Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Neonivek]

What do you mean 40k is COMPLETELY serious.

I mean the king of all good guys is a undead lich who eats baby souls and is in fact a very powerful space lightbulb!

[Krevsin]

Again, the problem isn't in the presence of dark elements or "gritty elements" or whatever. The problem is that there's often nothing else to it. Nobody seems to have a sense of humour or have something good or funny happen to them. It's just constant misery and pain and darkness and at some point, constant tragedy ceases to be tragic and just becomes boring.

You need some ups to balance the downs because that makes the downs much more emotionally resonant. Without moments of levity in Dwarf Fortress, the game would be a miserable slog to play.

What are you talking about is basically grimderp (Warning! Very addictive and kinda NSFW), it was one of the reasons Batman: AK sucked. It was trying to be "gritty and dark" so much that I didn't give a shit about anything.

It's also why WH40K attracted a horrible fanbase.  It's supposed to be a ridiculously dark satire and instead, most of the people who play it now take that shit as seriously as it's possible to take it, and it is basically the definition of grimderp.

Dark satire of what exactly?

WH40k's inspiration and aspiration seem to be pretty much entirely to be as overblown, overdramatic, and grim as a metal album cover. It's space metal opera. It's grimdark in such a larger-than-life way that you can't really feel emotionally invested in anything but the spectacle of it. it has fun with the grimdark because it keeps trying to outdo itself in just how big and overblown it is and has just tons of silly shit in it (the entirety of orks as a race).

[Virtz]

It's also why WH40K attracted a horrible fanbase.  It's supposed to be a ridiculously dark satire and instead, most of the people who play it now take that shit as seriously as it's possible to take it, and it is basically the definition of grimderp.

Where do you see this group of people taking WH40k seriously? Cause all I've ever heard concerning WH40k is lulz.

[Krevsin]

Oh they're definitely around. Edgy 14 year olds going through puberty and arriving at strange questions about themselves and their role in the world pick the damnedest role models.   

[muldrake]

Dark satire of what exactly?

WH40k's inspiration and aspiration seem to be pretty much entirely to be as overblown, overdramatic, and grim as a metal album cover. It's space metal opera. It's grimdark in such a larger-than-life way that you can't really feel emotionally invested in anything but the spectacle of it. it has fun with the grimdark because it keeps trying to outdo itself in just how big and overblown it is and has just tons of silly shit in it (the entirety of orks as a race).

That's true, but the dark satire was of itself.  You weren't supposed to take any of this seriously.  At the outset, it was supposed to be FUN.

[Neonivek]

Right now it is kind of between being serious and being a self-parody.

Each edition brings it closer to being self-unaware and "SUPER SERIOUS!"

[Persus13]

Still an improvement over Inquisitor Obi-wan Sherlock Clousseau.

[Krevsin]

Eh, dunno. It really depends on the authors of novels as to how serious Warhammer 40k is. Like every new edition adds more SERIOUS stuff, but based on art alone, you really can't think either of these overdesigned figures

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

can be taken seriously unless you are Edgemeister Supreme, the god-emperor of Edge. The story can be as dramatic and SRS BISNIS as it tries to be, but so long as it happens to 7 foot tall, 700 pound demigod mutant people wearing gothically ornate armor, it's pretty much just opera. Metal Space Opera to be exact.

[AzyWng]

A significant portion of the games involving upgrade systems are guilty of at least one of these three sins...

Unknown Improvements

Vagueness
Some games have upgrades. Some of these upgrades, for example, result in increases to damage - but sometimes the descriptions are vague and don't give much detail on how much more damage you inflict. Not something encountered that often, but when it does pop up it's rather jarring.

Pretty and Meaningless Bars
A lot of games that have upgrades (and several games that don't) have stats represented by bars. As a parameter is higher or lower, that stat bar increases. However, in a number of games there's no measure of how much more of an improvement a full bar has over an empty bar.

