Saturday!
The usual answers just don’t feel like they should preclude a helpful vampire. I mean, without getting into the whole Sephenie Meyer thing, you’d think like there’d be *SOME* nice undead out there.
A lawful good wizard stuck in a tower doing research for decades who happens to forget to die when his body passes on should continue to be a lawful good lich, right? Or if a lawful good guy gets himself bit by a vampire, why should he stop trying to save the world? (Yes, I’ve been keeping up with Order of the Stick. No, I don’t think that that would always happen.)
Well, Shadow of Mordor comes out and says that undead folks aren’t necessarily that bad. You’re this guy who watches his family be murdered by one of Sauron’s henchmen right before you yourself buy the farm. Your family goes to the next world but you? Well… you’re a little pre-occupied by the whole “murder of your family” thing. So you stick around to get a little revenge despite yourself. On top of that, you fall over to the other side and immediately find a comrade: an elven ghost who has a little vengeance of his own to get to (though, to be perfectly honest, I don’t trust that his goals and my goals align that much outside of the whole “kill the orcs” thing).
In any case, this is the first game since Bloodlines that I’ve played an undead good guy and… well, the story is about as compelling as you let it be. If you don’t like obvious emotional manipulation, you probably won’t dig the whole “vengeance” thing. If you can run with it, get your tennis shoes on.
Oh! One thing I wanted to mention: the story assumes you’re not an idiot. At one scene early in the game, there’s a cut scene in which you encounter a guy and your first comment to him is “so you didn’t die 10 years ago” and his response is “I doubt you came all this way to hang me for treason.” Golly, there’s a lot of backstory in that dinky little exchange. A lesser game would spend 20 more lines hammering about what happened way back when. This game is content with letting your characters talk the way that characters talk.
As such, I’m digging it so far. Though I do wonder how much better the PS4 and/or XBone version would be.
So… what are you playing?
(Photo is āThe Gameā taken by Mo Riza, used under a creative commons license.)
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As such, Iām digging it so far. Though I do wonder how much better the PS4 and/or XBone version would be.
You playing on PC or 360/PS3?
If the former, nada. If the latter, I don’t think you get the nemesis system — or at least not the full version of it. (That’s what was reported, but I haven’t seen an actual live review of the game on 360 or PS3 to find out for sure what got ported and what didn’t). I’ve been told by a number of people that it’s by far the best part of the game.Report
I’m playing on the 360. So far, I have been trying desperately to *NOT* get killed but, when I finally did, it turned the archer who sniped me into a captain… who I am now stalking.
I don’t know what the differences would be.Report
Me either. I just did some digging and it appears textures are worse (duh), they’ve toned down the number of enemies some, and supposedly the nemesis AI isn’t as good. Rougher animations and longer loading times, to boot.
I had originally heard it was gutted entirely, although some of it actually has to remain (fighting your way up to the chiefs is, you know, critical plot stuff).
On the PS4 version I heard a lot about how the captains evolve (in skill and appearance) and how they’ll taunt you over recent encounters, making it very…personal. š
A PS4 is our ‘big buy’ for Christmas for the family, so I’ve just decided to wait until then. Sad to say, but Shadow of Mordor is about the only game I’m interested in this year. It’s a real shallow holiday season for games. (The remastered GTA 5 and Last of Us seems nice, but I’m only getting them if they’re in the bundle I get).
Just nothing exciting on tap.Report
You know, if they gave those things some kind of backwards compatibility (or had the option of buying a more expensive one with backwards compatibility), I’d have picked one up in the first month.
I don’t understand why new generations refuse to put emulators on their hardware (or have the option of doing that) when the number of decent games in the new libraries can be counted on one hand.Report
Same here.
Admittedly, hardware emulators are expensive — and the Xbox one was already too pricey, and the PS4 is expensive enough as is. Software emulators, though — they can be tricky to do, and backwards compatability is hard (OTOH, both Sony and MS know their hardware inside and out. It’s fixed.)
PS4 wants to sell you on Playstation Now, wherein you RENT games for a week or a month or a day — where a lot of their PS3 catalog lurks — or outright buy them again, for a PS4 version. I suspect MS has similar designs — why go through the effort of creating an emulator when they can just charge you for your games again?Report
Dragon Age II. Yeah, as usual I’m years behind everyone else in gaming, but I feel like I want to be finished with the first two before starting Inquisition.Report
I’m in the same boat. I recently dusted off a save game that was over 2 years old and am trying to piece together the storyline from the middle of Act 2.Report
Standard D&D rules state that one’s alignment changes from neutral or good alignments to evil when they kill through feeding as an undead. This strikes me as reasonable especially considering that in a D&D setting an undead being is fundamentally imicidal to life (their presence in any concentration produces sickening in the land and withering in the wildlife).
Liches do present an interesting question though as they apparently do not require any form of sustenance.
I’m playing Dragon Age Inquisition. Quite enjoyable so far though I’m not sure yet if I like it as much as One or Two.Report
The argument that “the cycle of life and death is lawful, therefore not following this law is chaotic (or neutral)” is an argument that strikes me as less than compelling. I’m not talking about raising zombies or skeletons, of course, but some of the higher forms that involve fairly strong emotions of one kind or another.Report
Abraham Lincoln is pretty lawful good
Otherwise, do you know of any legends that really have lawful good critters in them?Report
Ah, but if Abraham Lincoln was a lich?Report
I mean, no politics.Report
Jay,
no politics, just poetry:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176810Report