faetal on 8/10/2013 at 10:22
Quote Posted by dethtoll
And their previous product wasn't very good either.
I'm just grateful they're not ripping off Lovecraft from whole cloth this time around.
Good things can derive from other things. Good execution can be a good experience even if derivative. Deus Ex is basically just a pastiche of Gibson-esque cyberpunk + every conspiracy theory ever and managed to be ace because it was well executed.
june gloom on 8/10/2013 at 11:15
Nah, man, it's more than that, as I've elaborated in the past.
It's all a matter of how derivative it is. The thing about Lovecraft-style horror is that there's a thousand ways or more to do it. Warhammer 40k, Mass Effect, Neon Genesis Evangelion, the list goes on and on. All are very different takes on the themes and concepts Lovecraft put forth. The problem with Frictional is that their games more or less are complete Lovecraft knockoffs from whole cloth. Penumbra is basically "At the Mountains of Madness: The Game" and Amnesia is "The Outsider" mashed with "The Shadow Out of Time." This is extremely boring, because let's be honest -- Lovecraft's stories themselves weren't that great anyway. What's important are the ideas he came up with: that there are things out there that all of rational science cannot explain, things so large that we can't even comprehend them -- not without risking madness, anyway.
If you're going to give me tentacle monsters, put them on a space ship or something, not some asshole's basement in 1922.
That comparison of Gibson and Deus Ex falls flat because while most of cyberpunk media gets its visual tropes from Blade Runner (Deus Ex didn't, incidentally, its environs were much more real-world) its thematic tropes tend to run towards the "evil megacorporation" bit as a driving factor in the plot. Gibson's novels didn't do this, though megacorporations -- ruthless, if not necessarily evil -- were certainly a part of his world. And the ultimate theme on which the Neuromancer trilogy is built turns out to be AIs using the internet to evolve, which is in keeping with Gibson's obsession with new technologies. Deus Ex with its conspiracy kitchen sink goes off in a completely different direction, one that's about world domination using megacorporations and political manipulation with a secondary plot about near-omnipotent AIs controlling the internet and a tertiary plot about nanomachines supplanting cybernetics that was not explored nearly as much or as well as Human Revolution covered the initial rise of cybernetics. If nothing else, Deus Ex was more a product of the 90s, which had a lot of conspiracy stories thanks to the popularity of The X Files. So, no, outside of sharing roughly the same genre, Deus Ex isn't really that derivative.
(Also, while I think Deus Ex had some interesting themes to cover, some eerily prescient for a pre-9/11 game, I think its execution ultimately doesn't hold up today as most of the important characters you talk to are walking sociology papers.)
faetal on 8/10/2013 at 11:28
I don't get why being completely derivative is somehow mutually exclusive to being good.
I can read a Lovecraft story any time I want to, but I can't play one.
At the end of the day, people can make what they like and people either like it and it is successful, or they don't and it flops. I don't get the need to criticise things other people like because you don't like it. Isn't it fine just to say that you don't get it? It doesn't click with you? I mean fuck, I can't stand metal, but I don't think that metallers have bad taste, I just assume that when I developed aesthetic appreciation, bits that would resonate with metal weren't included.
I think it may be your inability to allow for other people's tastes (oddly reminiscent of Koki's Fallout 3 hate) which puts you on a collision course with every TTLG poster on a rotating 2-monthly cycle.
june gloom on 8/10/2013 at 11:33
I haven't said anything about anyone's taste in this thread or really any other thread lately that I can think of. This business of yours of accusing me of being "taste police" for criticizing a game (never mind that I said nothing about anyone's taste) is fucking irritating (and insulting) and you keep doing it and you need to stop.
Fuck this, I'm going to bed, I should've gone to bed ages ago.
faetal on 8/10/2013 at 11:56
It's kind of implicit when you call stuff objectively bad. Don't get me wrong, you're nowhere as a bad as Koki, who said explicitly that anyone who liked FO3 had bad taste, I'm just saying it's a bad style of discussion. Penumbra / Amnesia are good. They're derivative too. Lots of people like them - Frictional are a success story off the back of it. Isn't it enough to just say you don't like it, rather than it's bad? Don't take it too personally, I'm just trying to agree to disagree.
