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archetypal-archivist · 3 years ago

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My Beloved, Penis

Fuck it. I was infected by Penis SMP by @demonboyhalo reblogging a bunch of it and the lack of consistent lore bugged me, so I somehow banged out 2000+ words of fanfic about the Penis SMP and how it got started. Lots of internet humor and classic MInecraft shenanigans in this one folks. *slaps roof* This baby can fit so much crack treated seriously, lol. This is also up on my AO3, Zazibine, if you would prefer to read it there.

_-_-_-_

It was never supposed to get so big. It was just an SMP with a couple friends of his he had met from the Hypixel discord server, where he had logged on simply to trash talk the absolute asshole who had dared to kill him last minute in bedwars, only to stumble upon said asshole- going under the name shittyfartbaby69 of all things- complaining to his girlfriend(?) Milfboss in the voice chat. Thirty minutes later of awkward hellos and the manliest of bitching at each other (with Milf chiming in every once in a while to roast them both), and PenisUnavailable had perhaps his first Minecraft friend in, like, forever.

Then Admiral_Anus had entered chat, bitching about his competitor in ABBA Mining and his bullshit bad luck and the whole process repeated. By the end of the day, Penis had three new friends, a private discord server for the four of them, and a promise to meet up with them in Hypixel next Sunday for the ultimate round of bedwars.

The game went spectacularly. Somehow, Admiral had some of the best bridging skills any of them had ever seen, and between Milfboss' terrifying Scottish screaming and pvp and Shitty with his clutch TNT skills, the three of them almost made up for Penis' awful depth perception. They still lost around forty percent of their games, but that was certainly better than Penis' own abysmal record, not helped with his habit of walking off the edge at inconvenient times.

And it was... fun. Usually bedwars was just him playing in his bedroom alone for an hour before he rage-quit and went back to survival for a bit before he died to fall damage and rage quit that too. But shittyfartbaby69 would crack dirty jokes that he'd never even heard of before, and Milfboss would roast him for looking it up on reddit and Shitty would cuss her out as he tried to prove that no, he was being original- all while Admiral would comment of them as if they were a sideshow display. Then Admiral_Anus would turn around and knock an enemy player off their island with some clever pvp and they would all hoot and holler and swear for a while before going back to their conversation, joking about forgetting the topic and starting up a running gag about something new.

And their accents, mmm. PenisUnavailable would never say it, but he really was as American as white Wonder bread and Milfboss' Scottish brogue, Admiral's smooth British snark, and Shitty's shrieking in Australian, well. Ear candy, you know? Even if he teased them mercilessly for pronouncing shit wrong, like "buhguhr". Ppffttt, it still cracked him up how Milfboss had threatened to murder him after the dictionary app on his phone had proved him right that it was actually "Bur-gur", even if Admiral kept insisting it was pronounced "bruh-girl".

Four hours and twenty-eight wins later, they had agreed to meet up the next day to play again, preferably at an hour that wasn't two am for Shitty again. (It was two am for Shitty again, although that was because they played for six that time.) Eventually, it just became a regular thing, them playing bedwars and competing at ABBA Caving- the one game Penis was unnaturally good at, much to Admiral's annoyance- to the point where they ran out of funny jokes about their competitors and the game itself and started talking personal anecdotes.

Milfboss owned a motorcycle. Admiral, entirely independently, also owned a motorcycle, as that was the only vehicle of reasonable speed and style that could actually handle the London traffic. Shitty couldn't drive at all, something about never passing his driving test. Admiral ate cheese at breakfast. Shitty liked to burn his garbage in a metal oil drum in his backyard. Milfboss posted herself singing covers of shit over on Youtube. And it wasn't just real life stuff either- their minecraft skills were also on the table for them all to collectively roast.

Admiral had never seen a single Minecraft Championship. Milfboss thought a flat cobblestone roof was entirely acceptable. Shitty's favorite block was the flint and steel. (That's not a block, sixty-niner. Shut up, is too. OoOh, real clever, 'shut up'! Uh, how about no? How about I fuckin' make you, ever think 'a that? No nono nonono, I'm on two hearts! I'm on two hearts, stop!) It made him curious, honestly. He wanted to see Milf's builds for himself, get revenge on Shitty, see if Admiral really could beat the Ender Dragon with a knockback stick like he said he could.

So he made a minecraft server. And they all joined it. (And stuck PenisUnavailable with the bill, suckaaahhh~!)

Predictably, it all went to Hell in a hand basket pretty quick.

See, it's one thing to play with nutters like his friends in a structured set up like Hypixel games, it's quite another to try and keep a semblance of order in an open world survival server like the Penis SMP. The first five minutes had been him trying to explain the rules and teleporting everyone back to spawn over and over as they tried to "escape the cops," ie, him. The next five minutes was Shitty scream-laughing "scatter!" and other John Mulany references down the mic as everyone ran off to start their houses. Penis, as he was still "god" at that moment, used admin commands to find the closest flower field biome to settle into, hoping for some- ha- peace and quiet.

Shitty, inevitably, ended up trying to settle in the fucking Nether. Like a mad lad, you know, as you do when you are apparently obsessed with all things lava. Milfboss ended up making an oak plank box of a "tree house" in a dark oak forest, while Admiral_Anus picked a nearby swamp for his starter base. Outside of that, they just kinda vibed in discord as they tried to fend off the mobs and get enough resources to try and build up houses that were a bit more than cobblestone towers and wood boxes- er, mostly. Milf kinda just fucked off to go mining, found a skeleton spawner by chance, and made a set of iron gear to stand in the dungeon room with to just chill and kill mobs for a while. She ended up with something like 45 levels and burned her only diamond on an enchanting table so she could buff the Hell out of her iron weapons and armor.

Penis, rather typically, he though to himself, put together a basic sheep farm and started work on a cute little cobblestone cave base. He managed to get a whole twenty by twenty block room done and fully furnished before he noticed the chat full of Shitty's death messages and went to go investigate. After nearly dying in lava twice, he managed to find Shitty's pile of items floating on a basalt pillar about a hundred blocks out from his... base?

It was a soccer ball. Shitty's base was a perfect fucking spherical soccer ball made up of quartz blocks and basalt. Just. What. The Fuck??? Then out popped shittyfartbaby69 and it was PenisUnavailable's turn to misjudge a jump and plummet right into lava. Fifteen minutes and much shrieking later about losing his diamond pick, and it turns out that Shitty didn't really care about his lost items, as he really only had four gold picks, a stack of dark oak, two furnaces, a bucket, and thirteen cooked mutton to his name. Not even a bed, the fucker. He just ran back to his portal from spawn every time he just burned to death, taking the chance to gather resources on the way back each time.

And no, he wasn't following a tutorial for his "football" base. Jerk. (Although Penis did have to admire his determination...)

The day ended on Milfboss, Shitty, and Penis reconvening back at spawn to try and hunt down Admiral_Anus, who they found later having built a thirty block tall castle of all things. Out of cobble stone and the windows weren't quite even, but still, it was pretty impressive. And of course, when presented with a castle, what can what do but siege it? So they lay siege to the castle and Milfboss curb-stomped Admiral in pvp and laid claim to the throne, crowning herself queen before summarily throwing the rest of them out. It was a good day.

And the day after was a good day. They played dodge ball crossed with hide and seek in forest around Penis' house with arrows supplied by Milfboss. And the day after that, too, where they had a building competition using nothing but cobble stone, specifically to spite Milfboss, who had kicked all of their asses the day before. In fact, three wonderful weeks passed of doing normal Minecraft shit and being friends passed by, and every bit of it was great fun.

And then came the fucking role play.

PenisUnavailable would have liked to preface that with he only participated under duress, but really, Milfboss had been queen for too long and nobody wanted to risk TNT cannoning any of Shitty's nice builds, so. Well, the castle was better than his drafty cave, alright? It was cold and wet and didn't have a proper door because aesthetic (and because it usually took him several tries to work an iron pressure plate door), so there were far too many mobs wandering in at night and spawn camping him. He and Shitty had almost the same number of deaths and Shitty lived in the fucking Nether.

So yeah. Castle time, baby! Daddy needs a new home! And Admiral obviously wasn't happy living out of Milf's awful tree house hot box where they all did drugs together on day fifteen and it still smelled of burnt wheat seeds, aka "weed." It was only obvious that they teamed up to try and take back the castle.

The battle itself didn't exactly go great, but it wasn't exactly horrible either. A lot of shouting shit at each other for fifteen minutes, the majority of which he wouldn't remember until it was too late- something about server unity?- only to find out that it wasn't two on one girl boss, it was two on a girl boss and her "baked out of his mind" henchman, also known as Shitty in a squirrel furry skin.

The ears man. Those stupid (cute) ears.

And then they were running for their lives because Milf had somehow gotten her hands on a flame bow with infinity enchants.

It all culminated in a dramatic stand-off in front of Shitty's Nether Soccer ball, Milf on one side, diamond axe in hand, not a bit of armor on because of an unfortunate run in with lava, Penis and Admiral on the other, picks in hand, threatening to tear down shittyfartbaby69's base. Shitty wasn't online just then to comment, but they could all hear him click-clacking away on his keyboard so he obviously hadn't gone to sleep just yet like he said he had. At an impasse, and unable to justify letting her teammate's home be used as collateral, Milfboss stood down and gave up her "crown," an enchanted golden Prot IV helmet she had gotten off a skeleton from her spawner.

Then the great betrayal, the beginning of the end. Shitty came back online. 96-Cam joined the game, not that they noticed in the chaos. Admiral-Anus cackled wildly and PMed Milfboss the message that Shitty had sent him, giving Team Gay Sex permission to tear down his base in the name of winning the war if it came down to it- making Milf's sacrifice worthless in the end. Penis gave another dramatic speech, circling around Shitty, who was acting weirdly apologetic to Milf about betraying her and still wearing that fucking squirrel furry skin.

"You see Milf, there's one thing more powerful than a girl boss, and when it comes down to wars between kingdoms, there's something you need to remember!" Penis got out his golden ax, helpfully labeled 'Piss Off'. "And that's a dilf with something to lose!" An enderpearl in his off hand and he teleported behind Milf, catching on fire from the lava but still landing the last hit needed to finish her off. She puffed into a cloud of EXP, swearing up a storm, and then Admiral and Penis turned their gaze to the cheering Shitty.

"AAAAAYYY, LET'S GO DADDY!" the squirrel man screeched, wild laughter shorting out the discord voice chat, making him go quiet in patches when the volume overloaded the client. Behind him, Admiral quietly started building a chair out of birch fence posts and slabs.

"Not so fast, shit-ty-fart-baaaaa-byyyyy~, this isn't quite over yet!" Penis fucking chirped, barely holding back his laughter. "You're still a fucking traitor and we can't have you backstabbing us too. Get in the chair for Daddy, okay baby?"

Admiral finished the chair just in time for Shitty to turn around and see the completed monstrosity, shrieking dying off immediately. "Oh screw you, that's just mean. The Hell man? That's not a chair, that's illegal. If you want an electric chair or some shit, just ask. That's just sad." Mentally shrugging, Admiral lit up his work with a flint and steel while Penis pillared up above where Shitty was building an electric chair out of iron bars and trap doors. Admiral nudged Shitty into the chair, Penis dumped a bucket of lava over the edge of the pillar so it flowed over him, and Shitty started giving a soliloquy about how betrayal and how his love for his "Daddy" still "burned strong".

Like his dick. Apparently.

By the time the lava finally hit the floor and burned Shitty to death, Penis was crying with laughter, shrieking down the mike and banging on the desk hard enough to make him forget that his was still on the mouse, making him mine the block under him with the bucket and sending him hurtling to his fiery death too.

It was a good day... almost.

Because, as it turned out, shittyfartbaby69 was actually a tiktokker of some renown and his cam account had record everything. And he had uploaded the bit to tiktok, as you do, where it went viral, where it wasn't supposed to. And Milfboss, who had recently been uploading covers of herself singing old classic Minecraft songs, had attracted the Minecraft fandom kids to her twitter, where she had gone to post her rage about the events of her dethroning and Shitty's execution.

Penis SMP had gotten on. Fucking. Trending. And now everyone was demanding the full clip, their names, their Twitch streamer handles, their characters' backstories.

The masses wanted lore.

Penis watched in disbelief, head in his hands and mouth agape as sugar crash played over a clip of him killing Milf on loop.

They were making memes.

...Oh god. They were screwed.

#penismp #penis smp #fanfiction #minecraft #my writing #crack #crack treated seriously #also on ao3 #penisunavailable #milfboss #shittyfartbaby69 #admiral_anus

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felassan · 4 years ago

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Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 4

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler continued playing DAO from where they had left off in Part 1, 2 and 3. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, personal accessibility reasons, etc). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into other parts of the franchise. Some of it is info which is known having been put out there in the past, and some of it is new. There’s a bit of overlap or repetition with topics covered in Parts 1-3. This post leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

The stream can currently be watched back here. Next week LE will be streaming a different DAO playthrough with commentary from another guest. Two weeks from now LE and DG will return to continue this playthrough for another stream session like this one.

(Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

The Loghain sequences, where it jumps out of the HoF’s point of view to let the player see what Loghain is up to, were added quite late on in development. Some of the dream sequences (like the HoF’s dream of the Archdemon) were also probably added quite late. Those sequences were added as they felt that they needed to have more indication of the larger goings-on in terms of what Loghain was up to, since they had cut some stuff that was meant to have shown this. Cutting things can be funny like that as you’re then left trying to explain the holes.

An original Archdemon concept drawing had them as a lot more demonic as opposed to draconic, with blank all-black faces, a giant ornate crown, smoke, tentacles and a Cthulhu-esque feel. Things change a lot during the concept phase however. At the time, DG wasn’t sure if he liked the changing of the ‘demon’ into a ‘dragon’, but over time he digs it - it sorta implies some things about the nature of dragons in the world that they later decided “yes, that is probably the case”. They then worked that more into the lore so that dragons weren’t just there to be huge lizards. Given the difficulty the team had modelling things like tentacles and snakes, the original Archdemon concept would probably have been iterated on and would’ve had to become something else eventually anyway.

Having the party camp was probably always part of James Ohlen’s plan. Originally, there was going to be different camps in specific places around the map. They then made it a sort of ‘pocket area’ that the player always ‘took with them’, but here they had problems figuring out things like what would happen if the player rested while in an interior location as opposed to somewhere out in the wilderness, “like, does that change it?” For a while there was a complicated system where the party members would do things in camp that would give the player items and help out in such ways - like a party member who made potions, ones that could be interacted with and asked to craft, a whole crafting system relating to that, etc (this all got cut). This was supposed to act as a reason for the player to return to camp and have more interactions at camp; they didn’t want the camp just to be ‘the place you go just to talk to followers’. A good portion of the team considered dialogue to be boring and not an activity that was engaged in.

