Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster There's no reason why you couldn't also consider hybrid races. Goblins who are highly industrial and care nothing but constructing better and newer machines. You get kond of a Dwarf like attitude on them, but it fits since they have long slender fingers.
The Mordoks from Wells' Time Machine?
Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster Giants who are tall and slender rather then your stereotypical giant who is think and stupid. They're oversized elves, you can still use the elven ranger formula... But it's easily different enough for an audience due the fact that their bows and arrows would be huge and they wouldn't be as "stealthy" or elegent due to their size.
NOTE: Nobody steal my ideas, I'm using them on something.
The Giants out of Donaldsons Chronicles of Thomas Covenant? The value is in the actual 'implementation' of the races not in giving a brief overview (or creating a new stereotype). Most ideas are not al that unique at all, they simply don't get repeated over and over again and are limited to only a few books or games.
Quote:Original post by Spoonbender
Quote:Original post by abstractimmersion It isn't just the history. Elves already make sense at a deeper level. If Tolkien would have introduced Elves who were miners and loved machines, Dwarves who were wise and good at magic and archery, and intellectual orcs, the immersion in his book would have suffered.
Er, which deeper level is that? Why does the stuff Tolkien made up make more sense than what other people make up? If Tolkien had decided that Elves should be miners, then elves would be miners, and it'd make just as much sense. You seem to think we're born with this imprinted idea that elves are wise, magical archers. We're not. It's not even some ancient legend or old myth. Tolkien made it up.
I think he means that (as one of the very first posters in this topic mentioned) that races have their appearance for a reason. A tall slender creature simply fits in a forest.
Quote:Original post by Spoonbender
Quote:Original post by abstractimmersion Similarly, if you have a Wizard class, it'll be hard to create a magical system where both the lobsterman and the human mage learn the same fireball spell and keep immersion, since a player would assume the cognitive structures of the two races would be vastly different.
Why? Or rather, why doesn't the same apply to humans and elves then? Shouldn't they also be unable to learn the same fireball spell?
Because the lobsterman probably didn't go to magic school with (correct me if I'm wrong, Ive never read the books / seen the movies :) ) Harry Potter and friends while elves and humans have more contact between their societies. This is of course story dependent but this distinction is very natural if the races do not have a deep background.
Quote:Original post by Spoonbender The (few) games that actually bother to make a setting that makes sense are usually great, even if they just have the standard races.
Just out of interest how many games with EGOD can you name that do have an interesting setting? I only remember Arcanum and even that setting wasn't to convincing.
Quote:Original post by Sneftel A data point. Consider Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Very popular game, well-received by critics and players alike... obviously they did things more or less right. KOTOR contains significant characters from at least a dozen different alien species. Many of these species had a very minor role in the movies, or were absent altogether. (I hear most were present in the novels, but obviously most players hadn't read those.) Yet despite the existence of all these races, each with dissimilar physical and behavioural traits, the game wasn't an endless game of catch-up. Clearly, it's possible to inundate players with a completely different cast of races, one they've never seen before, and not scare them off.
Perhaps this is because Star Wars has very shallow aliens? They have aliens that are either human, human with a speech impediment or slightly intelligent rat-like creatures. It doesn't take much effort to be familiar with those.
This is my first post here, and I must say that there are some interesting topics in these forums.
On the subject, I personally think that you don't have to lose the traditional values of the races to still give them a new way of appearing. Elves, for example, are in nearly every way superior to humans/orcs/dwarves and no unoften are they arrogant about this as well. But they're still good guys. Why not manifest their arrogance and superiority by making them a ruling class of a society with human workers? It'd give them a totally new look, while they could still have their magic and wisdom. I'm a bit tired of the good-guys/bad-guys.
I rather like what Warhammer 40K does to the traditional fantasy setting. Especially the humans, who are normally oh-so-good guys, get turned into a fascist regime, giving them much more depth, while still retaining the traditional fantasy ideas that humans populate much more of the world than other races do (except for Orcs perhaps) and are somewhat in-between in terms of technology (or magic in the traditional fantasy).
Quote:Original post by abstractimmersion It isn't just the history. Elves already make sense at a deeper level. If Tolkien would have introduced Elves who were miners and loved machines, Dwarves who were wise and good at magic and archery, and intellectual orcs, the immersion in his book would have suffered.
Er, which deeper level is that? Why does the stuff Tolkien made up make more sense than what other people make up? If Tolkien had decided that Elves should be miners, then elves would be miners, and it'd make just as much sense. You seem to think we're born with this imprinted idea that elves are wise, magical archers. We're not. It's not even some ancient legend or old myth. Tolkien made it up.
I think he means that (as one of the very first posters in this topic mentioned) that races have their appearance for a reason. A tall slender creature simply fits in a forest.
