Thoughts on this as a Veeky Forums CRPG?

>non-discussion

Maybe the system could be interesting, but I prefer the world of Tyranny.

Tyranny was fun, the different ways you could run the story and end up with different results was refreshing. You could really run a diplomancer build and do well.

Divinity Original Sin was great as well. The main story was meh, but the side quests were enjoyable and the gameplay, turn based that emphasized strategy and planning, was a blast.

I liked the Tyranny very much, but combat in it was the most boring combat in any CRPG I played, ever.

Yeah, if you gave Tyranny Divinity's gameplay it'd be pretty fantastic

What about it bothered you? I found it pretty fun, particularly figuring out the various interesting spell combinations.

>Games it was inspired by
It's not as good as those but it's pretty good. People view the BG series with such rose-tinted glasses that they get pissed off at any little thing that's different.

I'll have to check out Tyranny then.

What did you find boring about it? The plot? The combat?

It's a small thing, but I liked that the game allowed fighters to play with spears and javelins. I enjoyed the versatility of being able to play javelin and shield, and being able to fight melee or ranged.

The plot was a complete borefest, yes. I didn't care for anything I saw on the screen, and from what I heard later, the game's ending is a fedora-tier faggotry.

I actually thought the metaphysics of the world were pretty nuanced and interesting. The concept can be done badly, sure, but the execution made sense to me.

>fedora-tier faggotry
kek.

I thought its been pretty interesting so far. You're trying to learn about your freaking soul and you get to talk to dead people. That's pretty cool to me.

That it was essentially turn-based combat, which for some reason was run in real time and took worst part of both approaches. For real-time combat it was too clumsy and slow. I also hated lack of any reason for using any combat tactics - spamming all abilities was more than enough to skim through game (on medium difficulty, at least). Only one fight in an entire game had any difficulty to it.

The gameplay is fun enough, but the lore is just complete trash.

It tries to imply again and again that there's more to the world than the Dyrwood, but it doesn't tell you enough about the rest of the world (or the Dyrwood's political AND physical place in it) for any of that to be relevant.

In fact, all the lore is kinda like that. They claim that it's expansive and complex, and maybe it is, but it never explains it to you well enough. They improved this significantly when they made Tyranny, at least.

The companions are okay, but nothing special. Easily forgettable.

>You're trying to learn about your freaking soul and you get to talk to dead people. That's pretty cool to me.
And watch how fast all that gets ripped away from you cause the gods are all fake.
just like in real life, yo
/tips fedora

Not the OP, but yes, my feelings exactly.

That wasn't my take away from it at all? Heck, a large part of the point of it was that they still had meaning, value and power despite that. The truth of their nature doesn't innately remove the value of faith, it's a matter of how you choose to respond do it.

Now, I do agree about this stuff completely so far. I like Eder as a companion but the others I'm pretty meh on so far. Except Durance, he's a complete asshat.

I can't get a feel for how this world is put together very well. Even in dungeon crawlers like IWD, you have a good idea of the world-at-large, but it seems pretty confusing in Pillars.

not gonna read the spoilers

The whole game should have been about inheriting the fortress, hiring companions to protect it and to go on adventures for treasure, managing its income and facilities, and slowly exploring the layers of its megadungeon until you beat the final boss. The gay story feels tacked on, and all I wanted to do was go on adventures and pursue my own enterprises. When they added those fake sidequests you can send idle companions on, I wished I could just play those instead of kind of being forced to play content related to the plot, which I had no motivation to engage with apart from some vague threat.

> the gods are all fake

It's more retarded than that. The god are real, but they were created, yet the game still treats this as a "checkmate Xtians" moment despite proving that gods objectively exist in the setting, just not in an ex nihilio capacity like in the Abrahamic conception of God.

Though fedora faggotry aside, the worst part of that ending was just how hamfisted it was in trying to make the player sympathize with that ghost elf bitch.

I was roleplaying as a super goody-two-shoes priest of Aeothas (sp?), and was horrified that someone didn't want to get back into the soul recycler, so naturally I chose that decision.

For the game designers though, that was obviously a super badong decision, because my character's cruelty score instantly shot up from zero to my 3rd highest modifier. Fuck whoever designed that and their shitty waifu.

