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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: Games
Topic ID: 48
Message ID: 7
#7, RE: Taking a look at Star Citizen
Posted by StClair on May-13-14 at 06:42 PM
In response to message #4
LAST EDITED ON Aug-05-15 AT 05:05 AM (EDT)
 
With all the mods out there to Freespace (and/or XWA), you could probably take a shot at it.


(edit 5/14/14) (touch-ups 8/5/15)
Meanwhile... turns out that I'm still mad at Chris Roberts for what he did in WC3. I've often half joked that the gaming thing is just a sideline for him, and what he's always really wanted, "in the worst way", was to be George Lucas ... and sometimes he's succeeded at doing exactly that. :p Certainly his handling of WC3 was very much in the style of prequel-era Lucas, on par with "midichlorians" and other infuriating missteps.

What did he do, you ask? Well, he wanted to end the game and the trilogy with a sequence very similar to the classic Death Star trench run. With Mark Hamill in the pilot's seat, even. Only this time, instead of blowing up a military space station, the player is blowing up a whole planet - the Kilrathi homeworld. A planet inhabited by billions.

Nor was it acceptable that this act, like the atom bombing of Japan, be presented as controversial but necessary. Like OSC, Roberts wanted his genocide to be blameless. So he stacked the deck further, with a whopper of a retcon that reached all the way back to the first game of the trilogy, and declared that Kilrathi would never, under any but the most extraordinary circumstances - like having their sacred homeworld and more than half their race wiped out at a stroke - surrender. That they literally did not understand the concept. And in so doing, he made one of the most sympathetic and best written characters of the series - written mostly by others, in fact, and here's that Lucas touch again - into a lie, a sleeper agent, someone who never really was. No Kilrathi can really be sympathetic, really be open to negotiations, unless it's a trick and a lie. Because that would mean you, the player, couldn't kill them all with a clear conscience.

Never mind that an aggressive species with no concept of surrender would never be able to form a society, let alone an interstellar empire, when every quarrel must be to the death. Never mind that this invalidated (or at least made into a hollow mockery) some of the best bits of the second movie, I mean game in the trilogy. Never mind that an officer who defected in the first place because his superiors had acted dishonorably might have some legitimate objections to his new allies wanting to blow up his homeworld and everyone on it. Nope, Chris Roberts wanted his nice clean black-and-white ending.

And he got it. And all he had to do was assassinate one character and reduce the rest of his people to "orcs."