Hi I'm late because this got buried in my mentions, enjoy this shitpost as am apology (two versions!):
The mysterious man knows Cass well. Having watched as the sun was stolen, along with the future of the world, he has come to the conclusion that order must be beaten out of anarchy, lest chaos reign.
I am kind of upset due to earlier the characters said the guy had a metal suit and I was thinking it was going to go into this direction:
That would have been too much fun though.
Horned mech man is interesting: he does honestly believe in what he's doing is right, but Heather kneecaps this motivation by saying "Someone gave me a
large pile of money to do this". Hmm, almost as if the villain WAS fascist capitalism all along... Seriously, that's so fucking stupid. Let the guy take the blame, not your fucking politics (as usual). He can still be bad and fash, but saying "I've been working for some powerful people who also share my goal" and that would be fine (and more believeable in his case). He talks about having order in chaos while reality is literally breaking down and I see his point. The Meatpunks world is a shithole, bringing order to it is a must. It isn't good that he's in favor of death to gays and minorities plus the entire city of Hopesville but like reality is breaking down for fuck's sake, we need to take care of the cosmos ripping themselves apart somehow.
I also enjoy how this is the second big worldbuilding dump in the whole game and it's at the end. In good scifi, these things would have been said in the first third of the story, or at least established by showing and not telling.
It's nice the game remains hopeful. On one hand, the talk before the game on how Heather feels about the writing is cute and gives the reader a connection and honesty with the author, on the other, she fucking kneecapped the story's impact (again). Sigh. Who knows, maybe season 2 is better (
)
For my money the biggest lesson to take away from EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER is how badly that pandering restricts your own storytelling.
You keep saying pandering, and it is, but it's also what she believes in. She is almost completely blinded by her own politics. She's writing for the most narrow worldview in the world, and she doesn't even realize it due to her echo chamber. You're right, I just wanted to emphasize that.
Characterization is not the SJWs forte. As i think someone said already, they never give the bad guys visible names, ideology, motives or anything outside of them doing bad things because they fear that anyone might side with the bad guy rather than the supposed heroes. That would be probably the lowest of the low for these kind of people and that's why they resort to make the baddies such nebulous bumbling fools: so you don't have enough information about them to say "Hey, they are right".
You know, I was watching "Hogan's Heroes" a couple nights ago, a show dealing with LITERAL nazis. It turns out that yes, you can have fascist that the audience isn't supposed to side with but are engaging characters. Not all are multidimensional, but all are interesting bad guys who (mostly) pose an actual problem to the heros and world at large. Most of the Nazis were played by German-Jewish actors who signed on the agreement that they would never portray the Nazis as winners, and wow, guess what, we got a great sitcom (of sorts) out of it. Hell, there were sympathetic nazis who changed sides or just did it as a payjob, and people still didn't think fash = good. Who'da thunk it.
It seems like the problems with the worldbuilding and antagonists tie into a bigger overarching one: the game can't decide what the hell it wants to be in terms of narrative scope and tone. It tries to be a down to earth and relatable experience, but also an epic adventure. That's how you get villains who are goofy hooligans one moment and an evil army bent on taking over the country the next, or a world in chaos where everything has been destroyed but people still hang out at the pub and watch sports on television. The result is a mishmash that's less consistent than Sonichu, and nowhere near as unintentionally hilarious.
It's not that a story can't have tonal shifts as it goes on. The Lord of the Rings starts out with a humble little party and ends with quests and battles for the fate of the world, for example. But people like Flowers can't be bothered to put some thought into how to handle such a transition, and end up doing the same thing as their better-paid fellows in Hollywood: mindlessly aping the formulas and conventions of genres they don't understand. It's unsurprising that the results should invariably be abject garbage.
Thank you, I didn't know how to word this but you did it swimmingly. This right here.
I used to think that all of this simply stemmed from the above Informed Morality, but I've started to realize what one reason this nonsense is so pervasive is, and it's actually a lot simpler than this. Imagine, if you will, a scenario where you're writing something to appeal to this vaunted Twitter Audience - your gateway to free asspats. If you want to do this, you have to take care to offend
basically no one, and hire what are called "sensitivity readers."
These readers don't usually work for free and demand you conduct a frankly ridiculous amount of research on basically every demographic that could theoretically exist if you want a passing grade.
The thing is, that which can offend is an always-growing list. And while there's one entry on the list that these devs absolutely do not care about, they sure as shit care about every other one, and these groups are constantly jockeying for changes to langauge, words, and basic behavior. Appealing to the delicate sensibilities of one group can - and will - put you directly into the crosshairs of another. Now factor in the infinite varieties of people who believe in tacitly ridiculous nonsense like Headmates and Multiple Systems, who believe that they, too, must be catered to, and must not be offended -
or else.
Where does this leave you? Going with the only thing you know you're allowed to do (make white males the antagonist) and completely eschewing worldbuilding in its entirety, because the need to kowtow to special-interest groups has become completely untenable. There's
a well-known RPG.net thread in which a number of hard lefties have taken to abandoning worldbuilding entirely because it's literally impossible to
not offend someone otherwise - that's where we are now, where the only option is to shelve anything resembling setting the scene in the hopes that by the time the game starts the buildup, the player is so far in that it no longer matters. Even then, that's no guarantee that offense won't be taken at some point. They eat their own all the time.
Other developers who just don't give a shit and focus on the worldbuilding are the ones who are making out like bandits right now because they realize (correctly) that context is everything and that to properly lose yourself in a world, it needs to be believable.
It's so fucking upseting. This is why even if your cast is diverse you must take the route of telling people who want it to be woker to fuck off. That way, they'll bug you less after screeching at you and realizing they can't make you bend the knee. They'll still shittalk you, but behind their own garden walls.
Huh, this was all pretty dumb
Sequel when?
You're in luck, season 2 is already out! (I won't torture Jaimas with it - he's got other fish to fry and I haven't aquired it nor do I intend to on purpose).
Oh, reminds me: some of you spergs were asking about meatsuit specs: here's how tall they are.
Exactly the same thing, except he survives and gets away. He expresses significant remorse over it but justifies it as something that had to be done. It's genuinely more interesting in every regard since most of our heroes are, as has been established, utterly unlikable.
Horned man is best man. Metal > meat.
What they do inside is parasitize other settings and then turn them to suit the ideology, desires of the originally installed customer-base be damned. But they don't care about the setting itself, they care about the ability to use it as a mouthpiece. So when this inevitably alienates the customer, as it always fucking does, they see this as not a failure on their part, but on the customer's part for refusing to buy into the ideology.
It's hilarious every time it happens. At least the fact that they can't get the asspats they want helps feed the self defeating nature of it.
Big thank you to you again for being a Chad and playing through this shitshow. I feel validated in my suspicions when it was sent to me, glad you and a bunch of other lovely farmers took the journey with me. Much less painful this way. I hope you play some good games before you go to your next turd, I know you have more in your queue if I'm not mistaken.
@Randall Fragg It's coming to kickstart soon.... and
you can enjoy the quickstart now! All the art so far seems lovely at least.
The co-writer is someone named "Aura Belle". I was wondering why it sounded like a psyudonym a drag queen would use, and quickly found out why:
"my pronouns are
it/she." I will never get people who want to be called it. She's bonkers.
