That terrible illusion
So the talk of the day is that Pillars of Eternity, the Kickstarter darling of 2012, has come out - to considerable amounts of fanfare and a fair bit of muffled grumbling on the side.
For my part, I haven't actually put more than five or so hours into the game, so there's not really all that much to say about it (other than that the stat system is pretty dumb). That said, the actual conversation surrounding it is quite interesting. Pillars of Eternity isn't just any game, but to its audience, it represents the promise of a return to a golden age; a promise that was left more or less unfulfilled by Wasteland II, by the way, so there's a lot of hopes riding on Pillars of Eternity. This being the case, it's a game that will undergo a lot of scrutiny. To an extent, it's not even that important if the game is good - what's expected is a certain adherence to form. And so, judgemental, censorious eyes will probe and dissect the game in search of any heretical designs that defy the ancient paragons the game is meant to evoke.
Well, all of this is interesting for me to to observe, since I don't really have a dog in the race - for one thing, I was never really more than lukewarm about the Infinity Engine games that PoE is a spiritual successor to, but more to the point, I'm not really belong to the reference group; I remember the classic CRPGs, sure, but I don't share that experience - the longing for the glory days of the CRPG, or the sense of bitter deprivation during the past ten years or so as the genre fell by the wayside. So, from the sidelines, it's been interesting to watch the effect of these Kickstarters to the CRPG community - this weird, renewed vigour, how people would gush about stuff like new Mark Morgan soundtracks and whatnot. A sense of optimism, even.
It makes you wonder. Pillars of Eternity will inevitably fall at least a bit short of the frankly disproportionate expectations built for it, but in a way that doesn't even matter, because for its audience, it has given a bitter taste of that terrible illusion, hope. Or, if nothing else, something to talk about. Could you really ask for more? Like many (I assume) who go way back to FFOnline, I miss the world that was ten or fifteen years ago, when online forums were actually a thing. Part of that is that I like talking about video games - RPGs in particular - about as much as I like playing them, but there's also a more vague sense of "community" and shared experience that I enjoyed, frankly. And you can't sustain something like that on memories of past glories - every once in a while, you have to have something new to feed that sense of belonging.
Could something like that happen in the realms of us old JRPG fans?
Well! At any rate, 'tis a sad time indeed when RPG Codex - the RPG Codex where being some combination of white nationalist and Esoteric Hitlerist is the flavour of the week every week - is increasingly the only place on the Internet where people can have an excited, in-depth conversation about RPGs that doesn't concern the olfactory properties of the sweat of a prominent alien female companion. So here's hoping, because if nothing else, this brave new world of crowdfunding has shown that it can provide at least the fleeting illusion of things going back to those old, better days.
For my part, I haven't actually put more than five or so hours into the game, so there's not really all that much to say about it (other than that the stat system is pretty dumb). That said, the actual conversation surrounding it is quite interesting. Pillars of Eternity isn't just any game, but to its audience, it represents the promise of a return to a golden age; a promise that was left more or less unfulfilled by Wasteland II, by the way, so there's a lot of hopes riding on Pillars of Eternity. This being the case, it's a game that will undergo a lot of scrutiny. To an extent, it's not even that important if the game is good - what's expected is a certain adherence to form. And so, judgemental, censorious eyes will probe and dissect the game in search of any heretical designs that defy the ancient paragons the game is meant to evoke.
Well, all of this is interesting for me to to observe, since I don't really have a dog in the race - for one thing, I was never really more than lukewarm about the Infinity Engine games that PoE is a spiritual successor to, but more to the point, I'm not really belong to the reference group; I remember the classic CRPGs, sure, but I don't share that experience - the longing for the glory days of the CRPG, or the sense of bitter deprivation during the past ten years or so as the genre fell by the wayside. So, from the sidelines, it's been interesting to watch the effect of these Kickstarters to the CRPG community - this weird, renewed vigour, how people would gush about stuff like new Mark Morgan soundtracks and whatnot. A sense of optimism, even.
It makes you wonder. Pillars of Eternity will inevitably fall at least a bit short of the frankly disproportionate expectations built for it, but in a way that doesn't even matter, because for its audience, it has given a bitter taste of that terrible illusion, hope. Or, if nothing else, something to talk about. Could you really ask for more? Like many (I assume) who go way back to FFOnline, I miss the world that was ten or fifteen years ago, when online forums were actually a thing. Part of that is that I like talking about video games - RPGs in particular - about as much as I like playing them, but there's also a more vague sense of "community" and shared experience that I enjoyed, frankly. And you can't sustain something like that on memories of past glories - every once in a while, you have to have something new to feed that sense of belonging.
Could something like that happen in the realms of us old JRPG fans?
Well! At any rate, 'tis a sad time indeed when RPG Codex - the RPG Codex where being some combination of white nationalist and Esoteric Hitlerist is the flavour of the week every week - is increasingly the only place on the Internet where people can have an excited, in-depth conversation about RPGs that doesn't concern the olfactory properties of the sweat of a prominent alien female companion. So here's hoping, because if nothing else, this brave new world of crowdfunding has shown that it can provide at least the fleeting illusion of things going back to those old, better days.