Ludonarrative Dissonance and the Dismantlement of the Iconic Class Identities

[phalczen]

And lastly, something I wanted to say in my first post and something I've wanted to say since: Warzones and Galactic Starfighter are full of ludonarrative dissonance these days. All teams are mixed. It started with Odessen, but that one was designed around the alliance storyarch. Voidstar wasn't. Civil war wasn't. Everything is a training scenario for the alliance these days, even when the story has returned to its root with imps vs reps. They did this to appease the playerbase who complain about the long queue times. They removed faction identity from the one gameplay mode where it matters most. And I don't see this as a change that they can revert.

 

Absolutely!!!! This was pointed out of course when the cross faction thing was announced, but in the end it wasn't important to the Devs. Just a couple point of clarification though, it wasn't about the long queue times per se, but about the faction balance on the random teams. Matchmaking is definitely easier with cross faction, and for many (not all of course, but a sizable majority) exclusive pvp'ers its just about the competition and not much about the story. Also, all the Huttballs and all the arenas fit nicely with cross faction.

 

I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I did suggest at the time it would be better if Voidstar, Novare Coast, Alderaan, and Yavin were kept factional, for precisely the immersion. But the cat's out of the bag on that now.

[TrixxieTriss]

I do admit that the devs have made rather huge mistakes in regards to the game. The fact they changed from an alt-friendly game to one that wasn't alt-friendly was one of the major mistakes. Which is something I still don't understand the reasoning on, which is a sentiment that agrees with what you said about the lack of transparency and communication. Is it because Keith has a thing against people having alts? Is it because the devs don't understand players really like alts? It's unclear, which is bad and creates more resentment that could have been easily avoided.

 

What makes it more confusing about the direction to make it Alt unfriendly is Alts add more game playability and “content” by playing multiple ones.

This is a much more preferable way to play longer when there is less content being made than grinding yourself to boredom.

They keep adding grind instead of content and along the way make the game Alt unfriendly. They seem to be at opposing purposes. If you want people to play longer, don’t remove Alt playability content from the game.

Every change they’ve made along the way to make people play longer has had the opposite affect because they’ve removed the fun stuff from the game.

[AlrikFassbauer]

II was hoping it would have been modeled off more of a dagobah yoda-esque style. Have the story revolve around self discovery and tie in the gaining of new abilities to the sages story as trials or something. A little more jedi philosophy and spirituality.

 

Exactly my own problem.

 

In my opinion, writing an - in theorys - highly spiritual character as such an "aagreessive negotiator" is showing - imho - like a watermark cultural preferences of those who develop a game.

 

Me, I'm still waiting for an Star wars Adventure Game like Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis.

 

 

About the visual aesthetics : My current "headcanon" is that "we are playing the Legends that are so much later whispered in the bars at Coruscant level 1010", something like that.

Edited January 12, 2019 by AlrikFassbauer

[AlrikFassbauer]

They don't sit in the library all day meditating.

 

Some do. Jocasta Nu, for example ?

 

My other ludonarrative dissonance complaints really just come down to the core gameplay itself. The mechanics date back to wow 2004 and for me it just feels too old, constraining, shallow, and dull.

 

Well, the Blizzard-invemnted Action-RPG sub-genre conquered the world, and following the trail of money, most RPG developers actually followed that formula, because it provoded less development (no complicated skill checks !) , tied people to a genre that was and still is a people's favourite ( and probably with what I call "adrenaline addiction", too ).

 

I had a recent discussion on chat. I mentioned DDO. I wrote that one has to disarm traps there. Someone wrote : "Yes, one must disarm traps in SWTOR, too". I answered : "Not as a skillcheck". He became silent.

 

It is so much obvious that we have only action games these days. Why is that enormous focus / bias there in the first place ß I don't knbow, but I tend to think it's what I've mentioned above : Less development time, more focus on graphics (thanks to the graphics oriented players bred by NVidia et.al.), less maintenance time because of no complicated skill checks to look after, and, compared to that, relatively high profits,. Because profits is what gaming is about for the big firms.

 

As I wrote elsewhere, it's an self-fulfilling prophecy to me : I only produce action games, nothing else, and then I [can] say : "People want action games !).

EA being so much silent on Unravel is a clear sign, imo.

Edited January 12, 2019 by AlrikFassbauer

[salaciouscrumbbb]

I found this a good read, coming from a newer player just hearing your perspective. Very interesting, thanks for sharing this.

 

Glad you enjoyed it.. thanks.