As soon as hair/beard hair came past the ‘clipping plane’ of the neck, they had real trouble getting it to move due to lack of proper cloth physics and the troubles they had with hair. Beards were rectangular strips that dangled from the chin with the beard texture attached to it. Sometimes certain points were connected to the chest which is why there’s the weird stretching if models move in certain ways. This happens with robes as well. The reason they did this is so that there’s no clipping. For some reason the BW animation team was so averse to clipping compared to other games from elsewhere which sometimes have a bit of clipping that they’re actually not fussed about. At one point they had a big fight on the DA team because the art team said “We need to make every entrance and doorway [including tents] about twice the size that it is, about Shale-size specifically, because of Shale” because they were worried that there would be scenes where Shale would clip through the wall, and about how this would look to players. Others responded that it’d be rare where Shale would be seen going through a door and also that nobody really cares (as in it’s not a big deal). DG half-seriously suggested that instead of making every door bigger, have it so that after entering the door’s texture at the sides and above it would look cracked and have an outline of Shale’s arms and head as if she’d just barreled her way through the stonework. In the end Shale’s size was reduced as a solution to this (so Shale was originally intended to be a lot larger). This is an example of a place where different parts of the team had different priorities in development. It was pointed out that in the end having giant doors may not have made much difference, as every interior in DA is massive in terms of floor and ceiling-space, as well as items (huge jugs of ale etc) anyway.

Weapons and staves hover on characters’ backs due to the team’s aforementioned aversion to clipping. Originally there were plans for scabbards and straps, but they didn’t have the resources for these and they were also concerned about staves clipping through straps, especially when being ‘drawn’ for combat, even though that would just be a second or so. So this is why we instead have floating magnetically-attached-looking weapons.

DG wrote Nature of the Beast including all of the Brecilian Forest, it’s possibly his favorite plot/questline out of the ones he wrote for DAO. It’s one of the plots that survived best from first inception to final result. One of the prominent cultural features of Ferelden is the werewolves, and so DG had to make ‘the werewolf plot’. All the initial plots were split up like that (the werewolf plot, the dwarf plot, etc). Originally there was a separate ‘elf plot’ but it got joined together with the werewolf one. DG had an idea for a being that was like male and female, terrible and kind, beautiful and horrible and so forth - both at once, like the way nature is. This was the vague initial idea from which this plot grew. The nature spirit encountered is the flipside of the being. The spirit of the forest is both male and female, or something akin to being bigender (both rather than neither). There’s not much difference between the Lady and Witherfang. DG finds it so weird hearing the DAO Dalish elves’ American accents (since their accents were changed for the next game). The American Dalish elf accents bugged DG enough that when they got to DA2, he said to Caroline Livingstone “can we just retcon this” and she was like “yeah”. “I think we underestimated how weird prevalent American accents in the game alongside the British ones would be”. Zathrian is voiced by Tim Russ (Tuvok from Star Trek).

The Cammen-Gheyna plot is a fairly ‘nothing-y’ sidequest relatively speaking, but is so complex in terms of how many options and paths through it that it has that DG got a big of a finger-wagging for it and some people were not happy. LE commented that this quest is “an extremely Gaider plot”, as the player can ruin everyone’s lives in it. Gheyna’s pronunciation of Andaran atish'an is incorrect. This phrase is one of the ones that got mixed up in the pronunciation guide and one of the ones that when they got to DA2, DG was like “ignore what we did before, here’s the new pronunciation files”. One of the first ‘images’ the team had of the Dalish was that they had reindeer-like creatures that pulled the aravels. In DAO aravels look more like standard wagons than the ones in the ‘images’, and they weren’t shown properly. Aravels are wagons but they’re supposed to have big sails (not naval-style sails on top) all over the place to catch the wind, so that they look like a bunch of ships being drawn across a field. They got closer to how they’re supposed to be in DAI. At one point the artists sat DG down and asked him what should set the Dalish apart visually. “Funny you should ask, I have some very specific ideas about what the Dalish should look like that have just never been done”. [I think here he meant hadn’t yet been implemented in the franchise] “Oh, we just thought they were ‘people with wagons’.” “Nobody reads documentation...”

The lamps in the Brecilian Forest are a bit random. They put light sources everywhere and it seems like the Brecilian lamp thing was art-asset use that boiled down to “guess it’s an elven forest?”. The Deep Roads were supposed to be properly dark. The team had a lot of conversations over how dark they could or should make the Deep Roads. They constantly had beams of light coming from above and it was like “this is supposed to be like a mile underground, why are there sunbeams coming through cracks in the ceiling” - the answer is it looks good and they didn’t want to do proper darkness. By DAI, they got closer to the ‘look’ the Deep Roads are supposed to have. This is a recurring theme in the DA franchise lol. “This was a weakness in our team and processes, that it took two titles before we got on board with each other and with the vision.” But they had plenty of good strengths too! DG wishes they had iterated a bit more on the werewolves’ look.

“Evil options” was always one of the big conversations that they had. DG wasn’t a fan of the evil options because they mostly boiled down to being a big jerk. The reason for this is a lengthy design discussion that relies on interface - proper, smart evil usually implies some kind of deception, and how do you indicate to the player that the option they’re about to take has a more cleverly-sinister aspect to it (as opposed to simple Intimidate options)? They didn’t really enjoy just letting the player run around being an asshole to people, “do we have to service this hyuk-hyuk-hyuk, particular type of enjoyment?” DG wishes they had figured out how to do the evil stuff a little better (feeling that in a game, doing good has less merit unless there’s temptation to do evil, and that evil paths should be more materially rewarding).

DG wrote The Dawn Will Come with some help from PW and Karin Weekes. It was the first song he wrote. Trevor Morris sent him the tune and he listened to it many times and wrote out the lyrics. PW and KW helped him make it “less awkward and cringey”. “They’re very good at that”. PW is good at poetry, KW is more musical and knows more about music. “If you get something which is as ridiculous as it is memorable, it’s probably Sheryl. If you get something that’s beautiful prose, it’s probably Mary. Something in-between is probably PW.” The DAI bardsongs were written by an external party brought in specially to do so. This required a fair bit of review and revision to make sure they followed DA lore. “It’s a problem we’ve always had trying to work with third parties, they tend to think that anything that falls under the umbrella of ‘medieval fantasy’ would fit in DA”. (Here DG groaned a bit thinking about Orson Scott Card.)

On the Grand Oak and co: “After I finished writing this I totally regretted it. It’s a big dialogue and there’s a lot involved in this quest. Do you know how hard it is to make somebody rhyme in a way that’s not completely cringey for the entire dialogue? I was three quarters into it and I so wanted to stop but I was past the point of no return. But I did it! And it worked out.” The Grand Oak should have been a LotR-style ent-like being in terms of animations and presence. When DG sees the Oak’s stationary pose he’s reminded of Silence of the Lambs. When he finished the Grand Oak and hermit quest he was like “I make way more trouble for myself than I should”. The Hermit cycles through random animations outside of conversation because he’s supposed to be twitchy and weird.

The haunted empty camp side encounter was a pain for the tech designers to make work because there’s no NPC to talk to. It was a pain whenever companions had to offer critical information like in these sorts of parts in fact, as they had to write 9 versions of each ‘line’ (1 for each companion).

There are certain spells/abilities in D&D that can make a GM’s life frustrating, such as teleportation, telling the future, resurrection. The fact that death is not permanent, for instance, should be a huge thing that affects society and how the people in it view death. This is why they were thinking stuff like “If every low-level mage in the setting had a skill like ‘Charm Person’, what would non-mages make of that?” This ties back to discussions in previous part/s where there are lore rules like no teleportation. DA was originally envisioned as a low-magic setting, but this didn’t last long [this subject is also covered in previous part/s]. The rules of magic didn’t really change though, they just weren’t really communicated that well to the other teams in the early days. They slowly realized that it was incumbent on the design team to explain and sell to the other teams the vision, not just expect them to read documentation. They were also constantly fighting against their own presuppositions of “DA is like D&D”.

Desire demons were supposed to be genderless. DG isn’t a fan of how the Fade turned out in DAO. The quests themselves were too long; they couldn’t do all the original plans they had for them so there was a lot of iteration, “then we ended up settling for something not very exciting”. Another big fight the team had was about whether they should have permanent death since DA was a more realistic world? One side’s argument was that ‘if you don’t allow for resurrection then we can’t have death in combat’. DG wondered if there was a different dichotomy they could get to but didn’t want to dictate how combat should work or tell combat designers how to do their job, as he wasn’t the one doing that work.

One of the best moves they made when working on DAI was the concept artist consulting cosplayers. This was good work not only in a fashion sense but also in that it led to making outfits for characters that someone could actually wear (contrast those with Sebastian’s outfit, which DG remembers cosplayers having trouble making functional/wearable and putting together). DG really wasn’t keen at all on Cole’s hat. When designing the clothing-clothing in DAO, the artists were trying to get the most variation for clothing out of assembling pieces. For the sake of variation they allowed pieces to go together that really shouldn’t go together. This allowed for a larger number of clothing options to be made out of a smaller number of clothing models/textures.

In Neverwinter Nights they added a “jiggle mesh” to the engine, it was used in only one place (Aribeth’s cleavage).

Writers are the first ones that jump onto a project, so when last touches and polish is being added to a game they’re often not aware of it. Once the writing is more or less locked down for a game, they start working on the next project. On every project at some point they had to have what they called the “profanity meeting”, where they decide what types of profanity exist in that world, what level of profanity they’re accepting, establishing the standard on this front, etc. This leads to fun meetings where they go through every profanity that they know and try to create new ones. “Maker’s breath!” and “Void take you!” are some of these kinds of things. They needed exclamations akin to “Goddamnit” but which made sense in this fantasy setting (“Goddamnit” implies the context of God, and the concept of damning, for example, so it doesn’t hold up) and weren’t just word substitution like “frack” instead of fuck or something.

The Grey Wardens gained their trademark blue and silver uniformed look for DA2. When the new art director Matt Goldman came on before DA2, he wanted to re-approach a number of things such as the darkspawn (mentioned in previous parts) and the Wardens. He wanted factions like the Wardens to be more uniform and easily identifiable at a distance by silhouettes and colors. He wanted factions to be more visually distinct and to introduce more color in general, as DAO was very brown and muddy. This was something of a standing mission of his when he came onto the project. He disliked the idea that there wasn’t anything unifying or distinct or ‘easily identifiable as a DAO screenshot’ about DAO screenshots, other than that brown muddiness.

Deciding how to design the Lady of the Forest was a long conversation due to the potential nsfw elements. It was a long haul to get her to look a certain way.

The thing DG found easiest/least painful to write was probably Zevran’s dialogue. He felt less pressure about it and had a bit more fun with it. Zevran has a certain story about trust that DG found pleasurable to build on; Zevran had grown up with a certain expectation of deceit and trauma, and when confronted with earnest feelings, that was the more puzzling part for [Zevran] to process. “When you expect everyone around you to deceive you, you’re kinda like, okay, this is life. But then to figure out, ‘oh, I guess it doesn’t need to be that way’, well how do you even... not?” DG remembers straight male players complaining on the forum after accepting Zevran’s massage tent-invite and not clocking that that was an invite of a certain nature. Overall Zevran was a more relaxed piece of writing for him. Shale came later but writing Shale was also a lot of fun. Like HK-47, “you can string together a few quirks that you find amusing and people will still treat that like a character and love it”.

In DA2 there was an entire subplot centered around the Carta and Varric. It spanned all three Acts. Mary Kirby had written it to completion and it was good. DG had to tell her it was among the cuts they needed to do because it was written a bit later relative to other stuff and because cutting it offered the most return according to the schedule and resources/subsequent downstream work. In cases like these they sometimes take the cut plotbeats and put it in a ‘box’, in the hopes that they may be able to use it for DLC or something later on. In practise this doesn’t happen very often at all. On DAO it did happen once with Shale. Shale was cut from DAO and had to be moved to become Day 1 DLC. Work on Shale therefore took place after most of the game had been finished. If they hadn’t done this, she would have been cut completely. It also sort of happened on DAO with Loghain. It originally had a whole plotline in Denerim involving him which had the player figuring out his background, motivations and interacting more with Anora. All of that got cut (requiring the cutscenes mentioned at the start of this post being added), and this is where the idea came of writing a novel (The Stolen Throne). This occurred in the period when the game had been delayed and DG particularly regretted that particular cut. He thought, “I could take this story that you were going to learn about the history of Loghain and his relationship with Cailan, and rescue it in a way.” [source]

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

#dragon age #bioware #video games #cole #spirit boy

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tuesdayrising · 4 years ago

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Lair Review for nevvermore #132590

Buckle up, folks, because this review is a doozy! Over 30 dragons, and ALL OF MY LOVE. As is par for the course when we’re talking reviews. ♥

I absolutely had to start with Morrigan, partly because I wrote her lore for you, and partly because I’m such a sucker for that gold/brown aesthetic. Back in 2017, I was this close to moving to Earth instead of Light, if that tells you anything about my aesthetic preferences. But I also really love that little pop of Shadow around her head! It ties in well to her heritage, and sticks out very neatly!

Plus, she’s ambitious as hell and I adore her for that. ♥

Blue-green and brown is another outstanding combo, and Silail wears it so very, very well! I don’t know anything else about her beyond the implications in Morrigan’s lore (yes, I did notice they’re sisters!), but I’m in love with her anyhow. She just has this very fluid grace to her, and I also think you picked a perfect skin. Plus, Imperials can be super hard to dress, but you’ve pulled it off so well here! Great work on this gal!

Akatsuki is a perfect example of a subtle accent taking a dragon to the next level. Without that Trick of the Light skin, I think his mane would look way too flat, making him a lot more dull over all. This skin, though, adds some brightness and depth in a way that works really well! Plus, I love that he looks like a Fire dragon or Fire-adjacent at first glance, but he’s actually got Ice eyes!

First of all, I love this skin so much. I’ve got it slapped on one of my own Water dragons, and I just adore the way it works. More importantly, though, I’m impressed with how you dealt with Neptune’s tert! Normally, I wouldn’t love Thicket paired with Blue and Teal, but the lantern apparel actually does a huge amount of legwork here. It makes it seem like the green of her tert is actually a result of the lantern’s light, a little bit of ambiance on your deep sea friend. Great work dressing her!

What can I say about Felix except that he looks SO HUGGABLE? Seriously, I just wanna give him a big hug. That skin is absolutely adorable, and it’s making me like a male snapper, which I find hard to do a lot of the time. The big boy beans are typically not my favorite. But this boy? Best boy.

I feel like a big chunk of this review is going to be me commenting on your A+ skin and accent usage. Sparkplug is deceptively simple without much apparel, but I really, really like the accent, and the implications it has for a dragon that (I presume) is part of your flight reps. Did she build it herself? What happened that she needed prosthetics? Or is it armor? I’d love to know more!

Also, Lightning unusual eyes are SUCH a pretty shade of blue.

Again, you’ve got another blue dragon here with a green range tert, but I think I’m fixing on the accent. It’s so cute, all those little shells stuck to Terpsichore, and it makes me wonder if they’re decoration, or if she’s just that lovable to shellfish and can’t bring herself to peel them off.

Unlike Neptune, who you’ve dressed super well and pulled off an odd tert for, I don’t think I care much for Pistachio paired with Periwinkle and Twilight. That said, I love that you managed to make a purple range secondary look blue for cohesiveness!