Shhh user, he's bootybothered because a vidya used a twist he misconstrued as an affront to his religion. Arguing otherwise will only prompt a flood of *tips fedora* and reeeeeing with a side of /pol/posting and deus vult faggotry.

yet the game still treats this as a "checkmate Xtians" moment

Citation fucking needed. This feels like you projecting your own insecurities, nothing to do with the game which took a much more balanced, open ended approach, letting you choose what it meant to you.

...

The trouble is that they really just put that in there as a crutch so they could frontload every story and not have to be clever about world building. Rather than put together clues in your environment, 9 times out of 10 you just talk to some ghost memories and instantly know everything that happened.

That might have been cool, or if they had figured out how to meld the fortress into the story a little bit better. Otherwise it'd be kinda Diablo-ish.

Maybe have the keep be your reward for getting rid of Raedric and then the weirdass spirit stuff starts catching up with you.

> Poor storytelling, waifuism and blatant railroading in what was, up until that point, a flexible and interesting RPG is okay because it fits my beliefs.

Apply yourself.

>they really just put that in there as a crutch so they could frontload every story

that's not how writing works. They put that in there to be the plot hook, and THEN used it poorly in some parts. Though they do have you talk to several ghosts much of the time and then piece things together for yourself.

I'm assuming you aren't a fan of these types of games anyways.

It's mediocre shit. People are lauding it as some sort of classic because they're starved for crpgs, but it's really fucking boring on its own, and downright terrible if compared to older games.

All the companions are boring as shit (Yes, even Durance) because they barely interact with you and the plot and because they mostly have nothing interesting to say. The main villain is weak and the game has to make him teleport on-screen to make him do something bad to remind you that he's there and the story is mostly an excuse to make you explore the OC donut steel setting they've created. Most of the time I found myself wanting to leave, and I've never experienced that sentiment when playing a video game before, let alone an rpg. The gameplay is also meh and the enemy selection is downright insulting.

Obsidian used their freedom from publishers to release a really bland and boring rpg and I have a hunch that it turned out the way it did because a lot of old timers left and were replaced by people who weren't even born when Baldur's Gate was released. Just play Mask of the Betrayer if you want to see what Pillars of Eternity would've been if released by a competent team.

Alternatively, people have different opinions and interpretations and you're just butthurt.

It would have been perfectly fine if the game designers had actually implemented the option for your character to tell ghost elf lady that her logic is ridiculous, and the gods being created doesn't detract from their obvious power and, well, *existence.*

Instead, we're treated to a chorus of everyone except that Elf mage losing their shit, and liking and trusting this random ghost despite having never met her before (PC aside).

Disagree with that ghost? Eat shit and take a buttload of Cruelty points.

>People are lauding it as some sort of classic
wut. where have you seen this? Literally all I've ever seen people say is either it's shit or it's decent but not great. Literally look at this thread.

>Just play Mask of the Betrayer if you want to see what Pillars of Eternity would've been if released by a competent team.

The same competent team that released the same shit OC of NWN2.

I've seen a lot of people say it's some sort of masterpiece. In fact, I've seen more people say it's a great game than actually see them discuss anything from the game, probably because there's not much to discuss, since all you do is fight boars, shades, beetles and slimes and 90% of the story is exposition.

>The same competent team that released the same shit OC of NWN2.
Only Sawyer worked on both, from what I recall. Maybe Avellone, too. And NWN2's OC was a million times better. It was generic and cut down in several places, but to me it gave the impression that it was parodying or commenting on generic dnd stories in a way while treating its' threat seriously, and it had a few genuine moments of brilliance, like Khelgar's sperg-out, the trial or Bishop's betrayal.

It doesn't have to devolve into an entirely mindless treadmill if you focus on making those quests and adventures interesting. The best thing you can do in one of these types of games is to make the world naturalistic, then the player can tell their own story. Designing a game like that is a rigorous process though, and the game industry as it is has no motivation to do that, because it makes no more money than if they just pay a guy to write some really bland prose in the archetypal style of a popular genre. And that's what we got with PoE.

Don't remind me about that shitty fucking stronghold.

>Game gives you a fortress for doing a really easy mission and says that you're now a noble and own land around it
>It's never mentioned again in the story or by anyone else

It's like they wanted to do the Crossroad Keep from NWN2 again but turned it into a facebook game, just like they tried to do the trial from NWN2 again and failed as well. This is what happens when you add gameplay "features" cause of kickstarter.

>I've seen a lot of people say it's some sort of masterpiece
Well if you really have then they're wrong.

