Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Wulf says:

And really, I’d prefer Age of Conan. The problem with The Secret World is that everything I’ve seen of it is steeped heavily in hell & heaven tones, it’s almost worse than Evangelion. Almost. Enough with the bloody religious black & white morality in games already! Did organised religion brainwash most game developers when I wasn’t looking or something?

The sad part is is that things seem to be getting more and more simple in this regard, not less. Cartoons from younger years had more grey areas to them than the vast majority of entertainment nowadays. A great example of this is Mendoza from Mysterious Cities of Gold; a man who wasn’t clearly good or evil, he was simply driven by his own motivations. Old cartoons were doing shades of grey better!

But yes, The Secret World is looking very much like goody-goody people from heaven take on the nasties from hell, and that’s that. You’re a goody-goody who’s representing heaven. Personally I’d like to play a visually intimidating/sickening beast whose motivations could be seen as either good or evil, sometimes even both at the same time, quite confusingly. But noap. Average humans representing heaven versus the denizens of hell, protecting the world from teh evilz. Yawn.

This is actually one of the reasons I like the Charr from Guild Wars 2. They’ve been exploding brains, especially more limited minds on the GW2 forums, because people can’t understand that they’re not ‘evil’. They were brainwashed and enslaved by the Charr equivalent of a religious cult (the Flame Legion), at the time of Guild Wars 1, and anyone who tried to fight that was killed. But now in Guild Wars 2, we’re seeing a different side to the Charr, people are thinking that the Charr have been retconned, rather than, you know, that there were always many sides to the Charr and that you can’t judge a race on how they behaved when enslaved by a religious cult, living in fear and all that.

This is kind of why I’m into Guild Wars 2. GW2, at least, will have a few races that don’t fall into base morality (the Charr and the Asura). Age of Conan at least wasn’t about black & white morality, either. I wasn’t interested in playing it because of the PvP, I don’t do so well in MMORPG PvP you see, so I didn’t want to get involved in that, but I can respect Age of Conan for what it was trying to do, which was–generally speaking–more interesting than the majority.

And on the topic of the Longest Journey, I actually really liked that game. The more you dug, the more you found out how incredibly unethical the dragons were, despite portraying themselves as glowing white goody-goodies. This is why I was sort of expecting to have to deal with the dragons at the end of the Longest Journey, but that didn’t come up. I’m hoping that this will come at some point in series, since the story always strongly hinted at them being more jealous of how humanity wielded their power creatively, rather than protective, they created the balance out of envy, not a desire to preserve.

That’s what I was hoping Dreamfall was about, the fall of the balance. World of infinite novelty and all that. But I suppose I’m just a grizzled old Morrisonite.

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