 

Alrik, I agree with all your comments in this thread. I think we are in the very small minority though. I've also gotten pretty tired of combat.. Tired of killing things, playing mr. b@d@ss, saving the world again and again. My tastes have gotten so lowkey that I usually don't bother talking about it. I think I'm pretty biased now in that I've cherry picked elements I like about the movies and maybe made starwars into something it's not. Like I would love some slow art house movie of puppet yoda just wandering around dagobah looking for his lightsaber that some mischevous gremlin stole. Or something like a chambara movie.

 

It would take a quaint indie dev to make a more gentle and deep star wars game. A nice non "epic" one off story with maybe a few samurai style standoffs/duels instead of killing everything in sight. Maybe a puzzle platformer with controls like mario.. or a beautifully drawn point and click adventure like you're saying. I'm not that creative, but you get the idea.

 

Big developers will always just make action. But with the losses hitting the gaming industry, hopefully companies will rethink their strategies and put some real visionary talent back in charge and at least make good action.

 

Anyway, I'll just stick to wandering around my backyard in a robe whistling star wars themes when I'm in the mood.

Edited January 12, 2019 by salaciouscrumbbb

[Lhancelot]

Glad you enjoyed it.. thanks.

 

Alrik, I agree with all your comments in this thread. I think we are in the very small minority though. I've also gotten pretty tired of combat.. Tired of killing things, playing mr. b@d@ss, saving the world again and again. My tastes have gotten so lowkey that I usually don't bother talking about it. I think I'm pretty biased now in that I've cherry picked elements I like about the movies and maybe made starwars into something it's not. Like I would love some slow art house movie of puppet yoda just wandering around dagobah looking for his lightsaber that some mischevous gremlin stole. Or something like a chambara movie.

 

It would take a quaint indie dev to make a more gentle and deep star wars game. A nice non "epic" one off story with maybe a few samurai style standoffs/duels instead of killing everything in sight. Maybe a puzzle platformer with controls like mario.. or a beautifully drawn point and click adventure like you're saying. I'm not that creative, but you get the idea.

 

Big developers will always just make action. But with the losses hitting the gaming industry, hopefully companies will rethink their strategies and put some real visionary talent back in charge and at least make good action.

 

Anyway, I'll just stick to wandering around my backyard in a robe whistling star wars themes when I'm in the mood.

 

Entertainment has come to this. CGI has only exacerbated the lack of depth to not only games but movies too. I mean, how many modern movies are as interesting and character driven as the movie Slingblade?

 

Slingblade worked with paltry funds, has zero special effects in it, and I find that movie watchable even now 20+ years after it was made.

 

I guess the metrics indicate that the majority of people crave intense, battle-driven thematic scenes and so that's what we mostly get now from the big studios. There's usually little substance, but tons of action and these movies are pulling in the most money.

 

I suppose it's only natural games tend to go that direction too. My fondest memories of gaming are from when I had a Commodore 64, and was playing Bards Tale on it. The slow pace, intense concentration of trying to not die made it highly suspenseful and it was the most simplistic game ever compared to the technology they have now.

 

Even Everquest in 2000 had elements of that style of gaming, where actions really mattered and there was a real sense of substance in the game created by the game creators. I mean they put a ton of really interesting things in EQ1 that people still don't fully understand that go far deeper than just the simple type quests you had to work through. For instance, the lore was so deep that druidic stones were placed strategically by someone, something and no one knew how, just like IRL. If you looked at the map, certain types of buildings were created across the world that indicated a past civilization was there before the then newer one... Just like the real world now. Combat was a big part of the EQ1 world, but it definitely was not what made the game special.

 

If anyone is bored and wants to see a really fun and interesting video collection on Youtube that goes deep into the lore of Everquest done by an actual player I urge you to check out this and his others! These videos are high quality and very indepth on explanations of some of the stuff found in that 20 year old game.

 

Everquest Mysteries by Michael's Shenanigans:

 

It's a pretty nerdy watch, but if you had ever played EQ1 you undoubtedly will enjoy these videos, and if you never did you might still find them enjoyable just because they are humorously done and extremely high quality.

[Majspuffen]

Alrik, I agree with all your comments in this thread. I think we are in the very small minority though. I've also gotten pretty tired of combat.. Tired of killing things, playing mr. b@d@ss, saving the world again and again.

It's almost comical how many chapters in KOTFE and KOTET that ends with escaping an explosion of some form or another. Like, that's the only way to get the player excited. It's deus ex machina injected into the game; what the narrative tells you to do is not reflected in the gameplay at all. Slight spoilers from the Fractured Alliance chapter, but...