>since all you do is fight boars, shades, beetles and slimes and 90% of the story is exposition.
So pretty much the same thing as any of the Black Isle games that everyone loves.

NWN2 did have a few moments, I'll give you that. But oh my god they were buffeted by the most boring, trivial crap ever. I finished that game once and will NEVER go back.

>if they just pay a guy to write some really bland prose in the archetypal style of a popular genre
Wasn't it all written by Sawyer?

>BG series
>Forgotten Realms
cucks

what did he mean by this

It's a lot more tripe than other black isle games. The exposition and the descriptions are full of repetitions. In fact, from what I remember, the main villain's hair and beard are described at least three times in the game, despite him having an avatar and a model. It's just walls of text filled with redundancies, backstory, pointless descriptions and over-indulging flowery dialogue. It also has a serious problem of only voicing half the dialogue, and the voice acting being generally terrible. One moment you read a character's dialogue and suddenly the next line is voiced, and after a few lines it goes back to not-voiced.

I think the only reason people gave it the time of day was cause its' competitor was Dragon Age Inquisition.

Just calling it how I see it. Sure, the ghost soul thing might be interesting in the hands of competent writers, but that's not who they had on hand, or if they did, they were lazy and just said fuck it here's the story. There's not any room to infer things nor to interpret them. They tell you how shit went down, and use arbitrary pacing by spacing the ghost visions out in phases through a quest. When they aren't using ghost visions, they throw in journals or just people telling you things. That's the closest it gets to piecing things together, or true investigation. Most of the time I found the visions occur unprompted, sometimes in the middle of a conversation when I would otherwise be meant to draw my own conclusions, just to give me exposition that explains everything I need to know. After a while, it's hard not to just skip through it, especially because it affects the gameplay very little and is not enjoyable to read.

I liked Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment. Those are pretty good games but I don't think anyone's really made a game that capitalizes on the cRPG genre's potential to a wholly satisfying degree.

>It's just walls of text filled with redundancies, backstory, pointless descriptions and over-indulging flowery dialogue.
That about sums it up for me. Tyranny wasn't much better in this regard, but at least it had a highly entertaining and unique premise.

>unique premise.

>You're evil
>But you don't get to do evil shit
>Also mind my pronouns, shitlord
Yes, it was certainly... Unique.

I got to do plenty of evil shit. Did you end up sucking some faction's dick?

The reason I liked tyranny more than poe is that it lets you punch uppity npcs instead of having to sift through their bullshit dialogue.

> highly entertaining and unique premise

Until the game railroads you into cookie cutter "chosen one" bullshit fighting against the evil overlord at the end. Fuck knows how they thought that one through, considering the entire marketing campaign was built on being a functionary for the bad guy.

Because they wanted to leave the story open for a sequel, which will never happen because of its' abysmal sales.

200k units on Steam doesn't seem that bad?

What, it's impossible to continue with more stories while still serving Kyros?

That "twist" actually ruined any interest I could have had for a sequel. Doing a complete 180 turn on the entire premise of the story and game's appeal gave them an ending even worse than PoE's. I had stuck with the game up until that point, even through all the on-the-nose SJW shit like every single couple being a gay one.

It's not as much as Paracocks wanted

Well I guess it should be ironic that the fortress and megadungeon are the most compelling aspects to the game, apart from the stuff that's sort of inherently cool about the genre that suckered idiots like me into buying it in the first place. I'm just sad I played PoE and not the hypothetical game that's just based around the idea of an adventurer running a fortress and exploring the dungeon beneath it. I wish I was talented and rich enough to make that game.

> the main villain's hair and beard are described at least three times in the game, despite him having an avatar and a model
Agreed that's pretty bad. I wonder how much proofreading was done.

> It also has a serious problem of only voicing half the dialogue
This is exactly the same as the old Black Isle games. Not anything specific to this game.

>I think the only reason people gave it the time of day was cause its' competitor was Dragon Age Inquisition.

No they gave it a try because it was a throwback to those old isometric RPGs and people revere those.

I'm not arguing that they used exposition to advance the story. They definitely did.

>I liked Baldur's Gate
They also use exposition to advance the story here. HARD. You find out you're a bhaalspawn through a fucking letter, and all of Sarevok's plans are detailed in his diary. You might not even read them since it isn't required.

I feel like these games are kind of aping the stuff they think of as "good" in Baldur's Gate/Planescape to the point of parody. Those games were dense and often dark, sure, but they had moments of levity and Baldur's Gate had a really compelling character and combat system (so much so that DA1 which tried to resurrect it is still considerably inferior).