Muzman on 8/10/2013 at 16:38
I don't know if I'd say Deus Ex has little to do with Cyberpunk as a movement. Blade Runner and the The Sprawl trilogy might be a bit far away but they were just the kick off really. The game is very much in line with the mood of Cyberpunk 2020 games we used to play. Bruce Stirling stories and games like Syndicate were all part of that sort of mood too. A powerless, ignorant public filled with punks and revolutionaries squaring off against all powerful mega corps who hold the reins of the world. It was all part of that concept, back when clowns like Billy Idol were even trying to (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_%28album%29) cash in on it. DX just tied it up in a bow.
It's funny reading through the old 2020 modules now, as many of them would cover all the different places in the world and predict the future for them, usually by taking whatever current social disfunction was present at the time and turning it up to 11.
The early nineties was a pretty pessimistic time when I think about it.
june gloom on 8/10/2013 at 19:30
Quote Posted by faetal
It's kind of implicit when you call stuff objectively bad. Don't get me wrong, you're nowhere as a bad as Koki, who said explicitly that anyone who liked FO3 had bad taste, I'm just saying it's a bad style of discussion. Penumbra / Amnesia are good. They're derivative too. Lots of people like them - Frictional are a success story off the back of it. Isn't it enough to just say you don't like it, rather than it's bad? Don't take it too personally, I'm just trying to agree to disagree.
This is what I don't get -- you're implying that I'm taking things too personally but you're the one complaining about me attacking people's tastes because I criticized a game, and it's not the first time you've done it either. You should know me well enough by now to know that if I'm going to attack someone's tastes I'm going to do it explicitly, not implicitly. On top of that, you completely ignored everything I wrote explaining why there's such a thing as too derivative to cry "taste police" -- so I suggest you go back and actually read my post this time. Are Frictional's games bad? Well, they're very derivative -- that's boring, if not exactly
bad. What's
bad are the mechanics, but I'm well aware that some people find cheap scares and poorly implemented sanity effects fun,
and that's okay.
Quote Posted by Muzman
I don't know if I'd say Deus Ex has little to do with Cyberpunk as a movement. Blade Runner and the The Sprawl trilogy might be a bit far away but they were just the kick off really. The game is very much in line with the mood of Cyberpunk 2020 games we used to play. Bruce Stirling stories and games like Syndicate were all part of that sort of mood too. A powerless, ignorant public filled with punks and revolutionaries squaring off against all powerful mega corps who hold the reins of the world. It was all part of that concept, back when clowns like Billy Idol were even trying to (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_%28album%29) cash in on it. DX just tied it up in a bow.
It's funny reading through the old 2020 modules now, as many of them would cover all the different places in the world and predict the future for them, usually by taking whatever current social disfunction was present at the time and turning it up to 11.
The early nineties was a pretty pessimistic time when I think about it.
nnnrghghgh. I never said Deus Ex had little to do with Cyberpunk, read my 2nd to last sentence. What I
said was that Deus Ex is not derivative of Gibson
specifically as faetal was implying.
Muzman on 8/10/2013 at 19:59
Yeah, it gradually dawned on me. Gibson is much more fractious and weird than Deus Ex.
faetal on 8/10/2013 at 20:27
Ok, sorry Dethtoll, I over-stated my point - you weren't attacking anyone, I was being ornery.
My point was just that Deus Ex was fairly generic in terms of its setting and plot, but they pulled it off very well.
Being derivative not necessarily being boring.
Jason Moyer on 8/10/2013 at 21:09
I think part of the charm of the first Deus Ex is that they shoehorned every generic conspiracy imaginable into a single setting and made it work.
As I've said elsewhere, Penumbra/Amnesia being great has nothing to do with the setting/story/horror/whatever. I like those games for the same reasons I like Gone Home, which has nothing in common whatsoever with the Frictional games outside of the gameplay (well, and the lesbian Eldritch abomination that stalks you about halfway in). If someone made an immersive first-person Barbie simulator with the level of detail and interactivity of those games it would likely be awesome.