Take Alien Swarm, for instance. Its characters all have bars and even fractions measuring how effective their respective skills are. However, a certain comparable skill may only be shared in between two characters, making the bar useless for comparison - "More effective Motion Spotter" would convey a similar amount of information.

In general, however, sometimes bars are just that, bars - with no way to measure exactly how much a parameter affects combat. That pistol you just unlocked has a full centimeter on your old weapon as far as power - but how much more damage will it inflict? Can it kill on a single headshot?

Confusing Percentages
Mad Max will be my example here. Max's elbow guards and knuckle upgrades both allow Max to parry more effectively (and receive less damage from failed parries) and inflict extra melee damage, respectively.

However, the upgrade descriptions for both items describe this increase as a percent increase/decrease.

You do not know how much damage your attacks deal in numbers. In other words, all you know about these upgrades is that they make enemies die faster (or make you die slower).

Same happens all the time when percentages come up - and you're not given any other numbers.

[muldrake]

Eh, dunno. It really depends on the authors of novels as to how serious Warhammer 40k is. Like every new edition adds more SERIOUS stuff, but based on art alone, you really can't think either of these overdesigned figures can be taken seriously unless you are Edgemeister Supreme, the god-emperor of Edge.

The problem, though, is somewhat similar to that of media like 4chan.  If you are ironically Edgemeister Supreme, you inevitably attract people who are that exact thing, but serious about it.  You end up actually being what you started out just pretending to be for cheap yuks.

Irony can be so ironic sometimes.  Don't ya think?

[Krevsin]

Eh, dunno. It really depends on the authors of novels as to how serious Warhammer 40k is. Like every new edition adds more SERIOUS stuff, but based on art alone, you really can't think either of these overdesigned figures can be taken seriously unless you are Edgemeister Supreme, the god-emperor of Edge.

The problem, though, is somewhat similar to that of media like 4chan.  If you are ironically Edgemeister Supreme, you inevitably attract people who are that exact thing, but serious about it.  You end up actually being what you started out just pretending to be for cheap yuks.

Irony can be so ironic sometimes.  Don't ya think?

I think this is a discussion of something other than edginess and that needs to be talked about in another thread but I generally agree. 

[Neonivek]

Everyone carries two bullets

Yeah I hate this artificial scarcity ESPECIALLY in survival games... Even in Survival horror.

Who the heck even walks around with exactly one clip or ten bullets?

Oddly enough you would think Survival Horror games that don't do this are better... Nope they are far worse... because even though every enemy does carry a full clip, your character is ENTIRELY unwilling to carry multiple clips.

[Virtz]

Eh, dunno. It really depends on the authors of novels as to how serious Warhammer 40k is. Like every new edition adds more SERIOUS stuff, but based on art alone, you really can't think either of these overdesigned figures can be taken seriously unless you are Edgemeister Supreme, the god-emperor of Edge.

The problem, though, is somewhat similar to that of media like 4chan.  If you are ironically Edgemeister Supreme, you inevitably attract people who are that exact thing, but serious about it.  You end up actually being what you started out just pretending to be for cheap yuks.

Irony can be so ironic sometimes.  Don't ya think?

Again, never seen people unambiguously consider 40k "serious", whatever that actually means now since no one's given an example. Do you just mean people who find it awesome? People who care about the lore? People who play tabletop? People who roleplay in 40k? What?

[itisnotlogical]

You know people who don't realize that Sharknado was intentionally bad? I think that's what he's getting at; people who don't get the joke and take every last element as totally straight-faced. Even including Librarian miniatures that just randomly have an open book attached to their armor, Orks believing that purple makes them invisible (who's seen a purple Ork?), and so on.

I haven't seen these people either, but when I used to lurk /tg/ I'd see people complaining about them too.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

...Orks believing that purple makes them invisible (who's seen a purple Ork?)...

Wait, could that actually be possible since Orks reshape reality based on what they believe to be true?