It's like what someone trying to take all the "deep" parts of those games and amplify them would make, which makes it all the more depressing that it's the same people. And they clearly got a bit carried away by the scope in either case.

I think as says the Tyranny game and the Shadowrun series are a lot more sensibly constructed and IMO have more enjoyable gameplay options. The second Expeditions game (Vikings) also basically shifted from a tactical/resource management game into a full-on RPG and I found the historical Denmark-and-Britain setting of that very interesting.

NWN2's Mask of the Betrayer is genuinely fantastic though. I found the core game enjoyable enough to play through but MotB is like some A+ shit. And the base game has plenty of cute shit like the trial user mentioned, or the dumbass adventuring party that show up at your fortress themselves.

>Mask of the Betrayer
Can I play this as a stand-alone without playing the core game of NWN2?

Agreed MotB is dope.

I remember not liking it. It started off bad enough with the game not giving me any real reason to do the main quest and a special snowflake power that manifested in giving me the ability to read exposition, but what killed it for me was the quest when I was trying to find that elf girl. It turned out she was kidnapped by a retarded magician who sperged out because her uncle fucked her and he put some magic in her to punish her uncle. Everything about that quest and that guy's tirade and the fact that the game acted like her uncle did an extremely heinous act and not allowing me the option to not think it wasn't heinous is what killed it for me.

Agreed that Baldur's Gate has exposition too, not agreed if you think its usage of it is equally bad (the actual content is more digestible in BG for example), and also not agreed if you think it's a necessary or inevitable component to these games.

People keep talking shit about the trial because no matter what you do, it always ends with the boss fight, but personally I loved it. It was more about the journey than destination.
Also, the scene in the chapel, when you're praying and your companions come to talk to you before the fight? Best moment in the game.

I found the trial to be great as well, and I think people are overreacting about the fight with Lorne. The game doesn't throw your achievement of defending yourself under the rug, and even your companions rage against the injustice of it.

>not agreed if you think it's a necessary or inevitable component to these games.

never argued that.

>the actual content is more digestible in BG

are you meaning the actual prose? I agree.

Yes, though if you do NWN2's OC you'll (potentially) start with more levels, more frames of reference for a few things and you might care about your character a lot more, because MotB is a very personal story.

Other than that, MotB's story is almost entirely disconnected from OC.

So what do you guys think of Torment: Tides of Numenera?

A better effort than PoE?

But you'll have to sit through the first part of NWN2. which is the worst part of a game ever. It makes the Planescape tutorial look like an adrenaline rush.

Do you mean the tutorial, the first act or the OC? Because I'll have to disagree. I think it gets too much undeserved hate.

I couldn't get past how much like Baldur's Gate it was.

I get it, BG was good and there's a market for nostalgia, but both RPGs and computer games have evolved a lot since then. To get something that is so blatantly a throwback to the 90s in this age of Skyrim, Dragon Age and even indie stuff like Cave Story feels like a huge step backwards.

Of course there's something to be said for taking a retrospect and trying to bring back something new computer RPGs may have lost, but PoE does this in what I consider the wrong way. Instead of creating something that takes the best of old games and enhance it with new experiences they just make a copy of things as they used to be. This does not really help evolve computer RPGs, it just defaults to something that has come and gone.

To be clear this is my own personal perspective, opinions are like assholes etc. I have nothing against people who enjoyed the game.

Yeah the prose is more sensibly constructed and disseminated. With modern games it's a real nightmare every time, whether it's voice acted or you're forced to sit through reading it all. Game studios are still approaching story blind to the nature of the medium, and even worse they consider it an afterthought.

It's worse.

I liked it, but it has huge problems with how it chooses to tell its story. This manifests in several ways.