 

Theon sends you some intel about some space station. You go there and explore it and it basically serves to give the bad dude of the chapter some exposition. At the end, the station is rigged to blow because of course it is. When this happened, I actually activated walk toggle and walked back to the entrance. Nothing happened. When I got to the end a cutscene was triggered that showed my character and Lana in great distress, and they managed to escape the station just before it exloded! What luck.

 

The ludonarrative dissonance in that moment arose from my unwillingness to do what the narrative wanted me to do. If there had been an actual time-limit where failure would have meant restarting the mission, maybe I would have given a damn but alas. There was nothing in the game that reinforced the narrative they wanted to push so I decided to make fun out of it instead.

 

Bioware were very good at balancing story, exploration and combat, but they've kind of lost the art. And sadly, the art was never really in SWTOR. The gameplay was that of an MMO. Jedi Consulars could choose to play the diplomat in certain cutscenes, but at the end of the day their role was to do damage and kill, like every other class.

 

I'd still like to commend Bioware for some of the innovations they wrought; for instance, enemy types reacting differently to certain abilities (like Force Quake knocking them off their feet). This, at least, made the abilities feel more powerful to use and it could have allowed for some neat tactical gameplay. They were on to something... but today, your companion does all the killing for you if you can't do it yourself.

Edited January 12, 2019 by Majspuffen

[annabethchase]

Never stood a chance when trying to put Jedi/Sith on equal footing with the others. It requires you to throw out all logic from the jump.

[phalczen]

The ludonarrative dissonance in that moment arose from my unwillingness to do what the narrative wanted me to do. If there had been an actual time-limit where failure would have meant restarting the mission, maybe I would have given a damn but alas. There was nothing in the game that reinforced the narrative they wanted to push so I decided to make fun out of it instead.

 

Well, there are a couple of missions still in game where if you don't get out before the time limit then you esplodee too. There's a datacron on Quesh where it really matters. But, I've noticed even in Vet Mode KOTET chapter 3 Dark Reunion, when you have to go around and destroy the power cells in the gravestone to take down the shield blocking the quantum bomb controls, if time runs out you don't die … even in Veteran Mode. That's a missed opportunity. I can see the time limit not being enforced for story mode, but it should for Vet and Master modes. I mean, the devs have said that they never want a player to be blocked from progressing through the story. Enforced time limits for story mode might be an issue for the disabled/handicapped, for instance. But for people able and willing to do Vet and Master modes it should be enforced.

[spectreclees]

I didn't read this fully but I took parts from what you said and I'll add in my own problems with class identity and balance in this game.

 

As you probably said some abilities were given to classes that were not so much 'needed' in a word. A class that has a weakness is a class worth playing. Giving a class an advantage or an ability that defeats its weakness makes it less enjoyable to me. I'll stop being vague and get right to the point. Every class having a CC breaker, charge ability, gap closer etc was the wrong move on Bioware's part. Not every class needed these abilities and it just made balance a whole lot worse for the devs to tackle. You don't throw money at something and hope it works (metaphorically speaking here.) The same can be said for throwing abilities at a class and hoping it will just be better.

 

What Bioware should have done was refine and tune the abilities they currently had to work with and make the classes more distinct than what they are now. Every class has a stun now, every single one. Why? Not every class needs to be able to stun if they already have a slow, or a blind, or some other method of CC. The same can be said with gap closers and cc breakers. Every class has one of these and it's not necessary at all. Cooldowns again, every class has them and this is fine but some classes have more than others and some are completely ridiculous. Mercs/Mandos looking at you with a shield that heals you to full when you are attacked. They both already had a heal that would heal them when they got low on hp. Why not just make this ability better? Instead you added more to the problem.

 

Anyway, I think my point was made and I hope it coincides with what the OP was explaining in a way. I hope Bioware can fix the class problems this game faces in the future.

[TheAresian]

You get this in every game. Players start out excited about the classes and then they see an ability that some other class has and they complain about the other class being too powerful. Over time, the complaints get louder and more frequent until the devs give in and go full on "Bring the player, not the class" (to steal a phrase from WoW). Personally, I feel like it's a consequence of content locusting. Players rush through the content, where class identity adds a delicious flavor, to the end game and everything becomes about min/maxing, CC, PVP and whatnot.

