Elder Scrolls', but at least they put out a toolset and encouraged it. They didn't do that with DA2, and I'd say that game needs player-made mods to fix things more desperately than even Skyrim did.

 

Hitler has you at gunpoint and says you need to rape that woman or shoot her in the head. If you try to shoot yoruself, he will shoot her. If you run away, he will shoot her. That kind of contrived situation would make rape the "good" option. That's what I was saying by "contrived situation" - there are situations where being forced to commit some awful act prevents a much more awful act from occurring. Such situations are almost purely hypothetical though.

As far as rape being in video games - I think it depends on the context. If you're playing as Viking pillaging some European settlement, I think rape should be mentioned, if not explicitly made aware of to the player. Ignoring rape, which is what some overly protective people would have us do, does more harm in the fight against rape, than it does any good. Games probably shouldn't depict graphic rape (though movies and even televisio now can do this and not receive any controversy over it), or have the player commanding the act of it, but I'm fine if we give players the choice to do despecable thing off screen, especially if the result of raping someone is treated very negatively in the game world and its narrative. As long as there's proper consequence to a horrible action, I think in theory, it can be fine. Of course, there willl always be perverse people who get off on doing these horrible acts in a virtual world, but I'm not sure that's a good enough reason to censor ourselves, if we have something meaningful to achieve by including them in the game. There's no reason to suggest video games can't handle rape as well as some literature or movies do, it just depends on the tone and method of executing such a thing.

DA2 still uses the same engine as DAO. You can mod it. I even tried making mods for it to improve the game, but I wasn't very successful. I'm good at scripting, but DAO and DA2 have an ancient engine (same one used for NWN1 believe it or not) and it's fucking terrible trying to make something working for it. For DA:O, I tried to make a random loot generator, something like you might find in a Diablo game, but I just couldn't do it - you're just too limited in the game's code. There's a event code for a monster dying, but you can't seem to "get" the dying monster's loot table to modify anything, nevermind generate a blank item and change its propreties. Maybe it's do-able, but I just gave up on it. I'm sure a lot of other modders did the same.

 

I didn't say you couldn't, I just said support for modding was drastically reduced because they didn't release a toolset. I've got forty-five mods ready to go for when I decide to play DA2 again, but the majority of those are small, simple things like new face morphs or retextures, and the rest are fairly simple script edits for stuff like weapon and armor properties. Based on what I've seen, you can do stuff like that fairly easily with DA2, but you can't edit environments to make them less barren or anything, much less make whole new quests and campaigns like some people did with DAO.

Since they're making DA:I on a new engine and everything, I'm just saying that releasing a toolset again for the game definitely wouldn't go amiss. Ideally what I'd want is the same kind of mod support that TES gets, but, well, EA. "Why spend five minutes modifying an armor to look better when you could buy a cool armor pack for $10?"

 

I read somewhere that the Frostbite Engine is called "unmoddable", or that it's at least very hard to mod. Also, last time I was on BSN the general opinion was that there would be no toolset for DA:I.

Pity, really.

 

Seems you're right. And apparently this Frostbite engine was actually built so that it would be hard to mod? Jesus. It's like developers want to be hated these days.

Well if that's the case then they can at least have the fucking decency to make a game that stands on its own and not make us look at godawful, insulting shit like this.

 

Nah, they (or corporate) just don't want modders making their horse armor look bad.

Edit: Also, wow that's a beyond terrible texture, I guess I'd blocked out how bad they were.

 

Well, I imagine Frostbite is designed for consoles, just like BioWare's main platform is consoles, so there's no point trying to make a console game moddable, especially if it could potentially introduce an exploit which makes a console rootable (a lot of Wii games had this problem), I'm sure they actively tried to make modding the game difficult.

Any game is potentially mod-able with a memory editor, you can't prevent mods, but modifying game code that way is difficult and slow.

I'm sure EA has convinced itself mods are bad anyway. "If our games are modable then that means any DLC we release can't be something a modder has already done. Mods reduce the sales of DLC." I could see them having that mentality.

But really, in a console centric design philosophy, you're targeting burst sales for the first six to eight weeks. Modability improves the longevity of a game and makes sales steady (where's my evidence for this claim? Look at the major success of the indie game M&B), but they have no bearing on a short market cycle like that.

 

[Edit] Some controversial stuff removed. Obviously rape is bad and not to be joked about.

... awkward silence ...

In Kotor straight up evil is just killing the good and bad guys and whoever else is possible and ruining some lives. In Fallout 3 or LV its becoming a cannibal and killing anyone. If we're thinking about violence they are already pretty violent and grim. Especially if you consider the body counts.

Was it GTA where you could beat and\or run over hookers?

 

Stop, you used Hitler. Big no no. It just destroy any argument. Also, the gunpoint thing is just slightly better than Hitler.

You guys keep talking about Tevinter Blood Mage, well fuck that, i demand Female Kossith, and a hot one. Give me something like Kreya or Wynne and I will shit on your carpet. And it's gonna be so big even Bono is going to say "That's a really big shit". Also, rogue with magic sound pretty cool.