Aaah, that makes sense. [smile]
Quote: Because the lobsterman probably didn't go to magic school with (correct me if I'm wrong, Ive never read the books / seen the movies :) ) Harry Potter and friends while elves and humans have more contact between their societies. This is of course story dependent but this distinction is very natural if the races do not have a deep background.
Well, who says elves and humans have more social contact than the lobstermen and humans do? If you made a setting with lobstermen and humans, I'd expect them to have about as much contact with each others as elves and humans typically do in other games.
Quote: Just out of interest how many games with EGOD can you name that do have an interesting setting? I only remember Arcanum and even that setting wasn't to convincing.
Warcraft was mentioned earlier in the thread. I guess that's the #1 example. As you said, Arcanum tried to use the standard races in their own setting, but it wasn't a huge success. Not sure if Warhammer 40k qualifies as "EGOD", but the setting rocks. [wink] How about Discworld or LoTR? (Ok, they're not (primarily) games, but I suppose the same applies) And... Yeah, I never said there were many of them, did I? :P
That's "Morlocks", and they were awesome. Like zombies, they're really dangerous unless you aren't an idiot. I'd like to stroll into their caves with my Surefire 6P and a baseball bat. Iron Chef Carnage, Liberator of the Future!
I didn't get into D&D and Tolkien and all that until post-high school, and I was really confused about the elf thing. Cover art educated me on that. See, as far as I knew, elfs (the "v" in "elves" is a Tolkien thing, I'm told) were four-inch tricksters who would make great shoes if you left the materials out overnight and were an honest cobbler. Gremlins are the critters that live in your airplane's engine and make it fail inexplicably while you're trying to bomb London. I also don't get the bizarre angel/demon thing, where they have personalities and such. That never worked for me, although people with wings and Greek armor and fiery swords is always a kickass image.
Lately, I blame video games for this, especially Square/Enix. When they needed new sprites for their old RPGs, they're just open the big book of mythological critters and put a chimera in there. Need another one? Change the palette and call it "jimera". Then go pee on other awesome stories and ideas.
Greek, Norse, Maori, Aboriginal, Native American, Chinese, Japanese, African, Amazonian, Indian, and Romanian cultures all have a bunch of kickass stories and critters, and Square bastardized them all by making then 200HP enemies in Final Fantasy 2. I just read the 1001 Nights, which I think was abridged, but I couldn't find a thicker copy at the library, and it was so terrific I am dying to see a game set in the Baghdad of Haroun al'Raschid. Niel Gaiman wrote that sweet short story, "Ramadan", which is a good enough primer for anyone to get a grasp of the basic tenets of the mythos. Why can't we do it right?
Holy crap, I'm ranting like a crazy man. I just drank that new MDX Mountain Dew stuff, and it's making me gabby. I'm done.
EDIT: I guess I'm not. I think there's a fundamental psychological trinity of factions built into us. Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Nietzsche, Aquinas, Maslow, Kierkegaard and others all presented a continuum of dignity and morality, and they all put average humans in the middle, where there's both free will and temptation. Above us are the gods/angels/elves/Protoss/Covenant, who are splendidly moral and upright and noble, devoid of weakness or flaw, and always more powerful warriors than us. Below us are the devils/demons/orcs/Zerg/Flood, who are bestial and mindless, ruled my base appetites and primal drives, and whom we can kill easily, though there are tons of them.
Right in the middle is mankind. We've got the potential for good or evil, making us the most interesting and making our good or bad decisions significant. You can't say a hydralisk is immoral when it devours a medic, because it knows nothing else. You can't say an angel is doing the right thing when he saves a child from a burning building, because the alternative is totally impossible for him. So we have all the drama, all the dignity and all the room for improvement.
Oddly, we revolt even against this basic structure, because we think elves and angels kick ass, but we get mad that they can't have the true nobility of a good person, and so we imbue them with human frailties. Hence our favorite stories are about fallen angels, redeemed monsters and ennobled minions.
Quote:Original post by Seraphim Perhaps this is because Star Wars has very shallow aliens? They have aliens that are either human, human with a speech impediment or slightly intelligent rat-like creatures. It doesn't take much effort to be familiar with those.
I wouldn't say that that's true at all. While KOTOR doesn't detail the backstory of every race as exhaustively as Tolkien did the elves, significant cultural and personality differences are quite evident in the game.
Quote:
Just out of interest how many games with EGOD can you name that do have an interesting setting? I only remember Arcanum and even that setting wasn't to convincing.
