Minor spoilers for some companion stuff in Baldur's Gate 2
Butch:
I got nothing new. Watched the Celtics with the kids because they wanted to see someone win a championship.
However, I wanted to chat on something Looty mentioned yesterday.
Looty mentioned he was in the slaver place and there were KIDS there. Kidnapped kids who were being forced to fight and were tormented by trolls.
Like…..
This game GOES places. That's interesting in and of itself in a D&D game, as they can be more T for teen, usually. However, I think it also goes places that games don't or CAN'T go today.
There's no way a game, with modern graphics, could have enslaved kids tormented by trolls. It would fail what Mrs. McP calls "The front page of the Globe" test, in which she tells investigators at her job "Don't do anything you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the Globe." Yet, here we have a game that came out a good decade after the "Oh my God! Mortal Kombat is going to rot everyone's brain!" pearl clutching, and no one batted an eyelash at this. Indeed, in Fallouts 1 and 2, which were isometric and very much like BG2, you could kill kids! Like, for fun! Which…eww. Cue Fallout 3, which looked a lot like Vegas and 4, and, not only could you not kill kids, if you hit them even by accident, EVERYONE turned hostile and you died very quickly. While I would never intentionally shoot a kid, there were a couple of times a fight would happen in a town and one stray shot would hit a kid 1000 meters away and the town you were defending would kill you. Annoying. I digress.
I do not like gratuitous icky in any art form. I, personally, would not want to play a game were children were in peril because that's gross. However, I AM someone who thinks a lot about games as an art form, and this train of thought leads me to think that graphics might actually be chilling what can be represented narratively in games, not in any legal sense like "We'll get banned," but just what stories people will cheerfully consume if they have to watch them in modern 4K vs isometric pixels.
I'm not sure that's good or bad, either.
Hmm.
Loothound:
Wow, I'm amazed that those older games worked that way. In this case it's really just implication. The kid was just in the same room as the trolls, you didn't really get any details about what was up with that. We can obviously assume "nothing good," but that's about it. You're right about kids being kind of sacrosanct now, which is a lot less icky. Even the old, infamous use/kill/rob hookers routine that the older GTA games used to permit has been left behind.
You're right, though, about the underlying implications that pop up in this game being really adult and dark. I keep thinking about what the dryads were saying to Imoen when we were still in the dungeon. They called themselves Irenicus's concubines, and they said they "recognized" Imoen. Imoen then a goes into vague and oblique ramble about what she witnessed/experienced when she was under his power. Then, one of them says to her (and I was kind of blown away at how heavy this line was, so I wrote it down), "Live as you can where you must, young woman. You will not survive if you give in. We have learned this." Freaking yikes with the implied trauma.
Anyway, I played. Stuck on the sewer pipe riddle. I hate ochres and jellies. I haven't turned the difficulty back up yet, and they're still freaking tricky to kill. I actually lured one up into the Copper Coronet, and was able to exploit a glitch to kill it. The jelly could enter the map, but not the inn proper, so I was able to pepper it with arrows while it was stuck in the hallway.
Glitches, though! I had Jaheira turn into a bear for a fight with some carrion crawlers, and now she's stuck that way! She's just a bear in a dungeon hallway. It says you can talk to her, but you can't, and now she's not in the party anymore. Goddamn liked her.
Feminina:
That is an interesting question.
Kids are such a (rightfully) sensitive topic that I think a lot of times games just don't have them, even where it would make sense to see some. I remember noticing that Cyberpunk 2077 had a lot of creepy, mini-grownup looking kids walking around, but they were rarely involved in any quests—mainly there were the child athletes in Phantom Liberty, and of course what's-his-name's nephew in the main game, but he was a teenager. You could probably run over kids or catch them in the crossfire with other civilian bystanders, although I never tried because I'm not that kind of monster, so I don't even know this is true. Maybe they were magically invulnerable on the streets.
And as you say, it's a lot different meeting these child athletes in all their high resolution PS5 glory, compared to some half-formed figures on a blocky map. We can stand to hear about things we can't stand to watch, for sure.
And yeah, is that good or bad? It potentially limits the stories that are going to be told, but there are always going to be limits on what stories are told, so is that particular one a limit we agree doesn't need to be crossed, or do we think child endangerment is a perfectly good subject for a side quest?
Hm.
Butch:
Well, we've hit limits before. TLOU2 was so into the fact that if a bad guy finds a dead bad guy, they'd wail and call them by name. "No…no…not Jenny! Jenny! No!" for each bad guy. We were all "Uh…great…that's…great. And nope." And that wasn't even kids!
I think, at some level, we need some barrier, and that barrier has to be a different barrier than, say, movies. Movies, I think, it's easier to watch awful things (but it's still awful to) because we're not "doing" them, we're not a "part of the world." Hearing someone wail over Jenny when we weren't the one that "killed" Jenny is somehow easier.
But is that barrier a bad thing when it comes to narrative?
Feminina:
I mean, it just depends on the narrative, doesn't it?
If we want to play games that are all torture and rape and child abuse at every turn because we like the 'gritty' reminders of how horrible the world really is, then yeah…barriers on how kids can be treated are a constraint on that narrative. And there's a place for that narrative, I'm not going to say no one should ever want to play that. Tell the stories you want to tell.
However, I will say that I probably do not want to play that. So is that bad for narratives I am likely to enjoy? Not really.
Is a widespread squeamishness about kids in the game-buying public going to put a limit on what narratives are going to be commercially viable, thus rendering some people unable to produce/purchase the games they wish they could play? Yes, but that's capitalism for you. It's certainly "bad for narrative" in a general way that certain types of narrative are seen as too unpopular to fund, because it does limit the kinds of narratives we're going to see, but we don't really expect that the market will support every conceivable type of narrative. And being limited by the market sucks in its own way for sure, but that's an issue to take up with capitalism, right?