 

...mentioning one of the best characters in any RPG ever in the same sentence as that possessed Nanny? Fighting words, son.

 

What else?

It would've been no different if he'd used Emperor Palpatine. Besides, I'm pretty sure Godwin's Law is reserved for actual debates.

:|

Well on that I can agree at least. We had a Spellsword option with the Arcane Warrior in DA:O, maybe they should try out a Nightblade.

 

I somehow knew I would cause this discussion by just mentioning it. I was hoping we'd be better than this though. My comment wasn't meant to be taken seriously.

Rape is in movies and television and books, et cetera, there's no reason why it can't have a place in the narrative of a game, or even as a mechanic within a game, though again, I'd advise not having the player physically rape anybody, unless, I don't know, the game intends to have real ramifications from that act. Otherwise you run the obvious result of encouraging or rewarding some kind of rape mentality.

Really, really, did you have to say something this stupid? Couldn't you keep your stupid to yourself? "Reverse rape" does happen and when it does it's no less traumatizing to a male.

Rape is non-con sex. Period. Someone ties you up or something, and then does sexual shit to you that you don't want and don't enjoy. It's not a fun experience, even if you're male. The idea that boys and men can't be raped (by the opposite sex, which is what's implied here) is not only stupid and ignorant, but hypocritical. No, women aren't the only sex who can be raped, and no, not all men are ravenous sluts that would enjoy being raped.

Let's drop this shit, seriously, it's not viable discussion.

 

Took me a moment to remember where that came from, because I haven't played Skyrim very much, and haven't played Oblivion in years.

But yeah, I'd love a Nightblade specialization. The thing is, I don't entirely know how they'd be implemented mechanically, to differentiate them from Arcane Warriors.

My first thought was "Magical Body Enhancement," but that's what AW's do. They even have an Evasion increase.

I guess you could still go for it, but with a bigger focus on Evasion and Attack Speed, with a few magical attacks.

Anyone else got ideas for how it could go?

 

How to do a magical warrior hybrid? Sure, easy enough. Look at Path of Exile, they have Templars and Shadows. Er right, okay, maybe it's not so easy.

The problem with magic based warriors is they are either gimped mages or mages who are tanky. The former is useless and the latter is too strong.

I'd make a magical warrior about evasion over physical defense, because it's too hard to balance (and create a fun character) a mage that's Templar-y, they either are slow and clunky or do too much damage and have too much defense (or are just support characters).

Make a magical warrior focused around physical evasion, instead of an abstracted evasion stat. I guess I'd call this kind of fighter a, "Ghost" or something - they have arcane talents in the forms of offensive spells like fireball, but excel more at empowering their melee attacks with magical spells. For example, you have a fireball spell, but you can choose to enchant fireball on your blade, causing you to shoot fireballs when you attack or kill enemies. You could empower a healing spell on your blade to heal you on attack, or you could empower it with something like petrify, to make your weapon penetrate armor better. So, you have high magic and physical offensive ability, with plenty of weapon skills, but you have less defense than a mage, you either don't get mage shielding spells, or you just have less health overall. A class like this is only effective when they attack in melee range, then, at critical moments, teleport/blink to safety to avoid damage - they're centered around spell-based relocation or speed enhancement.

Still would be hard to balance, however. That's the trouble with a mage-warrior hybrid.

RPGs need to be about roles, really. It's hard to say how they should do hybrid or even pure classes, without having the context of what they're up against. I don't like the holy trinity, but it's a basic dynamic that works - however, the holy trinity just has room for three roles, which is just too constraining. You have to design an RPG that allows for multiple kinds of party make-ups, but also give each class a distinct role to play. It can't be arbitrary, like Ghosts have a skill that let them kill enemy type X, that no other class can kill... because then it weakens group make-up complexity (you need a ghost to succeed), but at the same time, the role has to be meaningful enough that it can't just be dropped.

 

On mods:

Frostbite wasn't designed to be unmoddable, it just contains a lot of licensed technology that would be prohibitively expensive to make publicly available. I don't know why DICE chose to go with that route when they built the engine, given the popularity of modding the the Battlefield series, but I guess writing the whole engine themselves just wasn't possible for whatever reason.

 

Fixed that for you. I'm perfectly fine with semi-complex loops of gibberish with different voices and tones of gibberish for different situations.

But not ripples like that. If something like what you described happened in a TRPG, I would accuse the Game Master of deliberately fucking with the players, and rightfully so.

Sometimes giving a begger a coin is just giving a begger a coin. It doesn't have to snowball to anything, ever.

You seem to be forgetting that Kreia is an existentialist nihilist and pessimist masquerading as a rationalist. She is also

Spoiler

a Sith, and more importantly, a liar who is trying to manipulate you. Spoilered since some people still somehow haven't played the game, what the hell are you people even doing?

