NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9219232" data-attributes="member: 7040941">Its not a zero sum, and this speaks to why innovation in these kinds of areas is important, and why I brought up TLOU as an example done right. The logic that these mechanics merely existing is problematic doesn't follow from any seeming criteria other than not liking all those other creatively bankrupt games that mindlessly copy/pasted the same mechanics that got stale decades ago. Its important to acknowledge what people would expect of such things, but that doesn't mean staying away from them unless your goal is just broad appeal (re: blandness).It just means you have to temper what you create with specific constraints that you follow through on. F[SPOILER="Blurb about my game"]or example if one examined my own games development, it'd be easy to throw around tired buzzphrases like scope creep, but it'd be doing my process a disservice to not acknowledge that the constraints I put in place are explicitly meant to temper the drawbacks. My game has gotten substantially larger in scope over time, but the constraints I use are fixed constants; my game must be efficient and every element and gameplay loop must be well integrated with each other.These constraints carry the load on ensuring what I design and introduce all ultimately serve the overall gameloop, even if some would take aesthetic issue with their inclusion, like having mechanics for Smell and Taste, for example, which in isolation as vague references are sure to provoke similarly hostile reactions to what I saw earlier (its happened before), but in context make perfect sense, not just in terms of how they mechanically serve the gameloop but also in the meta sense of organizing a rule book and developing a richer solution space for players to engage with through improv.[/SPOILER]But anyway, getting back to the issue:Heroic as defined by them is basically a word thats defining two different things simultaneously. On the one hand you have expected character motivations, which is fine, and on the other a gaggle of mechanics that the game otherizes as antithetical, justifying it by pointing to cinema. This is why felt they'd have been better off just calling this cinematic and leaving it at that, as the 6 paragraphs they spend on this latter part is clearly more of what they're concerned about. And as related in my OP, the parts that are more intuitive to the Heroic label aren't a maxim. The alternative interpretation is one possible way to approach the idea, and there are others we could find if we cared to brainstorm. What we intuitively call Heroic or Heroism has a lot more variety than their definition gives, and my intent in calling this out was just to highlight that, and thats where the only real criticism was; against the idea of Heroic being an absolute thing, which is being perpetuated by this game regardless of whether or not you like it (and i do like it, as I keep having to repeat). I often times pitch my own game as being a "legend shaping" game, and I put a pretty big qualifier on what I mean by "legend" in that I don't mean anything in particular by that word other than a vague end goal. What you as a player make of your characters overall legend is up to you, whether thats being a really great Baker, a great King, or a terrible Necromancer bent on death and bedlam, and the game gives you the tools to realize all of that, and more. Where this game does go right though is in deliberately deemphasizing the sandbox, as that at least makes the prescriptive nature more acceptable. Even so, I don't see that deemphasis surviving contact with players, but thats a different topic altogether.</blockquote>

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