Charcharo said:
Thyunda said:
Charcharo said:
Thyunda said:
Charcharo said:
Yes that arc was good, but truth is, most of the books in your course should be flat out superior to anything gaming has ever done or will do in the next 50 years at least. The difference... is that huge. And it is only natural, hell Cinema has a 80 year head start to gaming and it still can not measure up to the elder art form.
Okay, now you're sounding like kind of an elitist. And there are things that can be done with film that books simply can't do - have you seen Ingmar Bergman's
Through A Glass Darkly? It's utterly fascinating. And impossible with any other medium.
Yes there are such examples. But cinema has yet to really... reach it to such a level AS often as books
For all incredible achievements of the medium, they are still not enough. That is natural, realist... not elitist. How can you compare a 10 000 year old medium to a 100 year one? That is not ... logical at all. And is kind of demeaning to both of these arts.
Still... why not address anything else from my post?
I must say the UI really needs to be changed. And badly.
BloatedGuppy said:
Thyunda said:
And as a final note - the Ladies of the Wood are some of my favourite villains of all time. Eredin was cliché as fuck, and I almost wince every time I hear "you humans are so impractical." But the Ladies, with their Welsh accent and beautiful theme music, those are villains that last.
My favorite moment with them:
"How do you know they're not already here?"
"Because we're still alive."
Too bad they turned out to be push overs that serve a simple elf.
I didn't get the impression they served him because they were pushovers - especially since they only do it on a specific date.
And as for the rest of your post - I don't know anything about it, because I haven't actually played it yet. Your complaints may be totally valid. My point was that your complaints were silly, not that they were untrue. Well, your complaints about the technical things anyway - your statements about literature and film are way off - sure, literature may reach greatness more often than film (I mean, people consider Margaret Atwood great but have you read the
Penelopiad? It is an insult to everything, everywhere) but literature also produces more utter dross than film by sheer virtue of numbers. There are more dinosaur-themed erotic novels than dinosaur-themed erotic films.
Twilight was a book before it was a film. Same for
Fifty Shades and the films of each were arguably superior to the books by sheer virtue of brevity.
Also - you made a reference to novel-Eredin earlier. Are you reading unofficial translations? I don't recall meeting Eredin in either of the short-story collections or the novels up to
Baptism of Fire. In fact, I think the Wild Hunt has only been referenced as a natural phenomenon so far.
Yes, they were somewhat afraid of him AND the other elves. Which is silly.
Why are my complaints silly? I can not play the game due to them. That alone is enough. I see them as a sort of insult to me as a customer and an insult to other companies whose work I enjoy. This is a complete disregard for all that I wrote. What the hell would be non " silly" problem with the game?
I completely disagree with you on all other points too. Even the appalling books were superior to the appealing movies. Not that they are good... just better.
And no... I find it disrespectful to compare a 10 000 year old medium to a 100 year old. Especially when the elder one has actually had time to mature to such a point, is lower in tech (a gigantic advantage) and has such a quantity... cinema is yet to peak. It is not there yet. Maybe in a hundred years? Maybe. It is a great art form, but it is not THERE (yet).
I can read in 7 languages mate (well, badly in one of those, but I can do it)
Read the books a long time ago in Bulgarian/Spanish. I do not need fan translations
Wait and you shall see.
because, mate, you can clearly play the game because you've spent thirty hours on it. And I don't believe you spent any more than three hours of that time trying to get it to work, since none of your complaints appear to be "this shit straight up didn't work."
You want a real complaint? Why is it, when I hold the select button and try to look at my character, I can't aim my gun and look boss? And why doesn't my gun appear on my person when sheathed?
Those are real complaints. It's bullshit!
EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot to say - there are official translations out and about now but only the short stories and up to
Baptism of Fire - the next one is due in May. They're getting better with each successive book -
The Witcher is kind of awkward to read and the spelling of Wyzim/Vizima, Demawend/Demavend are a bit inconsistent through
Blood of Elves but after that it's fine.
Metro 2033 and
2034 had a similar improvement in translation quality.
And there's nothing disrespectful about comparing an older art form to a newer one. Not in the slightest. Especially as the traits that made literature so valuable in the past are largely non-existent in the modern publishing industry. It took time and effort to reproduce texts in the past, so only the ones that were truly worth copying were copied. Which is why it was mostly Bibles. Then, with a largely illiterate population, only the educated could write, and they were wealthy enough to dedicate whole years of their lives to sitting and writing.
Nowadays anyone can publish a book. 2,000 year old texts can be given a new cover and binding and exciting pictures and end up on the shelves alongside the latest tween fiction shit. Simply being a book grants a work no special dispensation. Anyone can do it. I've had a piece published before (have yet to replicate that success though) and I also know that with money or connections you can get published whether you're worth reading or not. I even received a number of threats for pointing out that perhaps, if you are dyslexic and struggle to spell words correctly,
you should not have been editing a book after a historian I know may well have ruined his own reputation with a self-published book full of valuable history, grammatical errors and formatting nightmares.
Only a select few books are worth that special notice, and there are more of them than films or games via the age of the medium. Films and games have every potential that books do.
Ulysses is widely regarded as a masterpiece of literature but have you read it? It's just a state! Yet there's brilliance in there. If a game or a film can make you feel, then it has succeeded as an art form. Unless it's the same feelings I get when I read Simon Armitage's poetry or Margaret Atwood's dire attempt at historical fiction - that's just rage at the sheer audacity of its bullshit. I mean, Armitage writes like a public schoolboy pretending to be working class and the result is an offensive list of stereotypes and weird abbreviations. Yet that fucker's a poet laureate - though, I guess the people in charge of electing a poet laureate (so to speak) are unlikely to know that working-class people don't sound like Armitage's poetry at all.
Anyway, yeah, got carried away with my hatred of Armitage. I study literature. It's my thing. Pretty soon I'll have a degree in it. Might even go for a Master's and then my PhD. I understand this art form, and I know the ins and outs of its industry.
And it's not very special. There's nothing pure about the words on the page. They go through edit, after edit, after edit. The author's original work is very rarely even hinted at on those pages. Everything gets changed - and often the work ends up better for it. The issues film and games have with presenting themselves is in expense - a change of director mid-film will royally fuck up the film's consistency, unless the director scraps everything the previous one used, and then you end up with a rushed product. With videogames, it seems as though either the creator has total creative control (which rarely ends well) or the publisher is insisting on including that month's trending mechanics and refusing to grant the developers the time they need to produce something that isn't a thrown-together mess of iron sights and reload-cancels with half a story behind it.