There are two main things that piss people off as far as 'choices' are concerned. You fix these, and the only people who will still complain are either people who get off on complaining, or snotty people that insist that the freedom to do whatever you want is the only thing that gets them off. We call these people "Chaotic Neutral" in the tabletop world, and you should punch them whenever you cross paths with one.

So choices, the big choices, need to matter. That's one. What is two?

All this really boils down to, both of these points, is the idea of 'making a difference.' If a little girl in a marketplace has a line where she references A.) your class and B.) your moral exploits, that gives the player the feeling that they have made some kind of palpable off-screen difference, even though it's just a scripted line the game throws out at you for meeting certain criteria.

Likewise, being able to influence the personalities, beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes of your followers/companions/party members/whatever is you making a difference on a personal level. It's not geographical or abstract like the girl. You've actively made a difference in someone's life, and they have been changed by your presence.

Know who you can't change? Morrigan. She's arrogant, vain, rude, nihilistic, hypocritical, and the only common vein in what she likes is that it involves being an asshole to someone else. She hides behind an excuse of being "survivalist," or allowing nature to take it's course, but multiple times you can choose to do just that, and she will disapprove of it. It's a lie. She's just an asshole, and gets off on asshole behavior.

And that doesn't make her a bad character.

What makes her bad is that you can't change or influence her in any way. You can't slap some sense into her, verbally or literally. You can't prove her wrong or force her to sit down and reconsider her beliefs through a prompted debate and carefully selected sequence of retorts. You also cannot encourage her behavior and give her the transition from irritating teenage rebellion to outright villainous behavior. Morrigan is, morally and ethically, a bad person, but more importantly, she is an unmoving rock sitting in the middle of a field. You can push and poke and prod and shove all you like. Nothing changes or moves. That's why she's bad. You can neither save her nor lead her down a path that encourages her behavior. You can't even do neither of those but give her something important to think over about what she should really choose to believe in. You can't change her. Thus, your choices in regards to her effectively do not matter, and thus, she is a bad character.

See, here's the thing that I think a lot of people, both in the gaming industry and in this thread, don't understand. Storytelling is an illusion, a deception perpetuated by a magician pulling strings and making appropriate things happen at the appropriate time. Being able to free roam, sandbox, choose where you go and when, or any of those things? None of them are actually necessary to making a player feel like they're having an impact on the game.

What you're doing, Chime, is making the same mistake that BioWare and EA are already making, which is that you need big, complex, expensive contraptions in the background running the illusion of this puppetshow. That you need these huge interconnected webs of choices and choose-your-own-adventure settings

You don't. All you actually need is a bit of string, a sock, a pair of scissors, and a piece of paper, and a few choice words in the right place at the right time. I know. I've done it that way before.

And you can do it that way because it's the little touches that count.

You could railroad the player straight down a set of tracks with no ability for them to choose where they'll go next, and you could set them loose in an open world free to go and do whatever they want whenever they want to, and neither will be any more or any less of a role playing experience from each other if the player doesn't feel like what they are doing is having any effect on the world around them. That's actually one of the biggest failings of The Elder Scrolls series as of late, and I say that as a huge fan of the setting.

You want to make somebody believe that the world they're playing in is real, for just an instant? You want someone to think they've had an effect in the world around them?

You railroad the fuck out of them, force them along a straight path, have a part of the plot where they wind up thrown in jail, and then, if they helped out some guy in a way that saved him or turned his life around in the beginning areas of the game, one of the guards palms you the key to your chains as he marches you away, and whispers "Heard what you did for my cousin down in Briarwall. Wait until the third watch to make your go; that's when the gap is longest, on account of dinner in the great hall." And instead of having to pick that lock or knock out a guard, the player gets to use a key and walk out, provided they time it right.

You do that, you fill a game up with things like that, and you'll have someone believe that the role they played has made a difference. Sandboxes and railroad ties have nothing to do with it, and neither do interrelation charts or choice webs.

 

While I liked Morrigan, I do agree that not being able to alter her in a very meaningful way is a big wasted opportunity. If you romance Morrigan you can kind of change her, at the very least regarding her opinions on love and being able to care about someone, but it's still not to the extent I'd like.

As far as open world vs. railroading goes, that ties into an argument I've come across repeatedly about the last two Fallout games (sorry for repeatedly bringing them up, but it's kind of the flavor of the month for me and I try to keep it relevant). Some people preferred how FO3 basically let you roam free after you escaped Vault 101 and disliked how New Vegas tried to shoehorn you into a certain path, putting high-level monsters like Deathclaws in the way of all the other possible routes to your end destination. Others preferred NV's method, saying led to a lot tighter role-playing experience as the path the developers put you on slowly introduced you to all sorts of factions in the Mojave and let you build up your skills at a reasonable level. Needless to say I support the latter opinion. Open worlds of the TES sort don't really hook me in the same way linear narrative-focused games do (though other qualities still endear me to those games), but Obsidian sort of hit the sweet spot for me.