Turns out Artim is NOT wearing Windbound Plumage, like I thought when I first saw him in your lair. That skin is a solid mimic, though, and I really like it. Plus, it adds a lot of depth and color where Artim would otherwise be a little bit flat and boring, so once again, props for your skin usage! I especially like the way it makes it seem like Artim is growing out of the foliage, rather than the foliage growing off of Artim, if that makes sense. He seems very woodsy and very comfortable.

Sometimes I forget how stinking cute M Faes can be, but Xenon just reminded me PERFECTLY. He’s so swirly and soft and adorable, and I wanna put him in my pocket and take him everywhere! White and Sky make for a classic combo, and that accent makes it look like he’s wayyyyyy up there in the atmosphere, just cruising along.

Also, the little hints of pink in his wings thanks to Facet add just a touch of extra color and depth. He’s perfect!

Chaorite is wearing a Ravenhearst skin. That alone means she’s looking absolutely beautiful as hell. That is all. ♥

I’ll admit I didn’t care for this accent during last year’s Trickmurk, but you’ve made it look great on Ashrah! I can’t decide whether those little fellas are her minions or if they’re pestering her, but I like the way they look on her nonetheless. It’s a shame that purple in the accent isn’t a touch more pink to complement the rosy tones in her primary and tert, but that’s not exactly something you can control.

Triple Terracotta, especially with PyMorph, is truly *chef’s kiss* and I LOVE HER. Can’t say much else about her, since she doesn’t appear to have lore or apparel or anything, but I love her nonetheless. She’s just prettier than hell.

Brigit is wearing one of my all time favorite festival skins, AND she’s rocking another classic color combo. She’s also worth a mention for her unusual familiar. I’ve noticed you’re normally pretty good at familiar matching, but the Deepwater Traveler you’ve put on her doesn’t match at all. Is there a lore reason for that, or are you just awakening your familiar ASAP?

Ooooh, a primal fella! He’s...so bright you can’t avoid looking at him. Honestly, he actually reminds me a little of a paper kite with that skin, like a kite that gained sentience and flew off on its own (but also just wandered because what’s a kite to do when the wind says “NOPE NOT THAT WAY, THIS WAY”?)

Pretzel is an ABSURDLY cute name for a dragon whose species is known for literally tying themselves in knots out of boredom. And yet again, your skin usage is a blast! Love the blue tones this adds to Pretzel, but it also works awesome with her existing orange colors. She’s very Halloweeny.

See, this is the power of a good skin or accent. I rarely like triples because they can be kind of boring, even with cool genes. But you’ve taken Phobus to the next level with a complementary accent, and I ADORE IT. The tiny horns it gives him are so cute, and I’m a sucker for florals when it comes down to it. Plus, those little butterflies on the wings are extra cute! He’s just soft and sweet all around.

A Ravenhearst skin strikes again! I’m not sure how I feel about black and brown together (Sand seems like a shade too brown, where something lighter and a hair closer to the yellows might be nicer with this skin), but at the end of the day, she’s still a lovely, pretty gal. Plus, all the eyes on the skin are like multigaze but more eldritch horror than site-approved cuteness. There could be a lore goldmine there.

Ahi is SO GOOD. An XYY Bane with complementary colors is no small feat, and I really like how fiery he looks despite being an Ice dragon. Have you considered Skink for him, though? That also has orange accents!

I’ll confess that I’m writing this lair review BEFORE writing your lore, but I couldn’t help but pick Varrick. He looks every inch a bard, and I really like that you’ve given him a Shabby Cane! Since it blends in with his wing, at first glance, it almost looks like it could be a bow. That works doubly well with his familiar being a Ghosthost Viola!

Lethe is giving me UNREAL steampunk ghost vibes. Between the apparel and her tert, she strikes me as a Victorian waif with steampunk enhancements come back to haunt whoever tried to make her more automaton than flesh and blood. And do you have lore plans for her? Is Lethe an intentional name? Can she make dragons forget things? I’d love to know more about her!

Cinder absolutely screams “oh no, sir, it’s such a tragedy my third husband died just like the other two and left me his entire fortune, so terrible, so awful” and it’s making me laugh a little! Not that she’s inherently funny-looking so much as the idea of a murderous widow dragon entertains me A LOT. What are your crimes, Lady Cinder? WHY DID YOU KILL YOUR HUSBANDS...

You have SO MANY PERMABABIES and of all of them, I think I like Banshee the most. But that’s probably because red is my favorite color, and I think baby pearls are honestly such cuties, even if they do have to spend all that time adding to their pearls in...such a gross way. Ew.

Green/brown/yellow range dragons are one of the most powerful forces on this site, and Swamp alone is a color with outstanding power. I said what I said, and I’ll stand by it. It makes Medeni a stellar dragon without any lore or apparel.

I remember when Stained first came out, and I brushed it off as a terrible gene to charge gems for. It was a ripoff, slapping a color overlay on a dragon!

How wrong I was.

Coriolis is a perfect example of how Stained can be used to soften a dragon and given them a lovely, lighter air, and it pairs so well with that accent! She makes me think of that stretch between summer and fall where the colors on the trees are beginning to change, but it’s still warm enough to wear shorts as long as the sun’s out. ♥

Another triple rescued from a dull life by a good skin! Obviously, the point of this skin is to evoke a prisoner in the Fortress of Ends, but what could Raiju have been imprisoned for? What warrants all the chains and ice? Is it a fair punishment?

It feels a tiny bit like cheating to pick another dragon I’ve already written for, but I really do adore branch! All the red accents add some cheer to her, and they make her stand out a little more. I think she’d be maybe a little too green otherwise, but you’ve dressed her perfectly! It also makes her seem approachable and warm, which is great for a healer.

I’m genuinely impressed that you have this little Goat Spiral army, and CiumaObake is my favorite of them all in terms of color. Do you just love baby Spirals with Goat eyes, or is there a lore reason behind this tiny baby army?

More importantly, is this lair tab just the FR version of corralling a pet or a toddler while yelling “WHAT IS IN YOUR MOUTH”?

I wasn’t part of FR when this skin came out and I am JEALOUS because it looks so nice on Mist! It’s extra frosty and pretty, with that tiny nosy hint on the rose and wings that makes me think she’s looking at a sunrise. She seems very warm and approachable despite the classic Ice aesthetic, and I think she’s outstanding without a drop of apparel.

Plus, you’ve done wonders with yet another triple!

Vedette is getting a mention for that skin alone. It’s so odd-looking in the best way, and I would love to see if you have lore reasons for his appearance! Is he a mutated Gaoler, or is he another creature entirely?

Between that skin and her Speedy familiar, Lusa is really rocking that threateningly pale witch aesthetic. I’m not sure I’d like to meet her in a dark alley. Or even a well-lit alley, to be honest. She’s vaguely menacing in a great way!

I see you, Bill Cipher. I see you.

And last but not least, Mr. Unnamed, living in your projects tab. He’s got some GREAT colors, and I can’t help but see the potential in him! Using Veined with that Sunset tert could really give him a magmatic sort of appearance. I’d love to see what your ultimate plans for him are!

#tues reviews #flight rising

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preserving-ferretbrain · 6 years ago

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Chapter 24 - Epilogue

by Dan H

Wednesday, 01 August 2007Dan concludes his review, having abandoned any semblance of impartiality, bless his bitter little heart.~

Previously: Harry does nothing of any interest for 23 chapters. We finally destroy one single solitary Horcrux.

Chapter Twenty Four: The Wandmaker

In which we learn a bunch of shit about wands that will be contradicted by the end of the book.

This chapter opens with a genuinely touching scene in which Harry buries Dobby by hand (as opposed to using magic). It's really sweet, although perhaps I would have found it more affecting if Dobby hadn't died out of sheer authorial malice.

So Harry dithers over whether to go for the Hallows or the Horcruxes, and thinks about all the shit that's happened and what it could all mean. He spends a really, really long time thinking about Dumbledore, and what his plans for the whole thing were.

So then Harry goes and talks to the Goblin they rescued from the Malfoys (did I mention the goblin? There was a goblin). The Goblin is all "you totally rock Harry Potter, because you sometimes treat other races with the barest minimum possible level of decency when you remember to." You see, it's because Harry understands love.

So Harry goes and talks to Ollivander about his broken wand. I mean seriously, it's not even worth doing jokes about, is it.

Having got his penis-metaphor out of the way, Harry then talks some more about Wand-Lore with Ollivander. Here we learn that it is the wand that chooses the wizard, not the other way around, and that if you take somebody's wand by force, that wand will work better for you than one you just picked up somewhere.

In particular, the discussion goes like this:

"I took this wand from Draco Malfoy by force," said Harry. "Can I use it safely?" "I think so, subtle laws govern wand ownership, but the conquered wand will usually bend its will to its new master."

This all leads into a big discussion of the Elder Wand and how to take control of it you have to kill its previous owner or some such shit like that.

All of which turns out to be nonsense. In fact the rules for wand ownership seem to be roughly these:

Every wand has a True Owner.

When a wizard takes a wand from another wizard, he becomes the True Owner of every wand of which that wizard was previously True Owner.

"The Wand Chooses The Wizard" is crap, the thing about the Elder Wand changing hands through murder is crap. Like all the rest of the magic in Harry Potter, wands aren't mysterious or mystical, they follow simple rules which can be written down and followed very, very easily.

This will all become apparent later on, when it is revealed that Harry's act of yanking some wands out of Draco's hands made him the True And Destined Owner Of the Most Powerful And Destructive Wand In History.

Lame.

This chapter ends with another flash of Voldy-vision, as we see the Dark Lord claiming the Elder Wand from Dumbledore's tomb. But it's okay, because he's not the True Owner of it, because of rules one and two above.

Chapter Twenty Five: Shell Cottage

In which Harry spends so much time sitting on his arse doing nothing that it's not even funny.

This chapter is short, at a mere thirteen pages, but that is precisely thirteen pages longer than it needs to be.

Harry gets all weird about how Dumbledore is totally alive, and totally talking to him by weird magical means. It's like that Buffy episode where Giles thinks that a poltergeist is Jenny, but it isn't. Only with more sucking.

Bill and Fleur carry on being shit. Fleur carries on 'aving zee most stupeed accent ever written, and doing that really fucking annoying thing that French characters in books always do, where they put one French word into every sentence so that they wind up sounding like they're failing their GCSE oral.

During the big slew of inactivity, Lupin shows up to tell everybody that Tonks has had their baby. His opening line of dialogue is truly, truly, truly stupid:

"It is I, Remus John Lupin ... I am a werewolf married to Nymphadora Tokns, and you, the Secret Keeper of Shell Cottage, told me the address and bade me come in case of emergency!"

Okay, I get that he's trying to convince them that he isn't a Death Eater using Polyjuice (it's nice that somebody in the Potterverse has worked out how trivial it is to use), but none of the information he gives is secret, except for the stuff about Bill being the Secret Keeper, and since the Fidelius charm already prevents people from getting into the cottage, it's a bit of a waste of breath.

Remus asks Harry to be godfather to his child, then leaves.

Harry decides to break into Gringotts with the help of a Goblin. He bargains the Sword of Gryffindor for this, because apparently it belongs to the Goblins anyway. In one of the few moments of (a) this book being remotely interesting and (b) my finding a piece of Fantasy Worldbuilding worth listening to, we learn that Goblins believe that anything they make remains the property of its original creator, and that if they make something for somebody else, that something should go back to the goblins once said somebody dies.

So they're off to Gringotts. Four hundred and fifteen pages in and we're onto Horcrux number two!

Chapter Twenty Six: Gringotts

In which they finally run out of fucking Polyjuice.

They Polyjuice Hermione into Bellatrix, give her Bella's original wand (which Ollivander conveniently identified for them), and head for Gringotts.

And they use the Invisibility Cloak, of course they use the invisibility cloak.

Anyway, Hermione has trouble working with Bellatrix's wand (because she "had not won its allegiance by taking it personally from Bellatrix" - although as we will learn by the end of the book, casting Expelliarmus on whoever did take it personally from Bellatrix, or on anybody who had ever cast Expelliarmus on Bellatrix at any point in the past, should also have worked). Blah blah some crap, blah blah diagon alley.

They head to Gringotts, where they are interrupted by another Death Eater, who asks Hermione-as-Bellatrix how she managed to get hold of a new wand, since the only Wandmaker in England is currently AWOL and hers was known to have been stolen by Harry Potter. Tragically, Hermione does not respond by saying "I don't know, the same place the new intake of Hogwarts students got theirs I suppose."

By the time they get to the main desk of Gringotts, the jig is totally up. All the crap with the Polyjuice and the Goblin and all the rest has been for nothing. From the security of his invisibility cloak, Harry uses the Imperius curse to get past the goblin on the desk. I'd like to think that this marked a genuine change in Harry's character, but it totally doesn't. He was in a difficult situation, he took the easy way out. I'd also point out that, compared to turning your target irreversibly into a drooling lunatic (like Hermione did to Xenophilius Lovegood) the Imperius Curse doesn't seem half bad. It gets your target to do what you want and go where you want, but so does a Confundus charm.

Just so we get the message that we're now in the company of dark, edgy Harry Potter, he uses the Imperius curse a couple more times, and each time it seems not so much like an unforgivable violation of somebody's free will, but a comparatively harmless way to get somebody to look the other way for five minutes. It's rather like the Jedi Mind Trick, in fact.

So they get deeper into Gringotts, and it's revealed that yet, they do have a couple of defences, in the shape of some water that washes away magical concealment (wouldn't it be better to have that before you get into the building - and shouldn't the Ministry invest in some of it as well?) and a blind dragon which is scared of loud noises.

Impregnable, huh?

So they head to the Lestrange vault, and realise that they find that every time they touch something, it multiplies itself and becomes burning hot. How the hell do the Lestranges expect to get anything out of there, I ask you? Or does it only work if you aren't the rightful owner of the vault? In that case, why not just rig the door to only open for the right person? They could use that "flesh memory" shit which snitches are apparently built with.

Seriously, though, this is what I hate (okay, one of the many things I hate) about Rowling's universe. It's all so arbitrary. Everything works according to these stupid rules which operate on the basis of pure plot-convenience. Like the poison in Book Six which "has to be drunk" in order to get at the Horcrux. All throughout this book, the "magic" is arranged so that the "only thing to do" is whatever the hell JK Rowling wants to have happen next. It's fucking lazy.

So they grab the Cup of Helga Hufflepuff, but they lose the Sword of Gryffindor. Don't worry, though, they can still pull it out the Sorting Hat.

Actually, thinking about it, wouldn't that have been a better, faster way to get the Horcruxes together: just get a True Ravenclaw, a True Hufflepuff and a True Slytherin to yank the damned things out of the Sorting Hat. Except, of course, that wouldn't be the way it Had To Be Done.

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Final Hiding Place

It's Hogwarts.

Chapter Twenty Eight: The Missing Mirror

In which we get yet another dose of Dumbledore backplot.

