What’s your problem with the storyline?

vetex wont let you hit :sob::pray:

man knows how to get vetex to talk about lore :sob:

This post was a rude awakening. I was fr theorizing that the place that Morden and the player were being experimented on was in the Dark Sea.

the tester role:

Personally love the story, but not a fan of some parts of the dialogue itself.
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These two are the ones that irk me the most, I don’t mind it being a bit corny, but it’s spoken so out of place and kind of forced.
From what I understand, AO MC is not meant to be projected on, kinda like Kris from Deltarune, so you can’t have your AO MC be a ruthless villain without it clashing with the story as to why he’s helping random people like Iris, but some of the dialogue sometimes carries heavy anime protagonist vibes, and not the good kind.

I know in the story the AO MC is meant to be a savant, so regardless of what build you’re going, you KNOW how to use magic in lore. I’m more of a fan of show don’t tell, and there’s a bunch of exposition that could be done through visuals or experience than text.

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I don’t mind THESE because it’s specifically Morden talking about HIS experiences, trying to re-tell everything to you, so it makes sense in-universe why he says that. But his first lines feel extremely weird, it’s like if it was a synopsis for the game instead of someone talking to you.

It’s only tad bits of dialogue that don’t feel natural in the game, as for the story I’m really enjoying it, I understand splitting up and know that we’ve had little buddy-buddy moments since Morden is too busy trying to recover from deep injuries, Iris taking care of him, Neviro leaving and us awakening. We go to Sameria to be intercepted, and basically have to rush everywhere since it’s a shaky place full of fighting until we eventually make it post Port Mistral and we split up.

So yeah, my only gripe with the story would be so that some dialogues actually sound like people interacting instead of trying to tell a story through people interacting.
It’s kinda like the difference between
“Jamie, I heard there’s going to be a big party at Sam’s house this Saturday. It’s supposed to be the event of the year with lots of people, great music, and amazing food.”
“Yes, I heard that too, Alex. I think it’s going to be an incredible night where everyone will have a fantastic time. I can’t wait to see all our friends and enjoy the evening.”

And

“Hey Jamie, you going to Sam’s party on Saturday?”

“Yeah, heard it’s gonna be huge. You in?”

“Definitely. Everyone’s talking about it. Should be fun!”

My two cents are that, since Morden just found out about your amnesia, he brings up the matter more… uncertain. He asks “Do you at least remember how to use magic?”, I feel like the other part sounds extremely unnatural and there’s no way to bring it up normally. I think that should be more… implied and shown, not told by a character. Hell, it may even work as a little tutorial for people to know that they need to select the magic and cast stuff (quite useless if you’re aiming for intuitive gameplay, but still would make sense in-verse, and you can leave some of the instructions in the quest tab, making people actually use it to check what they’re trying to do), and after you M1 or press Q, Morden goes like “Okay, that’s a relief, magic is a significant advantage for us to have”.

This way it could tie-in the dialogue, explain a little bit about gameplay and be a natural interaction in-verse. It could be applied to more exposition dialogues, like Elius’.

I feel like you can take this out.
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Because he says that like a second AFTER he talks about Beringer and Sea Curses. MC doesn’t even react or say anything, so it’s not like Elius has a reason to go “Shit, I talked too much” out of the blue. You can change it to a threat or something like “As for you, this is where your story ends, you made your last mistake following me here”.

After battle and having him at your mercy, now you question him about what he meant and NOW he goes “Fuck, I actually said too much there”, which then you ask about more details, he gives them AND then you can bring up the tangent of you asking about Curses, and that if he explains it to you, you’d let him live. Which now makes sense as to why:

1- He’d tell you everything. In the story he does this because “The Order doesn’t give second chances”, yet he wants to be left alone to his injuries in peace. So it’s either he wants to die bleeding out or plan to save himself and hide from the order as implied by Carina, either way it doesn’t make sense for him to want to be left alone to his injuries but say that he’s going to die anyway by the Order, and therefore no reason for us to have a choice on sparing or killing.

2- Sparing and Killing is an option, he would be asking for spare in exchange for information, and after him telling you everything, THEN you would be given the option to spare and kill. You’ve got everything you wanted out of him, so it’s either honor your word and let him live, or go fully ruthless and killing him despite him telling you everything.