[SaveTheMonkeys]

There were skill checks in the Athiss flashpoint, when I last played it (which was a few years ago). If your group had certain levels of a couple different crew skills (Archaeology and Slicing, IIRC), you could unlock a shortcut, or something. I got kudos from my team for having both - that was a nice moment.

[Majspuffen]

What Bioware should have done was refine and tune the abilities they currently had to work with and make the classes more distinct than what they are now.

Precisely! When everyone has the same base run speed, Force Speed and Force Charge are more distinguishable. Both abilities had weaknesses, however! Force Charge couldn't be used if the opponent was hiding from the warrior's line of sight and Force Speed was susceptible to knockbacks and roots. Operatives didn't have run speed, but they did have Cover which prevented them from getting charged by warriors, and they also had dispel meaning they could free themselves from a lot of root-abilities. They weren't as fast as the Assassin, but they were harder to pin down. Today, like I argue in my original post, Operatives and Assassin both attempt to fulfil the role of the same archetype; that of the Rogue.

You get this in every game. Players start out excited about the classes and then they see an ability that some other class has and they complain about the other class being too powerful. Over time, the complaints get louder and more frequent until the devs give in and go full on "Bring the player, not the class" (to steal a phrase from WoW). Personally, I feel like it's a consequence of content locusting. Players rush through the content, where class identity adds a delicious flavor, to the end game and everything becomes about min/maxing, CC, PVP and whatnot.

This post goes very well together with:

There were skill checks in the Athiss flashpoint, when I last played it (which was a few years ago). If your group had certain levels of a couple different crew skills (Archaeology and Slicing, IIRC), you could unlock a shortcut, or something. I got kudos from my team for having both - that was a nice moment.

 

I remember those skill checks. They're not in the new Flashpoints. Why? Might be because people wants to rush the content. When you play Flashpoints today, most experienced players seem to know exactly which way to go, which packs of mobs to avoid and which shortcuts to take. People don't play the content for the challenge, they play it for the reward (which is a problem with the vertical scaling model of MMORPGs). In order for fun gaming moments to happen, there needs to be a challenge and teams should have to communicate. I couldn't imagine playing a dungeon run in WoW's The Burning Crusade without communication. You'd always look at the classes present and use their unique abilities to tackle the challenge that lay ahead, and some dungeons were harder or easier depending on which classes you brought. This actually leads me to one of my favourite anecdotes from swtor..!

 

The first time I played False Emperor flashpoint, I was playing an Operative healer teamed up with a Powertech tank and two Sith Marauders as DPS. Back in those days, you needed to push Darth Malgus into the pit (granting him a Darth Sidious death). However, if you look at our composition you'll see that we had no pushback abilities whatsoever. We still managed to beat it, however. Our Powertech tank jumped into the pit and pulled Darth Malgus with him. Amazing moment!

 

But back on topic. When you dillute the unique tools of the classes, the classes themselves start to lose their unique identities. And the game feels less fun, as a result. That's at least my opinion, but I'm glad to have received such resonant responses so far! ^^

[SaveTheMonkeys]

 

The first time I played False Emperor flashpoint, I was playing an Operative healer teamed up with a Powertech tank and two Sith Marauders as DPS. Back in those days, you needed to push Darth Malgus into the pit (granting him a Darth Sidious death). However, if you look at our composition you'll see that we had no pushback abilities whatsoever. We still managed to beat it, however. Our Powertech tank jumped into the pit and pulled Darth Malgus with him. Amazing moment!

 

But back on topic. When you dillute the unique tools of the classes, the classes themselves start to lose their unique identities. And the game feels less fun, as a result. That's at least my opinion, but I'm glad to have received such resonant responses so far! ^^

 

 

That's awesome. It was a shame when they removed that mechanic. I do think that the classes had more identity in the early days, but honestly it was pretty thin to begin with; it had to be, to allow a smuggler to go 1-on-1 against someone with a lightsaber...

[VanniSilvante]

being a strictly pve player I can't really care too much about those problems. Not trying to be a dick, just being factual. My biggest issue is the game's story dissonance. Also the *lack* of story. I just resubbed last night after quite a long time being away. I forget how long but with my 'main' character I was caught up to the 'story' content that was released in December. Which took me all of 2 hours to complete and that was with bathroom breaks and having to go afk a few times. See my main is a Jedi Sage TK specialist. So the non force user dissonance that the non force users have I didn't feel as much when the Arcann/Vaylin conent was released. It still sucked that each class didn't have their own unique stories anymore but I dealt with it cause it was for the most part a decent story with some good characters.