So Harry is off to Hogwarts, because he saw in Voldemort's mind that the last Horcrux was there. He also saw that Voldemort had only just realised that his Horcruxes were in danger at all.

I mean, seriously, I get that he's arrogant, but you'd think that however overconfident you were, spending eleven years as less than a ghost would teach you some level of caution. I mean, I don't like leaving my keys where I can't see them, let alone fragments of my actual goddamned soul. But Voldemort, intent as he was on finding the Elder Wand, has just decided to take it on trust that his immortal soul is nice and safe and not hacked into bits with the Sword of Gryffindor.

Seriously, this guy totally deserves to get killed by his own rebounding curse.

Harry and co Apparate into Hogsmeade, where they immediately set off the alarm system and get set upon by death eaters, but the bartender at the inn takes the rap for them, and pulls them out of the shit.

I mean seriously, how many times can somebody get rescued from their own fuckups by smarter more capable people and still be considered a hero?

The bartender turns out to be none other than Aberforth Dumbledore. Woohoo, we're in for some more exciting Dumbledore backstory.

Aberforth tells us the exact same story we have heard six times already: Dumbledore hung out with Grindelwald for three months in the eighteen fifties, there was a fight and their sister got killed in the fallout. Aberforth thought it was Dumbledore's fault, Dumbledore thought it was Dumbledore's fault, Grindelwald ran off to be a Nazi somewhere.

Harry gets into Hogwarts through a secret passage which Neville created using the Room of Requirement. Because Neville rocks.

Chapter Twenty Nine: The Lost Diadem

In which Harry is systematically upstaged by every single character in the book.

Neville takes Harry into his secret military base in the Room of Requirement. Neville, incidentally, also has honest to god scars from standing up to the Death Eaters in charge of Hogwarts. Notice that's "standing up to" not "throwing a tantrum at" which was the best that our hero ever really managed.

Neville fucking rocks. No wonder Voldemort didn't mark Neville as an equal, he knew when he was outclassed.

It turns out that Dumbledore's Army, freed from having to put up with Harry's complete inability to get over himself for eight seconds, has gone on to actually be useful and effective. They offer to help Harry, and Harry has an attack of stupid.

"You don't understand." Harry seemed to have said that a lot in the last few hours. "We - we can't tell you. We've got to do it - alone." "Why?" asked Neville.

Harry Potter everybody: whiny shit with a messiah complex, completely incapable of independent thought. Eventually they do in fact manage to convince him that he's being totally totally stupid. But wouldn't it have been nice if he'd just not been stupid in the first place?

So the DA go off to fight Death Eaters while Harry looks for the Diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw, which somebody else told him might be the best place to start. Seriously, Harry does nothing for himself in this book. Or in any of the previous books come to think of it. But it's okay because he's "brave".

Harry and Luna try to sneak into the Ravenclaw common room to catch a look at the statue of their founder. In a rare moment of actually being kinda cool, we find that the Ravenclaw common room is not protected by a password but by a riddle (more of a koan, really: the question asked of Harry and Luna is "what came first, the phoenix or the flame?"). Needless to say, Luna answers the riddle, not Harry.

Worst. Hero. Ever.

They get to the common room, and are immediately ambushed by an interchangeable Death Eater.

Chapter Thirty: The Sacking of Severus Snape

In which Snape appears for ten seconds and utterly steals the show.

Oh look, they've summoned Lord Voldemort again. Pity they couldn't summon somebody actually scary instead.

So the Dark Lord is on his way, and all the people that are actually cool rush to the defence of Hogwarts. Harry, on the other hand, runs around looking for somebody to tell him what to do next. He eventually decides to start taking orders from the ghosts.

Everybody mills around in the corridors, and all the parents seem to have shown up. Molly Weasley continues to be completely fucking shit, insisting that Ginny can't fight because she's only sixteen.

Everybody gets ready for battle.

Oh, and Snape leaves so that he can get killed.

Chapter Thirty One: The Battle of Hogwarts

In which a battle presents no impediment to the interminable exposition.

While the rest of the student body are actually getting stuff done, and preparing to lay down their lives in battle against the Dark Lord, Harry goes off looking for a plot dump.

He finds it in the shape of the Grey Lady, ghost of Ravenclaw tower, who reveals that she is actually Helena Ravenclaw, daughter of Rowena Ravenclaw. Wow. Words cannot explain how little I care about that. She also reveals that she stole her mother's diadem, and that she hid it in a tree in Albania (the very Albania where Voldemort once went! Amazing isn't it). Harry suddenly remembers that he saw a diadem in the Room of Lost Things in the previous book (funny how he can remember that, but not - say - things that happened two chapters ago). He goes to get it.

While Harry is doing this, Ron and Hermione dash of to have sex in the Chamber of Secrets, which Ron manages to open by imitating Harry's use of Parseltongue. That's right folks, the magical language Harry carries in his soul as a result of his connection with the Dark Lord can be picked up by any schlub who pays attention for five minutes.

Hermione destroys the cup offstage, so we miss the big plot point, and get the ghost story. Oh JK, you master storyteller you.

Then the Troika go to the Room of Requirement and start ransacking it for Horcruxes. It's a good thing Harry happened to see it in the previous book really, or they'd be totally fucked.

In the Room of Requirement they meet Draco, Crabbe and Goyle. Crabbe and Goyle have been presented previously as a bit thick, but basically just your average bully types. In this scene, though, they're positively retarded. In, like, an actual way, rather than the way in which the whole book is retarded.

"We was hiding in the corridor outside," grunted Goyle. "We can do Diss-lusion charms now! And then," his face split into a gormless grin, "you turned up right in front of us and said you was looking for a die-dum! What's a die-dum?"

I've typed a lot of quotes into this article (I intended to do one a chapter, but I couldn't quite bring myself to), and fuck me JKR uses a lot of exclamation marks. Also: for fuck's sake, if you can cast a Dissillusionment charm, you should damned well be able to say "Dissillusionment charm".

Anyway, it turns out that Draco, Crabbe and Goyle have shown up to kill Harry, or bring him to the Dark Lord or something. I would like to believe that Draco is only doing this because he fears for the safety of his family, but since every single Slytherin turned against Hogwarts in the crunch, I think he's probably just being Evil.

So Crabbe or possibly Goyle summons Fiendfire, which is wild and uncontrollable and, conveniently, one of the few things that can destroy a Horcrux. This kills Crabbe, and allows Harry do demonstrate his heroism by rescuing Draco.

They get outside to see the penultimate (they think) Horcrux bleeding itself to death, and meet up with Fred, Percy and some nameless others. Percy gets quite a nice moment of redemption, where he apologises for trying to have a career when he should have just settled into virtuous poverty like the rest of his family. Then Fred gets killed in a horrible explosion.

Poor Fred. Ah well, it's not like he and George had distinct personalities anyway.

Chapter Thirty Two: The Elder Wand

In which Snape gets it for spurious reasons.

This chapter begins with Harry being Really Really Upset that Fred is dead.

The world had ended, so why had the battle not ceased, the castle fallen silent in horror, and every combatant lain down their arms?

Oh just shut up! Just shut the fuck up JK Rowling. If you want us to mourn the death of a minor character, spend some fucking time developing them instead of telling us how we should all be really sad and shocked that they died.

So the battle rages on. Harry decides he's got to go find Voldemort, because he has to kill Nagini and end the plot once and for all. Also: he has to overhear Snape's final confrontation with Voldemort.

So Harry sneaks into the Shrieking Shack with his posse in tow, and we see Voldemort killing Snape in order to become True Master of the Elder Wand. Snape coughs his memories into a jar, and Voldemort calls an intermission in the battle, instead of just killing Harry where he stands.

I fucking hate this book.

Chapter Thirty Three: The Prince's Tale

In which all the fanfic turns out to have been right.

Snape was in love with Lily.

Harry is a Horcrux.

Dumbledore is an asshole.

Chapter Thirty Four: The Forest Again

In which the forest still fails to be remotely threatening.

This chapter makes me genuinely uncomfortable. Not in a "it's so dark and edgy and outside my comfort zone way". In a "I seriously am beginning to find JK Rowling morally despicable" kind of way.

Harry discovered, through Snape's memories, that he (Harry) is a Horcrux, and that the only way Voldemort can be defeated is if he (Voldemort) first kills Harry, thereby destroying the fragment of his (Voldemort's) soul which is inside him (Harry).

Harry, being the braindead personality-free fucktard he is, accepts this at face value, and marches off to die, pausing briefly to tell Neville to kill Nagini if he gets the chance. I'll say this for Harry, he knows how to leave things in the hands of better men.

He realises that "I open at the close" (the cryptic message inscribed on the snitch that Dumbledore gave him) means "I open when you're marching off to sacrifice yourself pointlessly". So the snitch opens, and he gets the (new, not-cursed) Resurrection Stone out of it. He puts on the ring and turns it, and all the dead people in the book (well, James, Lily, Lupin and Sirius at least) show up in spectral form to tell him how proud they are that he's off to commit suicide by means of Dark Wizard.

I mean, seriously, this is all kinds of fucked up.

Lily's smile was widest of all. She pushed her long hair back as she drew close to him, and her green eyes, so like his, searched his face hungrily as though she would never be able to look at him enough. "You've been so brave." He could not speak. His eyes feasted on her, and he thought that he would like to stand and look at her forever, and that would be enough. "You are nearly there," said James. "Very close. We are ... so proud of you." "Does it hurt?" The childish question had fallen from Harry's lips before he could stop it. "Dying? Not at all," said Sirius. "Quicker and easier than falling asleep."

I'm sorry, but that's just wrong on so many levels.

Now I admit, all through this book, I've been annoyed by the overprotective coddling of Molly Weasley, who won't let anybody under the age of thirty do anything that might be considered dangerous, but I'd even take that interfering old biddy over this creepy band of suicide groupies.

I mean seriously: the Potters both sacrificed their lives to save Harry, but now they're all in favour of him rushing headlong into his inevitable destruction? And what's with Sirius' "being dead is totally cool" speech? I mean seriously, this is exactly the kind of shit that Christian Fundamentalists have fits over, and with good reason.

Harry confronts Voldemort. Voldemort kills him.

I really, really wish this article could end here.

Chapter Thirty Five: King's Cross

In which JK Rowling, through Dumbledore, tells us how to feel about Harry.

I almost cannot bring myself to write about this chapter, in which Harry has a vision of Dumbledore in King's Cross station, and Dumbledore explains the plot to him again for old times' sake.

So it turns out that Harry isn't dead after all, because of the Very Special Bond between Harry and Voldemort, but Voldemort did ironically manage to destroy the fragment of his soul which was inside Harry all this time.

Wow. Convenient.

Then Dumbledore gives us a big speech about how fucking wonderful Harry is. You see Dumbledore sought the Deathly Hallows himself, but he sought them for bad reasons. Which in this case means "any reason at all." Harry, on the other hand, is Good and Pure, because he went through his entire life without having a fucking clue what he was doing. Because Harry was a passive little pussy who never did anything, never achieved anything, never had any ambition or even motivation.

"You are the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying."

So Harry, by blindly and unquestioningly allowing Voldemort to kill him, has shown himself to be a better man than any other.

I'm sorry, but I find that genuinely offensive.

I'm going to go into more detail about this in my post-book wrap up, because I think it bears some close analysis, but for now I'll make a couple of simple points.

Every single man, woman, and child in Hogwarts is risking their life to defeat Voldemort. Every single one of them is confronting death (or, if you prefer, "Death") and every single one of them has accepted that there are far worse things than dying. But their sacrifice doesn't count, because they're actually fighting, which is to say, they are trying to survive. In the new morality Rowling wants us to accept, the only true way to show courage is to lie down and just accept death.

Furthermore, Harry's stoic acceptance of his mortality is grossly undermined by the fact that he actually doesn't die. His great sacrifice is actually just another instance of him doing nothing by himself, and relying on other people to make things turn out alright.

Consider: if Harry actually had died, his mastery of the Elder Wand would have died with him, and Voldemort would have been able to carry on slaughtering to his heart's content. He would have still had one Horcrux left, and Hogwarts would have been destroyed.

This is the emotional and moral crux of the book, and it sucks beyond the telling of it.

Chapter Thirty Six: The Flaw in the Plan

In which all that seemed wrong was now right and those who deserve to are certain to live a long and happy life, ever after.

Voldemort seems to have collapsed, as well you might after nuking your own soul. He sends Narcissa to check whether Harry is alive, but when she realises that he is, she asks him (in a whisper) whether Draco is still alive.

Seriously, I love the Malfoys. I mean compare Narcissa - whose first and only concern is for her child, so much so that she risks defying the Dark Lord who, let's face it, isn't exactly known for his forgiving nature, just to know if he's alive or dead - compare her with Lily Potter, who just moments ago was cheerfully watching her son go to his certain death.

So Voldemort carries Harry's "dead" body to the front lines and does his big "ha ha, I've won you bunch losers" speech.

Everybody acts really sad that Harry is dead. Then Neville rushes the Dark Lord. Because Neville fucking rocks.

The Dark Lord disarms him, binds him, and then puts the Sorting Hat on his head and sets it on fire. Dude, you know she's reaching when she kills the goddamned Sorting Hat.

Neville breaks free of Voldemort's curse (which I like to think is Neville being a badass, but it is later revealed to be the Power of Harry's Big Love Death Sacrifice), pulls the Sword of Gryffindor out of the sorting hat, and totally decapitates Nagini. Because he has had it with this motherfucking snake, oh yes.

So then the shit hits the fan, and Harry jumps under his invisibility cloak again. There's a bunch of really badly written action. Molly Weasley takes out Bellatrix Lestrange in what our esteemed editor would identify as the Battle Between The Virtuous Woman And the Sinful Woman. Harry finally reveals himself, and reveals too that he has learned from Dumbledore the capacity to make long stupid speeches.

I'm going to reproduce this in full, and I'll say beforehand that Voldemort is totally right about everything:

"I don't want anyone else to try to help," Harry said loudly, and in the total silence his voice carried like a trumpet call. "It's got to be like this. It's got to be me." Voldemort hissed. "Potter doesn't mean that," he said, his red eyes wide. "That isn't how he works, is it? Who are you going to use as a shield today Potter?" "Nobody," Harry said simply. "There are no more Horcruxes. It's just you and me. Neither can live while the other survives, and one of us is about to leave for good ..." "One of us?" jeered Voldemort, and his whole body was taut and his red eyes stared, a snake that was about to strike. "You think it will be you, do you, the boy who has survived by accident, and because Dumbledore was pulling the strings?" "Accident, was it, when my mother died to save me?" asked Harry. They were still moving sideways, both of them, in that perfect circle, maintaining the same distance from each other, and for Harry no face existed but Voldemort's. "Accident when I decided to fight in that graveyard? Accident that I didn't defend myself tonight, and still survived, and returned to fight again?"

Umm ... yes. Yes to every single one of them. At no point was it suggested that Lily Potter deliberately invoked ancient magic when she put herself in front of her son. Harry certainly didn't go to the graveyard by choice, and he had no idea that his wand would magically prevent Voldemort from hurting him. So yes, it was in fact all accidental. Harry Potter: the boy who was too dumb to die.