I don't know what my real point is here, other than that this limit probably isn't any worse for narrative than any other concept that a lot of people probably won't pay for in a game.
Butch:
Ain't it the truth that games are capitalism. Sadly. But then, what art ain't?
Also, Loothound, YOU LOST JAHEIRA TOO????
Dude. I'd reload. You're missing a lot here.
What's so hard about the jellies?
The pipe puzzle was a bit annoying.
Loothound:
Yeah, see, I again don't have a save I can go back to with that. At least, not without going an enormously long way back at this point. I got into two fights before I noticed that she wasn't with me anymore. I feel like I'm always going to be missing a lot with this game, so I'm just going to full steam ahead with this thing and take whatever happens. I'm not interested in managing 5-6 different saves to make sure that I have all of my potential bases covered. The amount of ticky-tacky management stuff you already have to do in this game has got me pretty frustrated without throwing a bunch of saves on top of it. Honestly, I'm finding this game to be far more work than fun at this point.
This game is actually a pretty good translation of the tabletop version of D&D, but it's done so literally that it's really a pain to work with in a video game format. All of the things that you can quickly cover in a live game by just telling the DM what you want to do you actually have to do, each time, one by one. "I'm going to drop all of the axes I've been carrying," becomes clicking on the axes one by one and dropping them.
I went and grabbed Hexxat just so I'd have a 6th person. And the jellies have some pretty tough damage and magic resistances, plus they have poison.
Butch:
Fair. I guess when I can use all my saves slots for me it's easier. That and I save about every six seconds.
It picks up. You're still in the hinterlands.
Of course, part of the reason it picks up is the companions…..hmm.
Loothound:
Oh, I save almost constantly. On one slot. That's the problem. I realize that I have something that I want to redo that is pretty long past. There doesn't seem to be a lot of leeway with these companions.
Butch:
Ah, the one slot problem. I have like, six. I never go way back, though. I think it's a vestige of my PC gaming days when I was terrified of losing saves. I think I still have a thumb drive with my PC Dragon Age and Fallout 3 saves on it.
Because you never know.
Even when you know, you never know.
T SHIRT!!!!
Feminina:
It's going to be fine. There are plenty of other companions around! There's definitely no point making the game more annoying. It is already plenty quirky, and it's definitely more of a hassle to save a lot when you have to be careful every time not to save over the wrong previous save and don't want 80,000 save slots piled up.
Butch:
There are lots of companions. Boy are there companions.
What are you up to, Femmy? Still trollville?
Feminina:
Yeah, see, in some ways it's actually an advantage to weed out some of the possible companions, just to limit the decision fatigue!
I will head back to trollville this evening. It's going to be great.
Butch:
Aerie and Jaheira are the two I'm flirting with. I know, I know.
By flirting I mean, uh, comforting her about the death of her husband and, uh, comforting her about the fact her wings were sawed off.
Yeah, there's a darkness you didn't get, Looty. Aerie is a winged elf who was captured, put in a cage, her wings got infected and were sawed off while she was awake. Yikes.
I wonder who women can romance.
Feminina:
I'm sure there's some other woman with a tragic past that Loothound can comfort.
Or – imagine the possibilities – a woman WITHOUT a tragic past! I know, almost everyone has some tragedy in their past or they wouldn't be out there living the hard, thankless life of an adventurer, where the only reward is treasure and perhaps romance and perhaps the love and adulation of the townspeople, depending on how you play it.
Butch:
Hey, yeah, why is everyone so miserable? Everyone is so miserable! The one who isn't is batshit crazy and has a hamster.
Or, I guess Yoshimo is perky enough. And there's another roguish fellow you'll meet later who is happyish. But why is it always the rogues that are happy?
Feminina:
That's an interesting question. We assume that rogues are sort of inherently unserious, and they can therefore be happy, while serious characters are obviously miserable because thinking seriously about life will naturally reveal how terrible it is.
It's like Russian literature. Only fools are happy, because the wise know better.
Butch:
But logically, it makes little sense. One generally turns to a life of crime (and, let's face it, rogues used to be "thieves") not because life is a perfect little bardsong, but because it isn't. You'd think the criminals, rogues, whatever, would have a sadder, tougher, darker backstory than everyone else.
Add to that, why don't you ever see a rogue's spouse die?
It's a strange quirk of fantasy games.
Except (now I'm running with this), it's really the FRIENDLY thieves that are nice and happy. NPC thieves (take the shadow thieves, for instance) are bad, bad guys. We always run into the head of the thieves' guild and he's always a bastard.
Hmm.
Feminina:
Very good point. Maybe a 'good' thief is kind of a mental contradiction (lawbreaking and all) and so they kind of unconsciously tend to give them cheerful backstories because it already feels a little like a subversion of a trope so why not continue and make them the only happy people around?
Butch:
It's one of the reasons I miss Khalid (despite me wanting to get with his widow). The romance between him and Jaheira was a strange happiness between two NPCs. It feels kind of cheap that this romance that the player couldn't affect all of a sudden becomes something the player CAN affect by comforting/romancing her. I thought the quest in BG1 where you help Khalid make a necklace to show he loves Jaheira was so great because it wasn't the player helping someone express their love for the first time. We've seen "Help me woo her" lots of times, but that was "She knows I love her already, I just want to give her something." The player didn't affect them, and they were allowed to be happy on their own terms.
Until they weren't.
And, for Looty's benefit, I bring this up because Khalid was NOT a thief. He was a good ol' fighter.
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