 

But Bioware's drip feeding 2 hours of content every 6 months (which I know hasn't been every six months...sometimes longer) is grating to me and I'm sure a lot of others who play this game for story. Cause oh boy do I love doing 2 hours of actual content to then run dailies forever. That is just the essence of fun. I hope this isn't too off topic, but seeing so many of you venting on the problems prompted me to post. I still like the game despite its flaws but their focus on the cartel market above all else is irritating.

 

Thanks for reading if you got this far.

[-sasori]

When I started out after the beta, I did choose commando because of the heavy armor hybrid healer type.

Considering 7 years swtor now has, they fairly quickly killed hybrids and we got left with a underperforming healer with non existing damage. If we wanted to play a heal skill spamming robe wearer we would have picked exactly that class....

 

And those people who had picked a heavy ranged damage dealer ended up with the squishest ranged Full derp DD role a Mmorpg could come up with.

The classic archer with no defense full of pointless utilities and the need to constantly kite enemies.

 

With the last overhaul the commando at least has great meta utilities for defense, but they don't fit either the kiting archer nor the initial hybrid heavy armored guy with a big gun.

Edited January 14, 2019 by -sasori

[AlrikFassbauer]

Entertainment has come to this. CGI has only exacerbated the lack of depth to not only games but movies too. I mean, how many modern movies are as interesting and character driven as the movie Slingblade?

 

Slingblade worked with paltry funds, has zero special effects in it, and I find that movie watchable even now 20+ years after it was made.

 

I was looking at one of my favourite movies of the recent years - and yes, these days I mostly view only animated movies anymore [gramnmar ?] - "How to train your dragon".

 

Only after watching it I realized that it is one of the very few movies I've even seen in recent times WITHOUT having a violent conflict in narrative. It's even so that the protagonist doesn't have any kind of conflict at all - the movie is more or less kind of an psychological study. Relationship between manly father and unmanly son.

 

Don't know about the other two movies of that series.

 

I mean, it's a Dragon movie, and Dragons are all about nothing but POWER, aren't they ? I mean, in Fantasy, Dragons are normally used as examples of ultimate power. Nothing is as powerful as a Dragon in Fantasy. Nothing. At. All.

And that movie is about Dragons, but NOT about power. Curious.

 

I guess the metrics indicate that the majority of people crave intense, battle-driven thematic scenes and so that's what we mostly get now from the big studios. There's usually little substance, but tons of action and these movies are pulling in the most money.

 

The older I become, the less I understand whatz's so interesting with movies like Transformers, or Avengers and with Superheroes in general. Even as a kid, I found Superheroes boring, but maybe that's because I grew up with Asterix, Lucky Luke, Tintin, Nick Knatterton ...

 

My current theory is that it really is an example of ... movies for extroverts vs. movies for introverts. I don't have any other way of explaining what I see.

I once read that the U.S. society is a society in which being extrovert is something positive, something wanted. Maybe that's part of what made the fascination of the film "Rain Man". Maybe that's part of what's making people use "Autism" as an insult these days.

In an newspaper, I recently read an excerpt from an Autobiography (is this the right word ?) of an medicine scientist, one of the best brain experts of the world, the article said, about his failing to understand his autistic son.

 

During that excerpt, there was one remarkable passage : That he was using "scans" (don't remember the exact word for that anymore) to test for sensitivity. The result was, that the sensitivity of his autisic son was exeeding anything normal. Only then he realized 2 things : That his try to acclimatize his son to normal living by bringing him into loud, noisy towns with lots of smells, lots of people etc. had been overwhelming his son. That his autistic behaviour was hos try to shut out the whole world of "it's just too much OF EVERYTHING", to say it in my words.

The second thing he realized was that probably all autists are THAT over-sensitive.

 

So, Autists seem to suffer from the extrovert world, which is very much non-sensitive (the German language has invented the insulting word of "noticing-free", meaning "free of the ability to notice anything detailed").

 

From this perspective, the insult "he / she is autistic", often read in the PvP forums, gets another drive. It's the insult - or so it appears to me now - of rather extrovert people who cannot cope with the fact that someone os not extrovert - and especially not adhering to extrovert society structures.

 

Introvert people might make up half of society, but in a society with a bias towards extrovertism (does this word really exist ?) , they are just not seen, they are a mninority, because to please them, much more substance would have to be put into movies, much more effort into details -> and the more money that's needed to spend, the less the profits are.

 

So, in the end, and this is my current theory, it's a matter of

extrovert movie -> less money spent = more profits

introvert movie -> more money spent = less profits

that locks out part of society. With games, with movies, with media in general. And let's hope it doesn't affect school too.