There's one more bit I want to draw attention to in this speech, because I find it so abominably offensive.

"I was ready to die to stop you hurting these people ... I've done what my mother did. They're protected from you. Haven't you noticed how none of the spells you put on them are binding?"

This comes back to my point from further up (and I'll come back to it again, because it genuinely sickens me). Why the fuck is Harry's sacrifice more significant than anybody else's? Why did Harry's "willingness to die" create a special magic forcefield around Hogwarts, but not the willingness to die of every single other person in the damned school?

Essentially, Harry is setting himself up here as a literal Christ figure. The perfect innocent, going meekly and willingly to his death in order to take the place of the whole world. The thing is, though, Jesus was supposed to actually be God. His sacrifice (according to Christian tradition) was greater than the sacrifices of normal men because he was not a normal man. He was God, suffering as a man for the sins of man. Harry Potter is just a miserable self-involved kid with a martyr complex.

Harry carries on talking for another three pages. Then Voldemort tries to curse him, but his curse rebounds because of that bullshit with the Elder Wand really belonging to Harry because he "conquered" Draco.

Of course with the Dark Lord fallen, his entire army disperses without a word.

They collect their dead, and we find that Mr and Mrs Remus Lupin are among the fallen. Harry is momentarily sad.

The final page of the book shows Harry with the Elder Wand, which is now most definitely His. In a scene which I think sums up the vacuous nature of the entire series, he uses the Elder Wand, the Wand of Destiny, the Deathstick, to magically repair his old wand.

Because lord knows, we wouldn't want the events of the last six hundred pages to have any consequences now, would we.

Epilogue: Nineteen Years Later

In which we learn that nothing that happened in the entire series meant shit.

Harry is married to Ginny. Ron is married to Hermione.

Back when I read The Order of the Phoenix, one of the few things I liked about it was the fact that Ginny seemed to have got over her crush on Harry. I thought that it was a refreshingly subtle, and subtly mature message to put into a children's book: sometimes you just get over people.

It saddens me greatly that JK Rowling, divorcee and single parent that she is, would feel the need to present such a naive view of romance. It seems like she spent so long talking about Death, she couldn't find anything to say about Life beyond "you grow up, get married, and have children."

Harry and Ginny's children are called James, Lily, and (as I am sure you already know) Albus Severus.

I think this, more than anything else, shows how deeply immature the series is. Harry goes through seven years of constant danger, he suffers torment, loss and even death. He touched the soul of the greatest Dark Wizard who ever lived, and practised the blackest of magic when he was forced to. But has he grown as a person? Has he changed? Not at all. His life still revolves around James and Lily, Dumbledore and Snape.

I also find it more than a bit offensive that Ginny (who we learn in

this interview

goes on to be an international sports superstar) doesn't seem to get any say in naming her own kids. I know it's an epilogue, I know it's sweet and everything, but her brother died at Hogwarts as well. The epilogue essentially says "And Harry Finally Got The Happy Family He'd Always Longed For". Never once does it consider the fact that after seven years he might want something else.

Coming Soon: My thoughts on the book as a whole, and the series in general.

Wardog at 15:46 on 2007-08-10I'm sorry I keep quoting David and Hannah at you but they're one of the few people to whose arguments I would naturally grant credence and they both very much enjoyed DH. David pointed out that there's something very different in fighting in a war in which there's a chance you might get killed and knowing walking to your death - thus Harry's sacrifice has more nobility and courage attached to it than you're giving him credit for. I guess it's the difference between rushing the Bastille and going to the guillotine..permalink - go to top

Dan H at 16:00 on 2007-08-10There is indeed a difference between fighting in a war in which there's a chance you might get killed and knowingly walking to your death. Knowingly walking to your death is easier. Harry doesn't really have a choice. He's "the chosen one". Colin Creevey, however, could have just walked away from Hogwarts and nobody would have thought the less of him for it. I'd also point out that Harry didn't sacrifice himself to *save* anybody. He sacrificed himself to *kill* somebody.permalink - go to topArthur B at 17:10 on 2007-08-10I have to say that I'm also deeply uncomfortable with any situation where deliberate suicide is actually a good idea. Walking bravely to the guillotine, I don't count as suicide, because you don't normally have much choice as to whether or not you get your head hacked off: the only choice is whether you cry and whine and piss your pants, or whether you walk with your head held high and, possibly, impress the crowd with your stoic acceptance of your fate. Walking to a duel which you are going to deliberately lose, because you think a loophole in the metaphysics in the universe will allow you to become Master of Death and give you the power to be the Messiah, isn't the act of a brave or noble individual. It's the act of a paranoid schizophrenic.permalink - go to topDan H at 17:15 on 2007-08-10He's not even doing it because he knows about the loophole, though. He's doing it for the same reason he does everything (see next article): Because He Thinks Dumbledore Wanted Him To.permalink - go to topArthur B at 17:31 on 2007-08-10So it is, in fact, literally true that if Dumbledore asked Harry to jump off a cliff, Harry would do it. (Which is kind of odd, in a series of books where mistrusting authority is supposedly a recurring theme.)permalink - go to topWardog at 21:51 on 2007-08-11I can't believe I'm trying to defend JK. I really have no investment in this, which is why I'm doing such an appalling job of it. But surely Harry has just as much right to walk way than Colin Creevy? He could go and live with Hermione's parents in Australia. I mean, through Snape's memories Harry sees what Dumbledore always intended for him (that he should nobly sacrifice his life) and *chooses* to do it anyway. An alternative reading might be that Harry realises that, rather than run around desperately trying to find alternative solutions to the Voldemort Problem, the adults around him have essentially groomed him into a passive matyr figure who will Do The Right Thing, even though it means his own death. And by the time he realises how thoroughly screwed he is, it's in the middle of the final battle and there's nothing much he can do short of pegging it. To *choose* what other people want you to do is still a choice, and after all that's happened to him, that Harry still has enough love in his heart to lay down his life is, y'know, pretty damn noble. For the record, I don't actually buy this. I don't actually buy that it's harder to walk knowingly into death than take a chance on it in a battle. Given a choice, I'd go for the battle and hope to find somewhere to hide.permalink - go to topWendy B at 23:29 on 2007-08-13Daniel --- I just wanted to say that you are not alone in your suffering. I've been working on a review of DH from my Livejournal site, but the 7th book seems to have killed my will to write. I am reading the book one more time to possibly find redeeming value, besides inducing millions of otherwise illiterate youngsters to get interested in reading. Beyond the insufferable plot details/holes you chronicle above, the series up through B6 appeared to be a gigantic and elegant mystery puzzle to be unveiled. And then on 7/21 we discover that it was an UNSOLVABLE mystery --- in B7 she introduced new characters and clunky plot devices. at the 11th hour (it burns! it burns!), to contort and bring the damn story to a close. All her prior book "clues" that fandom crawled over with a tweezer --- they weren't clever clues at all. Bah...but I loved this essay and laughed through the entire series. I might not write a thing but just refer folks here. Wendypermalink - go to topDan H at 15:13 on 2007-08-16the series up through B6 appeared to be a gigantic and elegant mystery puzzle to be unveiled. And then on 7/21 we discover that it was an UNSOLVABLE mystery I think that's part of why I found the last book so unsatisfying. While I wasn't ever massively into the "puzzle box" aspect of the books, I can understand other people being into it. But the last books lost sight of even that giving us, as you say, a bunch of new characters and clunky plot devices which came out of nowhere (or at the very least, out of previously untouched areas of her notes). If you do manage to get your review finished, I'll be very interested in seeing it. permalink - go to topWendy B at 16:18 on 2007-09-16Daniel...you might get some traffic to these articles as I posted the links within an essay I just posted to LiveJournal's hp_essays: http://community.livejournal.com/hp_essays/239017.html Wendy Bpermalink - go to topDan H at 12:24 on 2008-03-25On the Dumbledore side of things, I just don't understand how she can have a character that she spends half the book going off on a tangent about their unnecessary backstory (although it is a tangent away from that fucking tent so maybe I shouldn't complain) - the point of which is supposed to reveal that he turned away from power and ideas of sacrificing people for the 'greater good' - only to have him control and use every single character to the point where the entire book is just enacting his great Masterplan! Surely that contradicts a bit?!! JK is chronic for this: her Good characters behave exactly the same way as her Evil characters, except that everything that is a sign of an evil character's Evilness is a sign of a Good character's Goodness. Cases in point: Draco is evil because he "bullies" Harry. James is good because he "sticks up" for people against Snape (Harry similarly does a lot of "sticking up" for people that involves dogpiling defenseless Syltherins). Umbridge is a "racist" because she thinks Hagrid being a half-giant makes him a bad teacher. Harry, Ron and Hermione treat the full giants with patronizing contempt, and this is a sign that they're great humanitarians. Voldemort hates Muggles because he's evil. All the other Wizard treat Muggles like vermin but it's okay because they're endearingly careless about it. Then of course there's the fact that Harry's furious desire for vengeance is apparently a sign of his great capacity for "love". p.s ooh look, my first post. How exciting :) Welcome aboard.permalink - go to tophttps://me.yahoo.com/a/tjLTVHEducFb4rKDHU5DukBHtQcCbTVMEEq55v0CxV4-#5e156 at 20:29 on 2009-07-29Dan doesn't realise just how absolutely spot on he is. I remember the Magnet series in 1930 where the Remove overthrow a demonic temporary headmaster from Greyfriars. Did anyone else read the Magnet when it was still being published? DH should have followed the Hogwarts front with Neville and Luna leading the rebellion against the Carrows. Or better yet, Voldemort should have made himself headmaster and Neville should have barred him out, that would have made for an infinitely better story. Voldemort really was no more capable than the wicked headmasters who sometimes got foisted on Greyfriars were. But instead... JKR wrote so much about nothing happening that she seemed as nihilistic as Samuel Beckett.permalink - go to topGamer_2k4 at 21:20 on 2011-06-02I know I've been guilty of some serious comment thread necromancy as of late, but I've got a question. "I think so, subtle laws govern wand ownership, but the conquered wand will usually bend its will to its new master." Is this an inaccurate transcription, or does the book really have run-on sentences like that? I've seen a few other quotes from the book with similar use of commas, and it's almost painful to think that writing that bad can make it past an editor and into the final version of a book.permalink - go to topDan H at 21:36 on 2011-06-02I'm honestly not sure if I transcribed that right or not, although to be honest I'm not overly fussed by slightly long sentences and I think Orwell would have supported the choice of a comma over the semicolon (although I think the line would sound better split into two sentences: "I think so. Subtle laws govern...").permalink - go to tophttp://sunnyskywalker.livejournal.com/ at 02:52 on 2011-06-03I don't remember about that particular quote, but I do remember noticing several instances of comma splices while reading the book and wondering why the editor didn't, as Dan suggests, split the sentence in two or something, because there didn't seem to be any good reason to have them. (I accept that sometimes there is a good reason. JKR didn't have it.)permalink - go to tophttp://vonnemattheus.livejournal.com/ at 00:21 on 2012-05-04The Horcrux hunt should have been a dangerous and exciting adventure, instead of the Camping Trip from Hell plot you get in sitcoms like Bottom. It was like watching someone else play Zelda really, really badly. Also, I thought there was an expiry date on the Mother's Love charm that keeps Harry's arse above ground? The best part of the book is when Harry is at his parents grave were, for some reason, he starts thinking of them rotting underground. JK even uses the word "Mouldering".permalink - go to tophttp://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/ at 03:01 on 2012-05-04Inspired by that scene, I buried my old HP books in the backyard after Deathly Hallows, but when I dug them up recently, they weren't nearly as decomposed as I had hoped. I don't think the maggots or the bacteria liked them very much either.permalink - go to topFurare at 13:28 on 2012-05-04Since this article was bumped onto the front page again, I noticed the comment about JKR's abuse of commas. I was reminded of reading the climax of Half Blood Prince; it's supposed to be really exciting and everything, and all I remember thinking is "Wow, are there four separate clauses separated by commas in that sentence?" I thought that several times. It's really quite shockingly badly-written in places.permalink - go to top

#Ferretbrain #Harry Potter #Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows #J.K. Rowling #Dan H

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juleatic · 6 years ago

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Lair Review: Rocwylde, #266115

@stardust-rails Here we go, thank you so much for your patience! I already love the little description you have on your profile and also that you mentioned where your clan originally comes from. From your little self-introduction you seem to be a very cool and friendly person and I love that you really are a lore clan! I’m excited to get to know your dragons :3

First Impression: At first I was like “Oh, that’s not too many dragons!” but then I also saw your hibernal den and I was like “well, that kinda adds up!”. I love your lair organization and you’ve got some REALLY pretty dragons there. Nice colors, REALLY nice apparel! God, I’m so looking forward to this!

Joel is a good boy. I love his outfit? It’s just so calming somehow, at the same time somehow mysterious. The shimmer/circuit also gives me “vintage fr” vibes. Seriously, how are people so good with apparel layering? Teach me your ways! His lore also confirms that he’s a good boy. Couldn’t hurt a fly! I love that he is so kind. Really. Such a good dragon!

WHERE DO I EVEN START? Colors? 100000/10. Apparel? 10000000/10. I REALLY LOVE HIM! And he’s a gen1? Like? OH MY GAWD. Her Lore is a little painful tho? I want her to be happy, please let her be happy. She’s a princess. She deserves this. Like really Q___Q Man, I’m in love. I just don’t know what else to say. It’s a perfect dragon.

I mainly stumbled upon Rohan because of the combination of his outfit and the accent. It just works so well together, he seems a little bit like an android? Don’t know if I’m right about this, but that’s the kind of vibes I get. Again, very nice colors and apparel. It all just works so well together.

Atlantis just matches her name so well. She gives me all those mystical hidden/lost city vibes and I’m totally in love with her. I love that you kept it kind of simple with her apparel this time around, because one can appreciate her genral appearance better that way. Well done!

Fortuna’s colors work so well together with her genes! It’s great. I don’t know what else to say about her though - her apparel is perfect, as always. Her accent looks so good and I love the little highlights it creates on her horns! So warm and a little bit contrasting to her other colors, which are a little cooler.

BONUS: You can’t really see much of her own colors because of the accent and the apparel, but I honestly don’t mind it. It’s so prettily layered and it fits her overall appearance so well. The candles are letting her seem a little ghostly though, I don’t know if it was your intention but I really like it! Good girl! I wonder what the text in her Bio is about tho?

Thank you so much for letting me look through your lair! It is such a good combination of dragons and they are all so pretty, I had a lot of fun ;ooo; I hope you enjoy this review!

#flight rising #dragon share #lair review #fr #long post

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years ago

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Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

Fair warning: spoilers for Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers are to be found herein!

In 1989, a twenty-something professional computer programmer and frustrated horror novelist named Jane Jensen had a close encounter with King’s Quest IV that changed her life. She was so inspired by the experience of playing her first adventure game that she decided to apply for a job with Sierra Online, the company that had made it. In fact, she badgered them relentlessly until they finally hired her as a jack-of-all-trades writer in 1990.