One way is that NPCs have a habit of delivering lots of information that isn't relevant to anything actually in the game. For example, all the Dwarf Ranger companion ever talks about is her hometown, but you never go there or anywhere where that information is even remotely relevant. That's maybe not such a terrible thing, but shit like that happens again and again and again, which only reinforces that the generic pigshit fantasy countryside land the game takes place in is literally the least interesting place in the entire setting. And not just the place, but the time as well. You get to hear a lot about a war where the avatar of an angry god invaded the land and they ended up blowing him the fuck up with a magic nuke. That's some interesting shit, but you only get to hear about it. Meanwhile the most interesting thing that's happening in the game that doesn't directly involve the player is that a lot of kids are being born with no soul. Which is sad and a little creepy, but it's not particularly exciting stuff. But anyway it's all just stories that don't affect anything, and for some companions like Sagani, the Dwarf Ranger I mentioned, "hey let me tell you about the lore of my people who live on the other fucking end of the world" is like 90% of what they have to tell you. They barely even have a personality. Sagani's personality is "I miss my family but my mission is important too and this gives me internal conflicts." And there's nothing interesting to discover about her because she straight-up tells you this after the first time you meet her.

(1/2)

>a special snowflake power that manifested in giving me the ability to read exposition
kek this is so fucking true

What can I honestly say about the effort they put in when I have no firsthand evidence? As far as I know, the developers at inXile worked very hard to get this off the ground.

But as an intended result, regardless of the effort invested, it's shit.

Another big way is that the player's goals are unclear and just plain bad for most of the game. Without spoiling too much, you basically meet a guy in the first 15 minutes of the game. You don't know the guy, but he does something (you don't know what) and then something magic happens and then you feel different. There's no real indication that whatever he did made you feel different, it might've just been a coincidence, but when you're told that the "feels different" thing might eventually drive you insane (and that's just a maybe, because all you have to go on is "the same thing happened to some other guy"), it becomes your goal to track down the mystery man in the hope that he's the one who caused it (you don't know for sure) and that he can also undo it (you have no reason to assume he can). And let's not forget that even though everyone keeps saying you might go insane or even die, this never ever happens no matter what, and you suffer no negative consequences whatsoever, only positive. And this is all you have to go on for 90% of the game. Sure you slowly learn a thing or two about the mystery man and you find out that he's probably a bad guy, but that's it. And eventually it all makes sense and you find out why you have to stop him, and the story becomes a lot better by then, but that's in the final 10% of the game so it's too little too late. and by that time there's so much you need to know, that it gets condensed into like three giant loredump conversations. That's just awful writing.

(2/2)

Not everything. I think Arkane does a really good job with the stories of their games, being able to delve into some pretty complicated ideas while keeping everything very accessible and playable and using a lot of physical, visible storytelling just in the actual gameplay.

In spite of what I said in broad terms, I couldn't agree more with your choice of counterexample to the prevailing mediocrity. Arkane know how to tell story and convey meaning through interactive environments, which is the biggest untapped strength of the video game medium as an art form.

Nah.

PoE, for all its flaws, is at least entertaining.

Torment Numenera is basically just a vague idea of "PS:T, so we're going to try our best to be original and weird as well," but the writers lack any talent so it just comes across as bland, confused and forced, a not fully realized idea sewn together with shit mechanics and some of the worst purple prose to ever be featured in a video game.

>To get something that is so blatantly a throwback to the 90s in this age of Skyrim, Dragon Age and even indie stuff like Cave Story feels like a huge step backwards.
Dragon Age literally got off the ground by being a huge throwback to Baldur's Gate. And the second DA game was dreadful, only the third was where it found its space as an actual game.

Same deal with Skyrim honestly. Skyrim is not a good game for the kind of game it wants to be. The Witcher blows it completely out of the fucking water (helps that they have like 1000 eurodrones working on a game for Eastern European wages) but even if you compare to like, Dragon's Dogma: all of the action in that game is 10x better than Skyrim and while the story is less detailed its premise is actually more interesting and encourages more questions.

TES decided it was only ever going to be generic fantasy with Oblivion and Skyrim follows up on that with a Norse flavour. It's unambitious in both story and gameplay.

Now I actually agree PoE isn't very good, but that's more because it does what the old games did well badly than for anything else.

>only the third was where it found its space as an actual game.
Shame that it was complete shit.

It's getting an expansion, isn't it?

>What, it's impossible to continue with more stories while still serving Kyros?
Not impossible, but then they'd have to account for two wildly different starting points for the sequel. So you either get this, or you get some Telltale-style crap where your choices just get undone at the start of the next game via plot bullshit. Both options suck, but at least this way is a bit more straight-forward.

I found the setting to be painfully jarring and anachronistic, with the constant flood of exposition about it eventually scaring me away from playing the game at all.

I do not care the procreation of a species that I will never encounter except in the form of this sole character explaining it to me.
I do not care about the psychic wars and the literal ten thousands of words of exposition about them which aren't relevant outside of the tavern for psychic veterans that you hear them in.