Edited January 14, 2019 by AlrikFassbauer

[Sarova]

Ludonarrative dissonance is a phrase that refers to when the gameplay contradicts the game narrative.

I eventually got sucked into this thread to see what the above phrase meant. Consider me edumacated

[Ardrossan]

I thought of another one: class story vs other quests. Frequently the class story has a sense of urgency to it: your master is dying of a DS plague and you need to retrieve the three magical macguffins to save her, you must quickly get to Lord Praven before Kira's master dies and the planet explodes, or your apprentices left you a message that they're being hunted by a sith assassin, you have to save them.

 

And then there's how it worked up until 4.0 or so, where before you went to fight the impending doom, you had to do a bunch of unrelated filler quests. You got used to it after awhile, but initially it was jarring when this happened, like 'gee, I hope Kai Sazen hasn't killed Doctor Lokin while i'm over in another zone backstabbing rakghouls.'

 

It just makes you wonder what the timeframe of these quests are. Some [read: many] class missions you can be done on a planet in a couple hours. So was that how long the player took or how long the character took? Did Act 2 of the BH story take 12 irl hours or three months? I used to resolve this by thinking that during the prologue, each new level gain was one character hour, then in Act 1 it shifted to one character day, in Act 2 one character week, in act 3 one character month. But Makeb supposedly takes like a week and the other expansions are even more wonky. I guess the writers just never thought of it.

Edited January 14, 2019 by Ardrossan

[SaveTheMonkeys]

But Bioware's drip feeding 2 hours of content every 6 months (which I know hasn't been every six months...sometimes longer) is grating to me and I'm sure a lot of others who play this game for story. Cause oh boy do I love doing 2 hours of actual content to then run dailies forever. That is just the essence of fun. I hope this isn't too off topic, but seeing so many of you venting on the problems prompted me to post. I still like the game despite its flaws but their focus on the cartel market above all else is irritating.

 

I play for the story, but its not really grating to me. Game development is expensive, so what we do get is probably what they can afford to give us. There is a HUGE amount of environment and level design work in the Nathema flashpoint, for example, but I imagine 90% of players don't notice because they're sprinting from mob to mob. Cartel market stuff is much cheaper/faster to produce than fully fledged story content and all that it entails.

 

I thought of another one: class story vs other quests. Frequently the class story has a sense of urgency to it: your master is dying of a DS plague and you need to retrieve the three magical macguffins to save her, you must quickly get to Lord Praven before Kira's master dies and the planet explodes, or your apprentices left you a message that they're being hunted by a sith assassin, you have to save them.

 

And then there's how it worked up until 4.0 or so, where before you went to fight the impending doom, you had to do a bunch of unrelated filler quests. You got used to it after awhile, but initially it was jarring when this happened, like 'gee, I hope Kai Sazen hasn't killed Doctor Lokin while i'm over in another zone backstabbing rakghouls.'

 

It just makes you wonder what the timeframe of these quests are. Some [read: many] class missions you can be done on a planet in a couple hours. So was that how long the player took or how long the character took? Did Act 2 of the BH story take 12 irl hours or three months? I used to resolve this by thinking that during the prologue, each new level gain was one character hour, then in Act 1 it shifted to one character day, in Act 2 one character week, in act 3 one character month. But Makeb supposedly takes like a week and the other expansions are even more wonky. I guess the writers just never thought of it.

 

Well, that jarring is kind of on you You don't have to pick up all the side quests in a hub and then chase objective markers on your map. Pretty much everyone does it this way, and I think its probably why they chew through story content so quickly. Granted, before level sync, you were somewhat forced into it to get the XP rewards. I tend to RP with myself, so if my class mission is urgent, then I'll focus on that and come back later to do side/planet arc missions. Yes, you have to backtrack, but I'm ok with that.

 

How much time passes is entirely up to you. The writers would have had vague ideas (I've read in the past that each act of a class story was something like a year), but it has to be left to the player's imagination if they're going to have the freedom to approach it as they see fit. Hyperspace travel is instant in-game, but it actually takes hours to days. Also, presumably, things happen "off-camera" - eating, sleeping, bathing etc...

Edited January 14, 2019 by SaveTheMonkeys

[Majspuffen]

I thought of another one: class story vs other quests. Frequently the class story has a sense of urgency to it: your master is dying of a DS plague and you need to retrieve the three magical macguffins to save her, you must quickly get to Lord Praven before Kira's master dies and the planet explodes, or your apprentices left you a message that they're being hunted by a sith assassin, you have to save them.