Two and a half years later, after working her way up from writing manuals and incidental in-game dialog to co-designing the first EcoQuest game with Gano Haine and the sixth King’s Quest game with Roberta Williams, she had proved herself sufficiently in the eyes of her managers to be given a glorious opportunity: the chance to make her very own game on her own terms. It really was a once-in-a-lifetime proposition; she was to be given carte blanche by the biggest adventure developer in the industry at the height of the genre’s popularity to make exactly the game she wanted to make. Small wonder that she would so often look back upon it wistfully in later years, after the glory days of adventures games had become a distant memory.

For her big chance, Jensen proposed making a Gothic horror game unlike anything Sierra had attempted before, with a brooding and psychologically complex hero, a detailed real-world setting, and a complicated plot dripping with the lore of the occult. Interestingly, Jensen remembers her superiors being less than thrilled with the new direction. She says that Ken Williams in particular was highly skeptical of the project’s commercial viability: “Okay, I’ll let you do it, but I wish you’d come up with something happier!”

But even if Jensen’s recollections are correct, we can safely say that Sierra’s opinion changed over the year it took to make Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. By the time it shipped on November 24, 1993, it fit in very well with a new direction being trumpeted by Ken Williams in his editorials for the company’s newsletter: a concerted focus on more “adult,” sophisticated fictions, as exemplified not only by Sins of the Fathers but by a “gritty” new Police Quest game and another, more lurid horror game which Roberta Williams had in the works. Although the older, more lighthearted and ramshackle [this, that, and the other] Quest series which had made Sierra’s name in adventure games would continue to appear for a while longer, Williams clearly saw these newer concepts as the key to a mass market he was desperately trying to unlock. Games like these were, theoretically anyway, able to appeal to demographics outside the industry’s traditional customers — to appeal to the sort of people who had hitherto preferred an evening in front of a television to one spent in front of a monitor.

Thus Sierra put a lot of resources into Sins of the Fathers‘s presentation and promotion. For example, the box became one of the last standout packages in an industry moving inexorably toward standardization on that front; in lieu of anything so dull as a rectangle, it took the shape of two mismatched but somehow conjoined triangles. Sierra even went so far as to hire Tim Curry of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame, Mark Hamill of Star Wars, and Michael Dorn of Star Trek: The Next Generation for the CD-ROM version’s voice-acting cast.

Jane Jensen with the first Gabriel Knight project’s producer and soundtrack composer Bob Holmes, who would later become her husband, and the actor Tim Curry, who provided the voice of Gabriel using a thick faux-New Orleans accent which some players judge hammy, others charming.

In the long run, the much-discussed union of Silicon Valley and Hollywood that led studios like Sierra to cast such high-profile names at considerable expense would never come to pass. In the meantime, though, the game arrived at a more modestly propitious cultural moment. Anne Rice’s Gothic vampire novels, whose tonal similarities to Sins of the Fathers were hard to miss even before Jensen began to cite them as an inspiration in interviews, were all over the bestseller lists, and Tom Cruise was soon to star in a major motion picture drawn from the first of them. Even in the broader world of games around Sierra, the influence of Rice and Gothic horror more generally was starting to make itself felt. On the tabletop, White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade was exploding in popularity just as Dungeons & Dragons was falling on comparatively hard times; the early 1990s would go down in tabletop history as the only time when a rival system seriously challenged Dungeons & Dragons‘s absolute supremacy. And then there was the world of music, where dark and slinky albums from bands like the Cure and Massive Attack were selling in the millions.

Suffice to say, then, that “goth” culture in general was having a moment, and Sins of the Fathers was perfectly poised to capitalize on it. The times were certainly a far cry from just half a decade before, when Amy Briggs had proposed an Anne Rice-like horror game to her bosses at Infocom, only to be greeted with complete incomprehension.

Catching the zeitgeist paid off: Sins of the Fathers proved, if not quite the bridge to the Hollywood mainstream Ken Williams might have been longing for, one of Sierra’s most popular adventures games of its time. An unusual number of its fans were female, a demographic oddity it had in common with all of the other Gothic pop culture I’ve just mentioned. These female fans in particular seemed to get something from the game’s brooding bad-boy hero that they perhaps hadn’t realized they’d been missing. While games that used sex as a selling point were hardly unheard of in 1993, Sins of the Fathers stood out in a sea of Leisure Suit Larry and Spellcasting games for its orientation toward the female rather than the male gaze. In this respect as well, its arrival was perfectly timed, coming just as relatively more women and girls were beginning to use computers, thanks to the hype over multimedia computing that was fueling a boom in their sales.

But there was more to Sins of the Father‘s success than its arrival at an opportune moment. On the contrary: the game’s popularity has proved remarkably enduring over the decades since its release. It spawned two sequels later in the 1990s that are almost as adored as the first game, and still places regularly at or near the top of lists of “best adventure games of all time.” Then, too, it’s received an unusual amount of academic attention for a point-and-click graphic adventure in the traditional style (a genre which, lacking both the literary bona fides of textual interactive fiction and the innate ludological interest of more process-intensive genres, normally tends to get short shrift in such circles). You don’t have to search long in the academic literature to find painfully earnest grad-student essays contrasting the “numinous woman” Roberta Williams with the “millennium woman” Jane Jensen, or “exploring Gabriel as a particular instance of the Hero archetype.”

So, as a hit in its day and a hit still today with both the fans and the academics, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers must be a pretty amazing game, right? Well… sure, in the eyes of some. For my own part, I see a lot of incongruities, not only in the game itself but in the ways it’s been received over the years. It strikes me as having been given the benefit of an awful lot of doubts, perhaps simply because there have been so very few games like it. Sins of the Fathers unquestionably represents a noble effort to stretch its medium. But is it truly a great game? And does its story really, as Sierra’s breathless press release put it back in the day, “rival the best film scripts?” Those are more complicated questions.

But before I begin to address them, we should have a look at what the game is all about, for those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure of Gabriel Knights’s acquaintance.

Our titular hero, then, is a love-em-and-leave-em bachelor who looks a bit like James Dean and comes complete with a motorcycle, a leather jacket, and the requisite sensitive side concealed underneath his rough exterior. He lives in the backroom of the bookshop he owns in New Orleans, from which he churns out pulpy horror novels to supplement his paltry income. Grace Nakamura, a pert university student on her summer holidays, works at the bookshop as well, and also serves as Gabriel’s research assistant and verbal sparring partner, a role which comes complete with oodles of sexual tension.

Gabriel’s bedroom. What woman wouldn’t be excited to be brought back here?

Over the course of the game, Gabriel stumbles unto a centuries-old voodoo cult which has a special motivation to make him their latest human sacrifice. While he’s at it, he also falls into bed with the comely Malia, the somewhat reluctant leader of the cult. He learns amidst it all that not just voodoo spirits but many other things that go bump in the night — werewolves, vampires, etc. — are in fact real. And he learns that he’s inherited the mantle of Schattenjäger — “Shadow Hunter” — from his forefathers, and that his family’s legacy as battlers of evil stretches back to Medieval Germany. (The symbolism of his name is, as Jensen herself admits, not terribly subtle: “Gabriel” was the angel who battled Lucifer in Paradise Lost, while “Knight” means that he’s, well, a knight, at least in the metaphorical sense.) After ten days jam-packed with activity, which take him not only all around New Orleans but to Germany and Benin as well — Sins of the Fathers is a very generous game indeed in terms of length — Gabriel must choose between his love for Malia and his new role of Schattenjäger. Grace is around throughout: to serve as the good-girl contrast to the sultry Malia (again, the symbolism of her name isn’t subtle), to provide banter and research, and to pull Gabriel’s ass bodily out of the fire at least once. If Gabriel makes the right choice at the end of the game, the two forge a tentative partnership to continue the struggle against darkness even as they also continue to deny their true feelings for one another.

As we delve into what the game does well and poorly amidst all this, it strikes me as useful to break the whole edifice down along the classic divide of its interactivity versus its fiction. (If you’re feeling academic, you can refer to this dichotomy as its ludological versus its narratological components; if you’re feeling folksy, you can call it its crossword versus its narrative.) Even many of the game’s biggest fans will admit that the first item in the pairing has its problematic aspects. So, perhaps we should start there rather than diving straight into some really controversial areas. That said, be warned that the two things are hard to entirely separate from one another; Sins of the Fathers works best when the two are in harmony, while many of its problems come to the fore when the two begin to clash.

Let’s begin, though, with the things Sins of the Fathers gets right in terms of design. While I don’t know that it is, strictly speaking, impossible to lock yourself out of victory while still being able to play on, you certainly would have to be either quite negligent or quite determined to manage it at any stage before the endgame. This alone shows welcome progress for Sierra — shows that the design revolution wrought by LucasArts’s The Secret of Monkey Island was finally penetrating even this most stalwart redoubt of the old, bad way of making adventure games.

Snarking aside, we shouldn’t dismiss Jensen’s achievement here; it’s not easy to make such an intricately plot-driven game so forgiving. The best weapon in her arsenal is the use of an event-driven rather than a clock-driven timetable for advancing the plot. Each of the ten days has a set of tasks you must accomplish before the day ends, although you aren’t explicitly told what they are. You have an infinite amount of clock time to accomplish these things at your own pace. When you eventually do so — and even sometimes when you accomplish intermediate things inside each day — the plot machinery lurches forward another step or two via an expository cut scene and the interactive world around you changes to reflect it. Sins of the Fathers was by no means the first game to employ such a system; as far as I know, that honor should go to Infocom’s 1986 text adventure Ballyhoo. Yet this game uses it to better effect than just about any game that came before it. In fact, the game as a whole is really made tenable only by this technique of making the plot respond to the player’s actions rather than forcing the player to race along at the plot’s pace; the latter would be an unimaginable nightmare to grapple with in a story with this many moving parts. When it works well, which is a fair amount of the time, the plot progression feels natural and organic, like you truly are in the grip of a naturally unfolding story.

The individual puzzles that live within this framework work best when they’re in harmony with the plot and free of typical adventure-game goofiness. A good example is the multi-layered puzzle involving the Haitian rada drummers whom you keep seeing around New Orleans. Eventually, a victim of the voodoo cult tells you just before he breathes his last that the drummers are the cult’s means of communicating with one another across the city. So, you ask Grace to research the topic of rada drums. Next day, she produces a book on the subject filled with sequences encoding various words and phrases. When you “use” this book on one of the drummers, it brings up a sort of worksheet which you can use to figure out what he’s transmitting. Get it right, and you learn that a conclave is to be held that very night in a swamp outside the city.

Working out a rada-drum message.

This is an ideal puzzle: complicated but not insurmountable, immensely satisfying to solve. Best of all, solving it really does make you feel like Gabriel Knight, on the trail of a mystery which you must unravel using your own wits and whatever information you can dig up from the resources at your disposal.

Unfortunately, not all or even most of the puzzles live up to that standard. A handful are simply bad puzzles, full stop, testimonies both to the fact that every puzzle is always harder than its designer thinks it is and to Sierra’s disinterest in seeking substantive feedback on its games from actual players before releasing them. For instance, there’s the clock/lock that expects you to intuit the correct combination of rotating face and hands from a few scattered, tangential references elsewhere in the game to the number three and to dragons.

Even the rather brilliant rada-drums bit goes badly off the rails at the end of the game, when you’re suddenly expected to use a handy set of the drums to send a message of your own. This requires that you first read Jane Jensen’s mind to figure out what general message out of the dozens of possibilities she wants you to send, then read her mind again to figure out the exact grammar she wants you to use. When you get it wrong, as you inevitably will many times, the game gives you no feedback whatsoever. Are you doing the wrong thing entirely? Do you have the right idea but are sending the wrong message? Or do you just need to change up your grammar a bit? The game isn’t telling; it’s too busy killing you on every third failed attempt.

Other annoyances are the product not so much of poor puzzle as poor interface design. In contrast to contemporaneous efforts from competitors like LucasArts and Legend Entertainment, Sierra games made during this period still don’t show hot spots ripe for interaction when you mouse over a scene. So, you’re forced to click on everything indiscriminately, which most of the time leads only to the narrator intoning the same general room description over and over in her languid Caribbean patois. The scenes themselves are well-drawn, but their muted colors, combined with their relatively low resolution and the lack of a hot-spot finder, constitute something of a perfect storm for that greatest bane of the graphic adventure, the pixel hunt. One particularly egregious example of the syndrome, a snake scale you need to find at a crime scene on a beach next to Lake Pontchartrain, has become notorious as an impediment that stops absolutely every player in her tracks. It reveals the dark flip side of the game’s approach to plot chronology: that sinking feeling when the day just won’t end and you don’t know why. In this case, it’s because you missed a handful of slightly discolored pixels surrounded by a mass of similar hues — or, even if you did notice them, because you failed to click on them exactly.

You have to click right where the cursor is to learn from the narrator that “the grass has a matted appearance there.” Break out the magnifying glass!

But failings like these aren’t ultimately the most interesting to talk about, just because they were so typical and so correctable, had Sierra just instituted a set of commonsense practices that would have allowed them to make better games. Much more interesting are the places that the interactivity of Sins of the Fathers clashes jarringly with the premise of its fiction. For it’s here, we might speculate, that the game is running into more intractable problems — perhaps even running headlong into the formal limitation of the traditional graphic adventure as a storytelling medium.

Take, for example, the point early in the game when Gabriel wants to pay a visit to Malia at her palatial mansion, but, as a mere civilian, can’t get past the butler. Luckily, he happens to have a pal at the police department — in fact, his best friend in the whole world, an old college buddy named Mosley. Does he explain his dilemma to Mosley and ask for help? Of course not! This is, after all, an adventure game. He decides instead to steal Mosley’s badge. When he pays the poor fellow a visit at his office, he sees that Mosley’s badge is pinned, as usual, to his jacket. So, Gabriel sneaks over to turn up the thermostat in the office, which causes Mosley to remove the jacket and hang it over the back of his chair. Then Gabriel asks him to fetch a cup of coffee, and completes the theft while he’s out of the room. With friends like that…

Gabriel is turned away from Malia’s door…

…but no worries, he can just figure out how to steal a badge from his best friend and get inside that way.

In strictly mechanical terms, this is actually a clever puzzle, but it illustrates the tonal and thematic inconsistencies that dog the game as a whole. Sadly, puzzles like the one involving the rada drums are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, you’re dealing instead with arbitrary roadblocks like this one that have nothing whatsoever to do with the mystery you’re trying to solve. It becomes painfully obvious that Jensen wrote out a static story outline suitable for a movie or novel, then went back to devise the disconnected puzzles that would make a game out of it.

But puzzles like this are not only irrelevant: they’re deeply, comprehensively silly, and this silliness flies in the face of Sins of the Fathers‘s billing as a more serious, character-driven sort of experience than anything Sierra had done to date. Really, how can anyone take a character who goes around doing stuff like this seriously? You can do so, I would submit, only by mentally bifurcating the Gabriel you control in the interactive sequences from the Gabriel of the cut scenes and conversations. That may work for some — it must, given the love that’s lavished on this game by so many adventure fans — but the end result nevertheless remains creatively compromised, two halves of a work of art actively pulling against one another.