Disciples 2: Rise of the elves, a turn based strategy game. You have The Empire (humans), Mountain clans (dwarfes), Legions of the damned (demons), Undead hordes (undead) and the Elves, the usual fantasy settings more or less. But how this world was brought to life is a completely different story. Each of these sides has its personality, along with great 2d graphics, sound effect and music the devs created one of the better fantasy worlds out there. The ambient is dark, melancholic and mature and it simply devoured me. For anyone interested here's the website http://disciples2.com/D2/ and under downloads you can get the demo and try it for yourself.
I think one of the main selling points for what makes something so familiar is how it looks. You can tell a lot of a race by how it looks. For instance, you never see any fat elves. Why? Because they're not gluttonous and don't over-eat. They place less value in the shallow things in life and seek enjoyment from things like love and peace and nature. Dwarves? Not so much. They're fat and burly and love their alcohol. And you can see that by watching them for a couple minutes.
Think of it this way: If you see a character with dog ears, a tail, and claws, you're going to associate him with the characteristics of a dog and think of him as being rough and rugged and blunt. If you see a character with cat ears, a tail, and claws, you'll think she'll be prissy, less brutish, and probably smarter.
I think, if you can play on what people associate certain things with, you can create some interesting races that people will seem familiar with from the start.
Personally, I like Elves. I like the fact they are stereotypically used throughout western fantasy. I'm relying on this to a great extent to make the plot of Bloodspear take some unexpected turns. I hope most people will find it refreshing, and not a frustrating distortion of what they expect.
Given that I have to target a market dominated by that pervasive western fantasy and may need to raise investment capital (I'd rather not if I can help it), I can't really make any more sweeping changes to the fantasy staple without potentially losing investors, which are already dubious due to us being an unproven team. It's a sad state of affairs, but it's the way the game is played these days. I can't risk the loss of potential investment by being *too* original - not on the surface anyway. I already only have 3 races, and only one (human) playable. That in itself generated a flurry of 'why can't I be a drow/pixie/gnome/elf/troll?' in the forums.
Should the game take off, and the technology we're developing for it prove itself, many possibilities open up - a cheap, scalable server architecture designed for flexibility, content delivery and modification tools and access to niche markets where such flexibility can be put to good use making fun, original rpgs. That's where I want to be, not watching another studio take a concept that could be good and twist it to crank out (yet) another everquest, albeit one with a different skin.
Just my 2p. :-)
Winterdyne Solutions Ltd is recruiting - this thread for details!
I didn't realize this thread was still going. I love the game design forum!
Stop stealing my lobsterman idea! I came up with it first!
Anyways, I would just like to back up and expand upon a few points raised earlier. I think Ocarina of Time did the right thing: they invented new races, each with their own flavor and culture, which make sense in terms of their structure and society. They aren't completely blank, original races - one can see the Tolkien Dwarf/Goron and Merperson/Zora similarities. However, each race diverges from the norm, has some really original characteristics, and they don't have the Tokienic cultural extremes. Those are simply unrealistic - like assuming that all Klingons are warlike, strong, and distinguished only by their bumpy nose and forhead. I see the same amount of differentiation between stereotypical elves and dwarves.
I can think of a couple things that might help give the species of a game some new life. If the characters of these races all had some interesting quirks, something that separated them from the rest of their species, I believe the whole race would be more believable and interesting. This would also open the door to showing off the racial similarities in a better way. You can only see what sets a species apart when all of its members aren't clones of each other, in my opinion.
So this leaves me giving a couple general solutions.
1) Construct an entirely new blank species, and color it according to its environment and physical structure.
2) Alternatively, come up with a general physical form, a sort of archtypical society, and place it in a location that makes sense. Then, fill in the details.
3) Derive a species from a race that has already been developed. List what comes to mind when you think of this race. Example:
Merfolk ------ > Live underwater all the time > Wield tridents > Green > Live in fabulous underwater cities > Human size > Half of the body is a fish, the other half is human (fishtaurs) > Generally benevolent to humans (sometimes) > Live in the ocean
Now, I would change this to create a nice new race:
Ofgring ----- > Live in the expansive swamps at the northeastern part of the continent > Amphibious; they spend the nights on land and the days underwater, where they hunt > A certain kind of forty foot long eelshark, which hunts at night, is what forces them out of the swamps at night > Nomadic, culturally advanced (lots of poetry and oral tradition), but no real permanent works > Adults are about ten feet tall > They have a powerful tail, but it doesn't cover their legs - their legs and arms have a stiff webbing which helps them swim; they have human teeth (omnivorous), and large, green, but otherwise human hands > Generally peaceful to other beings, as long as they do not attack the tribe (not true of ALL tribes, but most will leave others alone.)
I think this race makes sense, has enough differences from the merfolk to make them interesting, and make perfect sense for their environment. This only took me five minutes to come up with.
There are plenty of opportunities for creativity out there, that make it fun for new players and oldie moldies alike. They don't have to be confusing to be original.
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