 

The first example you mention was one of the main things I disliked about the Jedi Consular story. The narrative told you that you grew weaker, but gameplay-wise you became more powerful and learning more abilities. Of course, the problem here is vertical scaling but I always thought they could have worked around that since story areas are unique to the player. An idea would be to have a debuff on the player in the story areas if they've taken light side decisions early on in the story. That way the characer, in the narrative and the player in the gameplay would have to rely more on Qyzen. As is stands right now there is nothing in the game that reinforces the narrative.

 

As for the rest of your post; what you're describing could be called distortion in narrative space. It happens in a lot of games. The Grand Theft Auto-series (particularly after GTA 3) is a great example of this. The narrative bits waits for you and doesn't care what you do inbetween each bit. That's how it works in SWTOR as well and it does require some amount of suspension of disbelief from the player. Personally I play like SaveTheMonkeys (poster above) and prioritize class missions when there is a sense of urgency in them, but that's because I as a player seek immersion. Which is why I wrote a long post about how Bioware is breaking down the class fantasies . I've always felt like I'm in a minority, and I probably am, but it's nice to see other people feel similarly about narrative and gameplay.

How much time passes is entirely up to you. The writers would have had vague ideas (I've read in the past that each act of a class story was something like a year), but it has to be left to the player's imagination if they're going to have the freedom to approach it as they see fit. Hyperspace travel is instant in-game, but it actually takes hours to days. Also, presumably, things happen "off-camera" - eating, sleeping, bathing etc...

Getting slightly off topic here but... I feel like the creators of the new movies are not aware of how long it takes to travel between planets. It is never stated in any of the movies but it is kind of insinuated in Episode 4 that lightspeed travel does take time. The characters have time to sit back and relax, play games and even device makeshift jedi-practice. Knights of the Old Republic 2 does a wonderful job giving the player a sense of time as well, as when you first escape Peragus you're stuck in hyperspace travel, chatting with your crew. In Episode 8, however, Finn and Rose have a couple of hours to travel to a distant planet, find a guy, return and infiltrate the enemy ship. [edit] ... and they not only accomplish said task within the extremely narrow time frame that they had but they also stage a revolution on the planet and free the enslaved beasts. But, now I'm ranting and I'm completely off-topic. My apologies!

Edited January 15, 2019 by Majspuffen

[Majspuffen]

I eventually got sucked into this thread to see what the above phrase meant. Consider me edumacated

 

It's a great phrase happy to have shared it. It's a concept I think all experienced gamers understand, even if we've not had the terminology for it.

[SaveTheMonkeys]

Getting slightly off topic here but... I feel like the creators of the new movies are not aware of how long it takes to travel between planets. It is never stated in any of the movies but it is kind of insinuated in Episode 4 that lightspeed travel does take time. The characters have time to sit back and relax, play games and even device makeshift jedi-practice. Knights of the Old Republic 2 does a wonderful job giving the player a sense of time as well, as when you first escape Peragus you're stuck in hyperspace travel, chatting with your crew. In Episode 8, however, Finn and Rose have a couple of hours to travel to a distant planet, find a guy, return and infiltrate the enemy ship. [edit] ... and they not only accomplish said task within the extremely narrow time frame that they had but they also stage a revolution on the planet and free the enslaved beasts. But, now I'm ranting and I'm completely off-topic. My apologies!

 

In the films, its completely inconsistent from the beginning. In Ep4 there's some time for exposition, in Ep5, when the Falcon escapes the imperials at the end, an imperial officer says something like "They could be on the other side of the galaxy by now!" less than 5 minutes after the fact.

Maybe I can try bring this back into the topic, which sort of ties in with what I was saying: In this game, the player needs to do most of the heavy-lifting in terms of narrative and suspension of disbelief. As has been said, most plot elements of supposed great urgency, aren't; you can take as long as you like getting out of the exploding space station. I can't speak for anyone else, but I pretend - If I have an urgent mission, I don't stop to do some shopping on the way. Of course I'd love for there to be actual mechanics and consequences outside of my imagination, but there isn't, and I'm resigned to the fact that there never will be.

 

Edit: On the subject of hyperspace travel, you can kind of pretend its like KOTOR, by going to talk to your companions, and triggering your travel from the galaxy map menu instead of the cockpit.