Gabriel sneaks into the backroom of a church and starts stealing from the priests. That’s normal behavior for any moodily romantic protagonist, right? Right?

It’s at points of tension like these that Sins of the Fathers raises the most interesting and perhaps troubling questions about the graphic adventure as a genre. Many of its puzzles are, as I already noted, not bad puzzles in themselves; they’re only problematic when placed in this fictional context. If Sins of the Fathers was a comedy, they’d be a perfectly natural fit. This is what I mean when I say, as I have repeatedly in the past, that comedy exerts a strong centrifugal pull on any traditional puzzle-solving adventure game. And this is why most of Sierra’s games prior to Sins of the Fathers were more or less interactive cartoons, why LucasArts strayed afield from that comfortable approach even less often than Sierra, and, indeed, why comedies have been so dominant in the annals of adventure games in general.

The question must be, then, whether the pull of comedy can be resisted — whether compromised hybrids like this one are the necessary end result of trying to make a serious graphic adventure. In short, is the path of least resistance the only viable path for an adventure designer?

For my part, I believe the genre’s tendency to collapse into comedy can be resisted, if the designer is both knowing and careful. The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, released the year before Sins of the Fathers, is a less heralded game than the one I write about today, but one which works better as a whole in my opinion, largely because it sticks to its guns and remains the type of fiction it advertises itself to be, eschewing goofy roadblock puzzles in favor of letting you solve the mystery at its heart. By contrast, you don’t really solve the mystery for yourself at all in Sins of the Fathers; it solves the mystery for you while you’re jumping Gabriel through all the irrelevant hoops it sets in his path.

But let’s try to set those issues aside now and engage with Sins of the Fathers strictly in terms of the fiction that lives outside the lines of its interactivity. As many of you doubtless know, I’m normally somewhat loathe to do that; it verges on a tautology to say that interactivity is the defining feature of games, and thus it seems to me that any given game’s interactivity has to work, without any qualifiers, as a necessary precondition to its being a good game. Still, if any game might be able to sneak around that rule, it ought to be this one, so often heralded as a foremost exemplar of sophisticated storytelling in a ludic context. And, indeed, it does fare better on this front in my eyes — not quite as well as some of its biggest fans claim, but better.

The first real scene of Sins of the Fathers tells us we’re in for an unusual adventure-game experience, with unusual ambitions in terms of character and plot development alike. We meet Gabriel and Grace in medias res, as the former stumbles out of his backroom bedroom to meet the latter already at her post behind the cash register in the bookstore. Over the next couple of minutes, we learn much about them as people through their banter — and, tellingly, pretty much nothing about what the real plot of the game will come to entail. This is Bilbo holding his long-expected party, Wart going out to make hay; Jane Jensen is settling in to work the long game.

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/GK.mp4

As Jensen slowly pulls back the curtain on what the game is really all about over the hours that follow, she takes Gabriel through that greatest rarity in interactive storytelling, a genuine internal character arc. The Gabriel at the end of the game, in other words, is not the one we met at the beginning, and for once the difference isn’t down to his hit points or armor class. If we can complain that we’re mostly relegated to solving goofy puzzles while said character arc plays out in the cut scenes, we can also acknowledge how remarkable it is for existing at all.

Jensen is a talented writer with a particular affinity for just the sort of snappy but revealing dialog that marks that first scene of the game. If anything, she’s better at writing these sorts of low-key “hang-out” moments than the scenes of epic confrontation. It’s refreshing to see a game with such a sense of ease about its smaller moments, given that the talents and interests of most game writers tend to run in just the opposite direction.

Then, too, Jensen has an intuitive understanding of the rhythm of effective horror. As any master of the form from Stephen King to the Duffer Brothers will happily tell you if you ask them, you can’t assault your audience with wall-to-wall terror. Good horror is rather about tension and release — the horrific crescendos fading into moments of calm and even levity, during which the audience has a chance to catch its collective breath and the knots in their stomachs have a chance to un-clench. Certainly we have to learn to know and like a story’s characters before we can feel vicarious horror at their being placed in harm’s way. Jensen understands all these things, as do the people working with her.

Indeed, the production values of Sins of the Fathers are uniformly excellent in the context of its times. The moody art perfectly complements the story Jensen has scripted, and the voice-acting cast — both the big names who head it and the smaller ones who fill out the rest of the roles — are, with only one or two exceptions, solid. The music, which was provided by the project’s producer Robert Holmes — he began dating Jensen while the game was in production, and later became her husband and constant creative partner — is catchy, memorable, and very good at setting the mood, if perhaps not hugely New Orleans in flavor. (More on that issue momentarily.)

Still, there are some significant issues with Sins of the Fathers even when it’s being judged purely as we might a work of static fiction. Many of these become apparent only gradually over time — this is definitely a game that puts its best foot forward first — but at least one of them is front and center from the very first scene. To say that much of Gabriel’s treatment of Grace hasn’t aged well hardly begins to state the case. Their scenes together often play like a public-service video from the #MeToo movement, as Gabriel sexually harasses his employee like Donald Trump with a fresh bottle of Viagra in his back pocket. Of course, Jensen really intends for Gabriel to be another instance of the archetypal charming rogue — see Solo, Han, and Jones, Indiana — and sometimes she manages to pull it off. At far too many others, though, the writing gets a little sideways, and the charming rogue veers into straight-up jerk territory. The fact that Grace is written as a smart, tough-minded young woman who can give as good as she gets doesn’t make him seem like any less of a sleazy creep, more Leisure Suit Larry than James Dean.

I’m puzzled and just a little bemused that so many academic writers who’ve taken it upon themselves to analyze the game from an explicitly feminist perspective can ignore this aspect of it entirely. I can’t help but suspect that, were Sins of the Fathers the product of a male designer, the critical dialog that surrounds it would be markedly different in some respects. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this double standard is justified or not in light of our culture’s long history of gender inequality.

As the game continues, the writing starts to wear thin in other ways. Gabriel’s supposed torrid love affair with Malia is, to say the least, unconvincing, with none of the naturalism that marks the best of his interactions with Grace. Instead it’s in the lazy mold of too many formulaic mass-media fictions, where two attractive people fall madly in love for no discernible reason that we can identify. The writer simply tells us that they do so, by way of justifying an obligatory sex scene or two. Here, though, we don’t even get the sex scene.

Pacing also starts to become a significant problem as the game wears on. Admittedly, this is not always so much because the writer in Jane Jensen isn’t aware of its importance to effective horror as because pacing in general is just so darn difficult to control in any interactive work, especially one filled with road-blocking puzzles like this one. Even if we cut Jensen some slack on this front, however, sequences like Gabriel’s visit to Tulane University, where he’s subjected to a long non-interactive lecture that might as well be entitled “Everything Jane Jensen Learned about Voodoo but Can’t Shoehorn in Anywhere Else,” are evidence of a still fairly inexperienced writer who doesn’t have a complete handle on this essential element of storytelling and doesn’t have anyone looking over her shoulder to edit her work. She’s done her research, but hasn’t mastered the Zen-like art of letting it subtly inform her story and setting. Instead she infodumps it all over us in about the most unimaginative way you can conceive: in the form of a literal classroom lecture.

Gabriel with Professor Infodump.

The game’s depiction of New Orleans itself reveals some of the same weaknesses. Yes, Jensen gets the landmarks and the basic geography right. But I have to say, speaking as someone who loves the city dearly and has spent a fair amount of time there over the years, that the setting of the game never really feels like New Orleans. What’s missing most of all, I think, is any affinity for the music that so informs daily life in the city, giving the streets a (literal) rhythm unlike anywhere else on earth. (Robert Holmes’s soundtrack is fine and evocative in its own right; it’s just not a New Orleans soundtrack.) I was thus unsurprised to learn that Jensen never actually visited New Orleans before writing and publishing a game set there. Tellingly, her depiction has more to do with the idiosyncratic, Gothic New Orleans found in Anne Rice novels than it does with the city I know.

The plotting too gets more wobbly as time goes on. A linchpin moment comes right at the mid-point of the ten days, when Gabriel makes an ill-advised visit to one of the cult’s conclaves — in fact, the one he located via the afore-described rada-drums puzzle — and nearly gets himself killed. Somehow Grace, of all people, swoops in to rescue him; I still have no idea precisely what is supposed to have happened here, and neither, judging at least from the fan sites I’ve consulted, does anyone else. I suspect that something got cut here out of budget concerns, so perhaps it’s unfair to place this massive non sequitur at the heart of the game squarely on Jensen’s shoulders.

But other problems with the plotting aren’t as easy to find excuses for. There is, for example, the way that Gabriel can fly from New Orleans to Munich and still have hours of daylight at his disposal when he arrives on the same day. (I could dismiss this as a mere hole in Jensen’s research, the product of an American designer unfamiliar with international travel, if she hadn’t spent almost a year living in Germany prior to coming to Sierra.) In fact, the entirety of Gabriel’s whirlwind trip from the United States to Germany to Benin and back home again feels incomplete and a little half-baked, from its cartoonish German castle, which resembles a piece of discarded art from a King’s Quest game, to its tedious maze inside an uninteresting African burial mound that likewise could have been found in any of a thousand other adventure games. Jensen would have done better to keep the action in New Orleans rather than suddenly trying to turn the game into a globetrotting adventure at the eleventh hour, destroying its narrative cohesion in the process.

Suddenly we’re in… Africa? How the hell did that happen?

As in a lot of fictions of this nature, the mysteries at the heart of Sins of the Fathers are also most enticing in the game’s earlier stages than they have become by its end. To her credit, Jensen knows exactly what truths lie behind all of the mysteries and deceptions, and she’s willing to show them to us; Sins of the Fathers does have a payoff. Nevertheless, it’s all starting to feel a little banal by the time we arrive at the big climax inside the voodoo cult’s antiseptic high-tech headquarters. It’s easier to be scared of shadowy spirits of evil from the distant past than it is of voodoo bureaucrats flashing their key cards in a complex that smacks of a Bond villain’s secret hideaway.

The tribal art on the wall lets you know this is a voodoo cult’s headquarters. Somehow I never expected elevators and florescent lighting in such a place…

Many of you — especially those of you who count yourselves big fans of Sins of the Fathers — are doubtless saying by now that I’m being much, much too hard on it. And you have a point; I am holding this game’s fiction to a higher standard than I do that of most adventure games. In a sense, though, the game’s very conception of itself makes it hard for a critic to avoid doing so. It so clearly wants to be a more subtle, more narratively and thematically rich, more “adult” adventure game that I feel forced to take it at its word and hold it to that higher standard. One could say, then, that the game becomes a victim of its own towering ambitions. Certainly all my niggling criticisms shouldn’t obscure the fact that, for all that its reach does often exceed its grasp, it’s brave of the game to stretch itself so far at all.

That said, I can’t help but continue to see Sins of the Fathers more as a noble failure than a masterpiece, and I can’t keep myself from placing much of the blame at the feet of Sierra rather than Jane Jensen per se. I played it most recently with my wife, as I do many of the games I write about here. She brings a valuable perspective because she’s much, much smarter than I am but couldn’t care less about where, when, or whom the games we play came from; they’re strictly entertainments for her. At some point in the midst of playing Sins of the Fathers, she turned to me and remarked, “This would probably have been a really good game if it had been made by that other company.”

I could tell I was going to have to dig a bit to ferret out her meaning: “What other company?”

“You know, the one that made that time-travel game we played with the really nerdy guy and that twitchy girl, and the one about the dog and the bunny. I think they would have made sure everything just… worked better. You know, fixed all of the really irritating stuff, and made sure we didn’t have to look at a walkthrough all the time.”

That “other company” was, of course, LucasArts.

One part of Sins of the Fathers in particular reminds me of the differences between the two companies. There comes a point where Gabriel has to disguise himself as a priest, using a frock stolen from St. Louis Cathedral and some hair gel from his own boudoir, in order to bilk an old woman out of her knowledge of voodoo. This is, needless to say, another example of the dissonance between the game’s serious plot and goofy puzzles, but we’ve covered that ground already. What’s more relevant right now is the game’s implementation of the sequence. Every time you visit the old woman — which will likely be several times if you aren’t playing from a walkthrough — you have to laboriously prepare Gabriel’s disguise all over again. It’s tedium that exists for no good reason; you’ve solved the puzzle once, and the game ought to know you’ve solved it, so why can’t you just get on with things? I can’t imagine a LucasArts game subjecting me to this. In fact, I know it wouldn’t: there’s a similar situation in Day of the Tentacle, where, sure enough, the game whips through the necessary steps for you every time after the first.

Father Gabriel. (Sins of the fathers indeed, eh?)

This may seem a small, perhaps even petty example, but, multiplied by a hundred or a thousand, it describes why Sierra adventures — even their better, more thoughtful efforts like this one — so often wound up more grating than fun. Sins of the Fathers isn’t a bad adventure game, but it could have been so much better if Jensen had had a team around her armed with the development methodologies and testing processes that could have eliminated its pixel hunts, cleaned up its unfair and/or ill-fitting puzzles, told her when Gabriel was starting to sound more like a sexual predator than a laid-back lady’s man, and smoothed out the rough patches in its plot. None of the criticisms I’ve made of the game should be taken as a slam against Jensen, a writer with special gifts in exactly those areas where other games tend to disappoint. She just didn’t get the support she needed to reach her full potential here.

The bitter irony of it all is that LucasArts, a company that could have made Sins of the Fathers truly great, lacked the ambition to try anything like it in lieu of the cartoon comedies which they knew worked for them; meanwhile Sierra, a company with ambition in spades, lacked the necessary commitment to detail and quality. I really don’t believe, in other words, that Sins of the Father represents some limit case for the point-and-click adventure as a storytelling medium. I think merely that it represents, like all games, a grab bag of design choices, some of them more felicitous than others.

Still, if what we ended up with is the very definition of a mixed bag, it’s nevertheless one of the most interesting and important such in the history of adventure games, a game whose influence on what came later, both inside and outside of its genre, has been undeniable. I know that when I made The King of Shreds and Patches, my own attempt at a lengthy horror adventure with a serious plot, Sins of the Fathers was my most important single ludic influence, providing a bevy of useful examples both of what to do and what not to do. (For instance, I copied its trigger-driven approach to plot chronology — but I made sure to include a journal to tell the player what issues she should be working on at any given time, thereby to keep her from wandering endlessly looking for the random whatsit that would advance the time.) I know that many other designers of much more prominent games than mine have also taken much away from Sins of the Fathers.

So, should you play Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers? Absolutely. It’s a fascinating example of storytelling ambition in games, and, both in where it works and where it fails, an instructive study in design as well. A recent remake helmed by Jane Jensen herself even fixes some of the worst design flaws, although not without considerable trade-offs: the all-star cast of the original game has been replaced with less distinctive voice acting, and the new graphics, while cleaner and sharper, don’t have quite the same moody character as the old. Plague or cholera; that does seem to be the way with adventure games much of the time, doesn’t it? With this game, one might say, even more so than most of them.