There are so many elements that clash with each other that the game is so eager to shove in your face. It's exposition saturation of the absolute worst variety.

Maybe if it was relevant to the game, or if Numenera was actually an interesting setting, I would have liked it. As it was, the only interesting part of the game was the story of the Changing God and his Castoffs.

>The Witcher blows it completely out of the fucking water (helps that they have like 1000 eurodrones working on a game for Eastern European wages)
CDProjekt had like a fraction of the team that Skyrim did and Polish wages are about 1/2 that in western europe.

While I fully understand and partially agree with what you're saying, this game was literally sold on the premise of "it's just like Baldur's Gate! You remember Baldur's Gate, don't you?!"

If they had made it too original, the Kickstarter backers would've rioted.

Yeah, they know how to use both environmental and in-character PoVs (and the actual PoV you have as the game's protagonist, the PoV of playing through it) really well. There was an interview with the new hire for Arkane recently I heard and she was talking about a game that didn't really appeal to me, but made some great points about the explorability of the environment in a vidya and how that's just inherently massively different from any other kind of storytelling you can do.

And that actually doesn't even mean it has to be like this fully realised 3D environment, it's just about the environment presented and what you do/how you look at it as a player. I'm sure none of this is new to you and all, just agreeing + speaking my opinion.

Your walls of text are long but also full of truth. The story of the game does not present a sense of urgency, which is mainly necessary because it is not in and of itself compelling. When playing the game, you're mainly motivated by the desire to explore, loot, and conquer enemies. The story only serves to interrupt that rather than complementing it.

But PoE is considerably worse at being Baldur's Gate than Baldur's Gate was. Icewind Dale is a better Baldur's Gate than PoE.

This reminds me that I immediatly figured out the elf faggot's gimmick the moment I met him, but the game still pretended like it was a "mystery". AND THEN out of the blue he reveals that he was a spy sent by Thaos all along, and your character can be mad or not and then nothing happens and it's never mentioned again.

They dropped the cutscene where you fuck him in the ass and everything is forgiven, that's why.

Kickstarter devs are not beholden to their backers, apart from fulfilling the pledge promises. It didn't matter if they changed the game or kept it like Baldur's Gate. What they failed to do was make the game good, or at least better than mediocre.

It was sold on the premise of "It's just like Baldur's Gate 2" but they made it like Baldur's Gate 1.

S A V A G E
A N D T R U E

Yeah I think part of the reason for this is that the various writers didn't communicate their intentions enough. So you get Aloth making a big revelation about who he's working for, but then his personal story ends and there's nobody to pick up that information and actually use it when it's relevant.

The most blatant example of this, in my opinion anyway, is at Dunryd Row. All right, so the game doesn't do a very good job of explaining the difference between Ciphers and Watchers, but the general idea is that Ciphers can read and manipulate minds/souls, but a Watcher can also see into the past of a soul, and even including the souls of corpses and past lives. Doesn't seem like as big a deal as the game makes Watchers sound, but still, that's clear.

But then you come across Dunryd Row, which are very clearly Ciphers and definitely not Watchers. But the first sidequest you get involving them says that one of the services they offer to the knight guys is reading their soul lineage so they can see if they have any evil indluence or whatever from past lives. Which is something that's already established to be the domain of Watchers, and not Ciphers. So here you have a while organization of Ciphers doing something Ciphers can't actually do. It's ultimately not a big deal since it's just a sidequest thing, but to me it clearly shows that there are different writers on the team that have different ideas of how the game should work.

I think the best word to describe the unique way games, and other interactive media, tell stories is "tangibility." This is an emotional response that can be triggered by illusion, much as in literature a writer can evoke visuals using imagery, and visual artists can convey motion through animation. Video game developers, by the same token, can evoke "tangibility" with tools and tropes that I don't think anyone fully understands yet due to a lack of formal study. The most common terms people associate with this phenomenon are "atmosphere" and "immersion" which always end up being nebulous because people have an understandable difficulty in articulating the sensation. What's clear here is that it's inherent and unique to the medium and it's also rarely done well. And I assert that it's because of the lack of motivation in the industry, and the fact that video games are too young to have a serious presence in academia.

favorite part of planescape torment was

>lower ward
pea brain

>curst
some brain activity

>sigil underground
normal brain

>clerk's ward
super brain

My favorite part was the Sensorium.