Crypt Cleanser
Posts: 746
Joined: Thursday, 5th December 2013, 04:01
Re: Remove Beogh
watertreatmentRL wrote:@Implojin: DCSS is not a commercial title. It can never have the kind of brand that carefully planned and marketed games like the AAA titles you mention have.
Undertale isn't exactly a big-budget AAA title. There are plenty of small indie games that have good stories without huge budgets or marketing campaigns.
But I think that's also besides that point. Different games seek to accomplish different things - there's no set of universal rules for what a game always should be or what priorities games should always have, and anyone who disagrees is probably just confusing their own personal tastes with objective quality. Some games are all about telling a story that was written by the game creator (possibly one that the player can influence, but not necessarily an emergent one - in Undertale, for example, the player can affect the direction of the story, but ultimately they're still just playing between one of several versions of the story written by the same person). Some games are about the player creating their own story. In some games, the story is a major part of the game, and there are cases where the story even gets prioritized over gameplay. In some games, the story exists but is more just a narrative to explain the gameplay forward than a core part of the game. In some games, the story's just an afterthought, or completely non-existent.
So what matters isn't what other games try to do, but what DCSS tries to do. That's why DCSS has clearly-defined design goals in the first place - those goals aren't meant to be general rules for making a good game, they're rules for the kind of game DCSS is supposed to be. And the kind of game DCSS is supposed to be is generally one that prioritizes gameplay over flavor or storytelling, particularly relative to many other classic roguelikes that have features that make things more "realistic" or can create entertaining stories at the expense of bad gameplay.
But flavor is still important in DCSS, and creating fun stories is still part of the game, it's just lower priority than gameplay. And I do think Dpeg makes a valid point about the stories Beogh creates being a big part of the god's appeal. Whenever I read about someone playing Beogh, they're not talking about the gameplay style, they're talking about the experience of amassing an orc army, about how big their army was when they made it to depths, about the massacre that killed nearly everyone off in a vault somewhere, about their one orc warlord who survived from Orc 2 until Zot 5 and nobly sacrificed himself to an OoF in one of the lungs, and so on. I think that's part of what makes Beogh cool, it's part of what sets him apart from Yred, and ideally, a rework could preserve that.
One thought on the resurrection front: If resurrection hurts the emergent narrative component by making the deaths of long-standing followers less significant, maybe it could be reflavored. For example, you could flavor it as a different orc taking on the dead orc's legacy, rather than the orc coming back to life. So you can still have your story of that one warlord who survived for ages and then died to an ancient lich in depths, but now you get the extra story of the orc who continued his legacy and lived to see the Orb of Zot brought to the surface.
- For this message the author Quazifuji has received thanks: 2
- all before, Implojin