The big climax. Yes, it does look a little ridiculous — but hey, they were trying.

(Sources: the book Influential Game Designers: Jane Jensen by Anastasia Salter; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Spring 1992, Summer 1993, and Holiday 1993; Computer Gaming World of November 1993 and March 1994. Online sources include “The Making of… The Gabriel Knight Trilogy” from Edge Online; an interview with Jane Jensen done by the old webzine The Inventory, now archived at The Gabriel Knight Pages; “Happy Birthday, Gabriel Knight“ from USgamer; Jane Jensen’s “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. Academic pieces include “Revisiting Gabriel Knight” by Connie Veugen from The Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet Volume 7; Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers: The Numinous Woman and the Millennium Woman” by Roberta Sabbath from The Journal of Popular Culture Volume 31 Issue 1. And, last but not least, press releases, annual reports, and other internal and external documents from the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is available for purchase both in its original version and as an enhanced modern remake.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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floralb0t-fr · 6 years ago

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Non-Lore Lair Review for user Chocoli.

First Impressions: Although there doesn't seem to be a super cohesive theme, you've got a lot of capes and dresses, so I'm expecting some really regal dragons! There are so many bright colours and I’m loving it

1. Aquamarine - I really love when the first dragon in a lair is a progen. Mine isn't, for lore reasons, but I really enjoy when people still treasure their first dragon enough for that little bit of respect. I like that you've got an in lore reason for him being both The First, but still not the leader of the clan. It's a nice touch! Speaking on looks, I adore how cohesive he altogether is. You've even gone so far as to get him a false white underbelly to make it all work! I love it. The layering on all of his various coats is interesting but it gives him this air of someone who is trying to keep warm. All in all I really like him! A very good progen, and first peek into your lair.

2. Constellation - I am an eternal sucker for dark blue/purple Skydancer girls. The moment I saw her I knew I needed to gush about this beauty!! Seriously, those silks, that accent, that familiar? I think I'm in love. I adore the lore that you have written for her as well! The first paragraph is fun and an interesting look into her existence and the second two paragraphs are very interesting, especially since they are also included in Celeste's bio. I love the mirroring! No matter what their origins are, it's a beautiful way to make sure that anyone who reads the lore knows that these two dragons are undoubtedly linked. I'm also a big fan of any usage of the cosmo gecko. It's just a cute lil thing isn't it?

3. Nymph - Perma babies are such a cute touch to any lair! I have one myself and I think they're a neat way to either showcase where a lair is in it's timeline, or to just show off what a person's favourite baby dragon model is. Spirals are a very neat choice because you get a lot of coverage for whatever the primary gene is, as well as the adorable ears that stick so far up. And now that we have different eye models, I think spirals show them off best. So for your perma baby to be a tree themed (always a good choice) spiral (love it) who has one of the new rare eyes? Absolutely superb. The little worldbuilding lore in this child's bio is a really sweet touch. I love the idea of there being nymphs who influence the growing season of Sorneith.

4. Twilight - I love the look that Twilight has going for her, something dark and broody, but seemingly at odds with her lore. It's really fun and I'm a big fan! I'm also a fan of the hopeless romantic character trope. Like, me too man, Soulmates and stuff? I'm down. In any case, it's Adorable and makes her very interesting. I did take a gander at her mate's lore, and I like the idea that even though Midnight doesn't subscribe to the idea of soulmates and cosmic love, he's still very much in love with Twilight. Real relationships don't always agree on ideology but can look past it easily enough. Its also nice that you didn't make Twilight's whole world depend on only Midnight by giving her a friend (taking them away, and then giving her a new one).

5. Krakatoa - Got to have some diversity in who I look at by doing at least One orange dragon. I really like how you've dressed him to give him a sort of spunky, dangerous trickster look. His clawtips match his eyes as well and that's perfect! I will admit I'm not a big fan of crackle, but since he's an xyx I actually didn't notice it at first so I think its acceptable. For me, Krakatoa's big draw is his lore! I really enjoy how you've described that he's both deeply involved in the protection of the clan, but knows how to have fun and direct his energy elsewhere when off duty. If your clan were a setting in an adventure game, I think Krakatoa would be the helpful guard the protagonist meets who helps them learn the warrior trade.

6. Rose - I think I've done enough with other dragons, it's time to return to my one true love in skydancers everywhere. Rose is downright gorgeous! Shes another tree themed dragon like Nymph, but this is an adult who can be dressed and bred. I think Rose is the perfect dragon to use the cherry dryad lotus accent. Also, as more and more genes are released, I think that the older ones get left behind. It's nice to see such a gorgeous dragon who is wearing such old genes as ripple and seraph. She also has your clan's active nature sprite (I know you have the whole set) and that's a perfect choice in my opinion. I also think the art you have of her is adorable ^u^

7. Fuyu - This darling guardian has totally caught my eye. I love all the roses and swirling patterns! Her lore stating that she want's a garden like the Viridian glade or the Tangled wood, is so bittersweet, especially since she Looks so much like she belongs with the nobles of Shadow. I like the idea of her being a very calm and relaxing dragon, and caring deeply for a dragon who is quite the opposite. Despite wanting the gardens of Nature and Shadow flights, she really does have the essence of a Water dragon! Very good overall.

8. Cordierite - The druid's outfit isn't as cohesive as some of the others, but I think it's perfect a dragon of her occupation. She also helps with Fuyu's gardening attempts! That's so cute! As an ambassador I think it's fitting that she has a dappled dunhoof as her active familiar. I like your usage of the Dryad's Guise to show that even though Cordierite, although accepting of being in a water clan, is not ashamed and has not forgotten her wind heritage.

9. Triplicate - A mechanic of gold and azure! I love the colour mix and the various apparel that you're using. I know I've mentioned it before, but I like how you haven't moved on from some of the older things that flight rising has to offer. He absolutely does look like the workaholic that his lore describes him as. It is cute, if maybe kind of sad, touch that he's too (shy) busy to have a mate and to have met Aki. Perhaps one day this will change. I really do enjoy Triplicate, and I wish him the best in your future lore.

10. Oidhche - I think it's a good idea to end off somewhere similar to where we started. Talking about appearances first, I like the skin that she's wearing, and I'm always a fan of ebony armour. I also am a fan of how you tied her wearing a skin into her lore. I'm curious what all this woman has been through! She sounds exactly like the sort of person who is exactly like you've described - word of law. And as strange as might be, I also enjoy that she isn't the happy go lucky figure head, nor is she the relaxed sort to let her subjects work things out entirely on their own. She has subordinates to take care of the jobs she's not suited for, but she is still very much in charge.

End thoughts: You have a Very interesting clan with a very deep lore! I like how much is different from dragon to dragon. It reminds me a lot of how I want my own lore to look someday haha. I'm impressed and as time passes, I'd like to see what all changes!

#lair reviews #chocoli #i really enjoyed this!

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aoriethetheif-blog · 8 years ago

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"The temple is under attack by a red dracolich in the shadow realm. This dracolich is why the temple has never been returned to our realm. There is a High Priest that keeps the dragon away from the temple but as long as it threatens he cannot return the temple. So, I study dragon lore and search for spells that will help me get to the temple and destroy the dracolich." They discussed other things while they finished eating. Aorie was just passing the last bit of hers to Shima, when the door of the taproom was kicked violently open. In the door stood a bald dwarf with half his face and head covered in old burn scars. His bright blue goatee reached past his belt, and he glared at Aorie and Shima with fire in his green eye, the other had a milky film and was partially buried in the scar tissue. Draga followed the dwarfs glare to find the drow wearing a merry grin and the dwarf trying to smother a laugh. "Commander," Aorie called. "You are looking well this morning. Did you change your beard? I like it!" Shima almost repressed a snort. The Commander started towards them roaring, "Ye did this," he lifted his beard, "Ye damned troublesome half-drow. Ye've been a pain in me backside all yer damned life. Tell me one good reason I shouldn't just put an end yer endless pranks and run ye outa me city!" Shima had slid under the table; it heaved with her suppressed mirth. Draga and River tried to clear the table before something fell off and broke. Aorie stood and fearlessly met the enraged dwarf commander in the middle of the room. She picked up the end of his beard, rubbed it between her fingers and showed the blue tips of her dark fingers to the dwarf. "This is a comb in color. When have I ever combed your beard?" She asked with infuriating calm. "What's that got to do with it? Ye're a sneaky one," the captain roared. "Which is why you pay me enormous piles of gold to catch thieves for you," she replied dryly. "But does not explain how I dyed your beard. So, why do you think I had anything to do with this." "Where were ye last night? Did ye go to Dwarftown? And just how do ye know this is a comb in job done on me beard?" "Look around," Aorie said, rolling her eyes. "I live in a brothel. I do the hair of many of the...employees on my off days. Of course I know about hair stuff. That stuff in you're beard will wash out next time you take a bath. And I was on the wall last night, per your orders." She slipped into a good impersonation of the commander's brogue, "Humans ain't no good on the durned wall on moonless nights. Ye round up them as can see for the new moon. And be there yerself." "BATH! I have to take a BATH to fix this," he bellowed. "Baths make ye sick. And me armor will rust!" Shima's laughter filled the room. Draga and some of the other patrons joined her. And the commander's anger was redirected. He stomped over to the table and drug Shima out from under it. "What're ye laughing at ye damned unnatural dwarf?" River had taken refuge in the rafters, as Draga returned the rescued crockery to the twins, who stood behind the bar, enjoying the show. "Aren't you guys going to break this up?" Bardo smiled at him, "Our guard Commander is only happy when he is yelling. Those two are his favorite targets, and they seem to enjoy upsetting him. He's not going to do anything but yell. And our gossip mongers," he pointed with his chin at a table full of well dressed patrons, "will talk about this for weeks. He usually keeps his fits in Dwarftown or the barracks." "Dwarftown?" Draga asked. "There are a couple hundred dwarves in the Citadel. They have their own district in the city's warren of tunnels," Zaria answered. Shima was sputtering, "Captain Bluebeard, you seem to have lost your eyepatch. Would you like me to go find you a new one?" It was only then that Draga noticed Shima did not carry the typical dwarvish accent. "See," Bardo said to Draga, "They can't help but wind him up. They say he takes himself too seriously. He'll be renamed throughout the city by the end of the day. The rest of the guard will take up the joke and present him with soap and eyepatches for a month or more." "Then, he'll most likely keep the color." Zaria told him, "The Guarda need the laughter, and he knows it. They are the ones charged with keeping peace in the city. They have to deal with all the horrors some people do to others and not become horrors themselves. Its hard on them." "Ye're both fired!" The commander declared. And with that, he left, slamming the door. Bardo said, "Now those two will spend the next month or two gambling, and starting bar fights. And there will eventually be some huge robbery, or murder that the rest of the Garda can't figure out. And he'll come stomping in here to get them back on the job, because they really are some of his elite." He grinned. And called out, "I think he means it this time, Aorie." "He means it every time," Shima answered for her friend, still laughing. "You want me bouncing the rabble out tonight?" "How many times has he fired you," River asked. "This makes five," Aorie said still wearing that tiny half smile the seemed to be a permanent fixture on her face. She yawned. "I'm tired. You guys still want an escort up to the monastery?" She looked at Draga. "Elite?" He looked at Bardo. "What kind of elite soldier lives in a brothel and plays childish pranks on superior officers?" "We've lived in many places," Zaria told him. "So, I would say, with some certainty, all of them. Soldiers, garda, watch, or whatever the local name for them, usually spend most of their off duty time in brothels much less genteel than this one. And they all play pranks on each other. People who depend on each other in the way the Garda do become family, but since they would feel awkward with traditional familial shows of affection, they play pranks." "Ok," Draga said slowly. He looked to Aorie, "When do we go see Grand Master Castellen?" "Give us four hours," she told him. "Explore the city, and meet us here. I'll send word up to Grand Master Castellen so he'll be expecting us this afternoon." Chapter 2

Aorie was dressed in tan breeches and a bright yellow blouse that made her eyes seem gold. Shima had thrown a green tabard over her armor that made her eyes look like sea foam. She carried a large covered basket that Draga assumed held the strawberries that the twins had asked them to carry up to the monastery. "Grand Master Castellen is expecting us for the midday meal. Shall we?" Aorie said, gesturing with a sun hat that matched her blouse towards the door. They walked up a slight rise though blueberry fields that were just waking from their winter slumber to the monastery. River danced and played in the fields as if glad to be free of the city. "What is she doing?" Aorie asked. Draga smiled gently, watching his fey companion. "She is fey. Her life is closely tied to nature, specifically to rivers, but all things in nature call to her. She is putting her blessing on the fields and most likely playing with other fey that live here," Draga replied. And at Aorie's raised eyebrow continued. "Most fey use their glamour to remain unseen by 'the big folk' as they call us. But, they can see each other. River decided to travel with me for reasons she has never explained. She knows I won't let any of the other big folk bother her so feels safe using the glamour to make herself look like a halfling or gnome." The gates of the monastery were open. He could see that when they were closed they would show the symbol of Ilmater, pale hands bound with a red cord. Just inside the gate, they were greeted by a young accolite, "Miss Aorie, Miss Shima, who have you brought to us today?" "A priest of Denier, interested in the library," Shima answered. "Brought some strawberries from the Widow in thanks for helping out our girls this morning, too." The lad grinned, "I'll make sure most of them get to the temple." "Where is Brother Abbott?" Aorie asked. "He took over the Grand Master's dining room this morning. I don't know what he is preparing but it smells wonderful. May I join you?" he answered. "Not today, Brother Joist. Maybe next time," Aorie sounded strange. There was a slight nervousness to her voice. When the boy had gone, Draga asked, "Joist is some carpentry thing, isn't it?" That got a laugh from Aorie, who had not said much since leaving the inn. He did not know her well, but she liked to talk, he knew. Her silence worried him. "His brother's names are Dowel and Mantel. Their father was a carpenter," her tone was the same dry amused one she had used when talking of her salary, "and wanted his boys to take up the trade. I think the oldest, Dowel, will. The boys came here when a fever took their parents," her tone was now matter of fact, as if this was were all the orphans came. And when he thought about it, he'd seen very few beggar children when he and River had explored part of the city. "Are there many orphans here?" Draga asked. "Ilmater loves children," Shima answered. "So, the Garda brings the kids that have nowhere else to go here. At least half the people in the Citadel have lived here or have friends who have." They continued across the courtyard to what looked to be an oversized barracks building. Shima pointing out different buildings and their purpose and greeting friends as they went. Aorie had gone silent again. Inside the barracks, they went up a stair on the right, and down a hall when they heard a weird noise, sluup-pop, sluup-pop. Aorie signaled to Draga to stay put, she had a dagger in her hand. Draga never saw where she had been keeping it. She moved around a bend in the wide hallway, Shima next to her with what looked like a cut down halbard, axe on one side balanced by a hammer head on the other. They looked up. Aorie relaxed, the dagger vanished and she sounded disgusted when she said, "What in nine hells are you doing here, gnome?" She held up a hand. "No, I really don't want to know. Do the Brothers know you are in the Monastery?"

#drow #dnd #half-dragon

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