Edited January 15, 2019 by SaveTheMonkeys

[AlrikFassbauer]

Yes, the hyperspace travel within SWTO is far too short. Even the hyperspace treavel in the original X-Wing games seemed to take longer ... not to mention The Clone Wars.

 

And teleporting ... Well, it's Gree Technology, so I can stomach that.

[Lhancelot]

I was looking at one of my favourite movies of the recent years - and yes, these days I mostly view only animated movies anymore [gramnmar ?] - "How to train your dragon".

 

Only after watching it I realized that it is one of the very few movies I've even seen in recent times WITHOUT having a violent conflict in narrative. It's even so that the protagonist doesn't have any kind of conflict at all - the movie is more or less kind of an psychological study. Relationship between manly father and unmanly son.

 

Don't know about the other two movies of that series.

 

I mean, it's a Dragon movie, and Dragons are all about nothing but POWER, aren't they ? I mean, in Fantasy, Dragons are normally used as examples of ultimate power. Nothing is as powerful as a Dragon in Fantasy. Nothing. At. All.

And that movie is about Dragons, but NOT about power. Curious.

 

 

 

The older I become, the less I understand whatz's so interesting with movies like Transformers, or Avengers and with Superheroes in general. Even as a kid, I found Superheroes boring, but maybe that's because I grew up with Asterix, Lucky Luke, Tintin, Nick Knatterton ...

 

My current theory is that it really is an example of ... movies for extroverts vs. movies for introverts. I don't have any other way of explaining what I see.

I once read that the U.S. society is a society in which being extrovert is something positive, something wanted. Maybe that's part of what made the fascination of the film "Rain Man". Maybe that's part of what's making people use "Autism" as an insult these days.

In an newspaper, I recently read an excerpt from an Autobiography (is this the right word ?) of an medicine scientist, one of the best brain experts of the world, the article said, about his failing to understand his autistic son.

 

During that excerpt, there was one remarkable passage : That he was using "scans" (don't remember the exact word for that anymore) to test for sensitivity. The result was, that the sensitivity of his autisic son was exeeding anything normal. Only then he realized 2 things : That his try to acclimatize his son to normal living by bringing him into loud, noisy towns with lots of smells, lots of people etc. had been overwhelming his son. That his autistic behaviour was hos try to shut out the whole world of "it's just too much OF EVERYTHING", to say it in my words.

The second thing he realized was that probably all autists are THAT over-sensitive.

 

So, Autists seem to suffer from the extrovert world, which is very much non-sensitive (the German language has invented the insulting word of "noticing-free", meaning "free of the ability to notice anything detailed").

 

From this perspective, the insult "he / she is autistic", often read in the PvP forums, gets another drive. It's the insult - or so it appears to me now - of rather extrovert people who cannot cope with the fact that someone os not extrovert - and especially not adhering to extrovert society structures.

 

Introvert people might make up half of society, but in a society with a bias towards extrovertism (does this word really exist ?) , they are just not seen, they are a mninority, because to please them, much more substance would have to be put into movies, much more effort into details -> and the more money that's needed to spend, the less the profits are.

 

So, in the end, and this is my current theory, it's a matter of

extrovert movie -> less money spent = more profits

introvert movie -> more money spent = less profits

that locks out part of society. With games, with movies, with media in general. And let's hope it doesn't affect school too.

 

American culture has long celebrated the extroverted personality while the introvert has been a tad demonized imo.

 

As an American, basically if you are quiet, stay to yourself, don't talk to every stranger that happens to be standing nearby you are considered "shy," "not confident," or even "weird."

 

Being quiet in group settings, enjoying alone time, and not socializing with every stranger that happens to be around are common traits of introverts.

 

Even "self help" books trumpet how to be more "outgoing" and "socially more appealing" for the less than appealing introvert crowd.

 

As a kid I always thought I was odd and weird, because I was not interested in befriending every person I met, instead I had a close knit group of friends, and I enjoyed doing things on my own.

 

It wasn't till I got older and started understanding personality types better that I came to realize I wasn't anymore odd than any other introvert! Americans definitely are pro-extrovert though, that is very much true.

 

Most people here don't understand or even know what introvert/extrovert means... They even think "extrovert" means out-going and good while "introvert" means lacking confidence and bad. It's just not true.

 

Also, I have traveled to many countries in my lifetime, and I have always had an easier time fitting in with foreigners in Germany, Russia, Philippines, basically everywhere I have gone outside the USA people tended to behave more reserved and more like introverts while Americans are typically louder and more boisterous in public.

Edited January 15, 2019 by Lhancelot