In my opinion, him giving this much exposition in an attempt to live makes more sense than “I’ll tell you, I’m dead anyways, but let me to my injuries after this”. And make the exposition fit the narrative rather than just feel like you HAD to explain Sea Curses someway in the story, and this was the chance for a dying guy to explain it like a powerpoint presentation. In one he explains because he doesn’t care about secrecy anymore, in the other he explains because he thinks you’ll spare him after that, so tell me which one is more likely to go in-depth about topics that he’s trying to make sure you understand and as many details as he knows.
The rest of the story related to this point should go pretty much the same with more reason, Carina either says that his brother is a coward (as he spilled the beans to try and live) and that he’s hiding somewhere (surviving his injuries and you sparing him), or that you killed him which pretty much gives the same dialogue as of now. And more reason as to why Ruthless kills anyone even if they comply like Captain Maria.

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unc struck down my post :sob:
bro fr needs to agree with vetex on every single opinion

im not a mod bro :fr:
why are u so obsessed with me, im just liking whatever he posts since i get notifications for it

lowkey sounds like authentic glaze but :pray:
feel free to base every opinion you have on a man who gets pissed at people when they use context clues from what was said ingame or by tech, then corrects them like this was common knowledge :fire:

no way the #1 Morock fan (who durza solos) is talking about glazing :sob:

6 Likes

No way bro just said fraudza solos morrock (who solos your favourite verse)

neither of those characters would last like 3 seconds against SpongeBob I’m ngl

check out this spirit weps suggestion absolute gas

Give me proof, since I have always given proof to state Morock is the strongest.
If you can’t, I’ll just assume this is bait and I was engaging in verbal combat with a lesser animal who is not belonging of God’s chosen people.

Morock solos.

bro is correct :sob::pray:

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He was killed by plain old water imbued with fancy sea-salt bruh :moyai:

I kinda disagree. I think it would be more interesting story-wise to fight a curse user (or at least see one), rather than getting lore dumped on us. Maybe when the player gets sent to the eternal mines after getting jumped by Julian and ask that one old dude what happened it goes something like:

“What happened?”
“You got jumped by General Julian.”
“Who’s that?”
“The glass curse user from what I’ve heard.”
"People keep talking about curses and I don’t know what they are. Can you explain it to me?
“Sure-”
You get sent back
“Nevermind, I’ll explain tomorrow”

Then you get exposition with two examples, General Julian and King Nero. It would probably make even more sense because that’s probably the only way to pass time in the eternal mines.

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iirc morden’s journal that you can find is “part 1”, so that implies there will at least be a part 2 in the future

i’m gonna be more interested in the part 2 because of the fact that morden is doing his own thing, and i wonder if we’ll also get an iris journal too

Looking back at my initial comment after 5 days later, what I had said earlier definitely lacked some refinement. With regards to implementing diversions from the main story in games (includes flashbacks but might also include a character imagining a hypothetical scenario so I don’t want to actually say the word flashback), there are at least five options I’m aware of:

  • Using normal dialogue recounting the thing that the writer wants to show the viewer.
  • Using a simple animated cutscene.
  • Changing the current scene and perhaps the character that the player controls briefly in the game.
  • Something like a “memory battle” where the thoughts of the character having a flashback are recreated as battles without any “scene-transition” necessarily happening (I’m thinking of Xenoverse here, I think it had some of these).
  • “Lore-books” which is the option you chose for all of them.

Initially I had kind of assumed that the last option must be the most undesirable option in any and all contexts. In my defense, this is the tempting assumption to make since it’s one of the least labor-intensive option to pick (the dialogue option is a bit easier simply because the game presumably already has dialogue, whereas you’d need to model the book object, code the GUI behavior of the book object like page flipping, mouse scrolling, etc.), but it’s a tool and can be either effective or ineffective at doing its job.

After thinking about it, I think Morden’s backstory is good being in a journal since none of the other options I thought up above would have made sense. We can’t get anything too explicit about anything that happened while we were in the lab since I’m assuming that’s supposed to be a secret, so there’d be too little exposition to warrant any of the cutscene options. Morden had already given us enough information verbally, and the way the story went, we haven’t had a time of rest with him yet (except immediately after the battle with Calvus, but he’s incapacitated there). The entries where he talks about interacting with Neviro and Iris are what I assume to be character-building details, so I still think these would be most effective cutscenes or dialogue interactions since that allows for the greatest breadth of expression, but yes there were literally no chances for this to happen.

I’ve forgotten too much about Neviro’s backstory to say anything about it in particular, though I personally would have been happy with extending the time spent in Cirrus Island just to interact more with him. I’m not sure just how popular my opinion is, though. I think at the time of his introduction in the battle against Calvus we knew too little about him personally to care a great deal, and that would have made the scene where he stands up from the rubble and rebukes Calvus much stronger. But this is a paid job for you, and time spent furnishing details that people are less likely to go back and consume is time wasted, so I get why such re-edits should be kept at a minimum.

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I assume mordens journal will get a new part at the end of every seas story, possibly same with neviro and other main characters we meet later on