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Author Topic: Games with deities that aren't proven to exist via the game's story/mechanics?  (Read 6644 times)

Neonivek

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Lord Bucket I'd kind of put a page that these religions should AT LEAST have some possibility of existing in some way. Otherwise they aren't really all that ambiguous.

As for the Protoss... You know about Xelnaga if you read the manual.

As for the Klingons... Actually yes. The entire series has left meaty hints of their religion being the one true religion (freakishly enough). Mind you their gods are all dead.
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Shadowlord

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Re: Games with ambiguous deities?
« Reply #31 on: October 15, 2015, 06:57:33 pm »

* Master of Magic, like Civilization, features primary races with temples and other religious buildings, and yet gives no validation of any deity. In fact, the game mechanics tend to imply that the religions are false, because the player character is siphoning power from those religious structures for his own personal use, and the priest units in the game have no spell abilities that are different from those available to the character. The obvious interpretation is that the deities are false, and the player is using their belief as energy to fuel regular magic.

This doesn't meet the criteria at all, but the Dominions series of games takes this a step further: Every player is a 'pretender god' (or disciple of one, in team games) aspiring to become the one true god by banishing all the other pretenders. Provinces have faith in a pretender, influenced by temples and preaching and so on, and whichever pretender has dominion over a province affects its scales (order, productivity, heat, growth, luck, magic). Your priests can cast priest spells and bless your troops, and you spend points in pretender creation on your scales and magic skills (and your initial magic skills determine your blessing's effects). You can even take 'bad' scales to get additional points to spend. Magic, of course, is separate from the few priest spells and all of the priest spells are identical for every god, except for a couple of nations.

Neonivek: Nonsense. The Bajoran religion is the one true religion :P. Voyager disproved the Klingon religion conclusively.
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Bohandas

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Re: Games with ambiguous deities?
« Reply #32 on: October 15, 2015, 07:08:26 pm »

Neonivek: Nonsense. The Bajoran religion is the one true religion :P. Voyager disproved the Klingon religion conclusively.

Didn't Captain Kirk meet Apollo in TOS.
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Neonivek

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Re: Games with ambiguous deities?
« Reply #33 on: October 15, 2015, 07:10:12 pm »

Neonivek: Nonsense. The Bajoran religion is the one true religion :P. Voyager disproved the Klingon religion conclusively.

Didn't Captain Kirk meet Apollo in TOS.

Yes but Apollo was a "fake" god. This powers came from an incredibly advanced technology.

Kirk's last words were only that forms of worship isn't bad.
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Teneb

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Re: Games with ambiguous deities?
« Reply #34 on: October 15, 2015, 07:12:15 pm »

Just would like to point these out. May have been covered in the thread already, but I didn't have the time to read through it all.

King of Dragon pass also has this. While blessings, magic and related god stuff do actualy work/seem to exist, there's nothing in the game that outright proves the actual existence of said gods.
The gods of King of Dragon Pass certainly exist. You can even meet them in the... whatever were they called. Something quests.

....though I haven't actually played it, only watched my brother, I think Dragon Age does this a lot. A lot of mentioning of various religions, and not a shred of evidence for any of them. I might be wrong, though.
Of the religions in Dragon Age, only the Maker is left ambiguous. The gods of other cultures are just powerful beings that are not necessarily divine.
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« Last Edit: October 15, 2015, 07:15:23 pm by Teneb »
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Cthulhu

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Dragon Age is definitely the best example, and the one I was thinking of.

The Witcher also has the Flame or whatever it is, which is frequently mentioned and plays a part in some quests, but as far as I know nothing actually supernatural ever comes out of it.  And aside from that there's little or no evidence of the divine in the game if you assume the various "supernatural" things are natural in their own world.
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LordBucket

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Re: Games with ambiguous deities?
« Reply #36 on: October 15, 2015, 07:31:22 pm »

This doesn't meet the criteria at all

I admit it's a borderline case because the priests do have "magic powers" that could possibly be attributed to a deity. But in terms of actual game mechanics, those priests are using the same life magic that's available to every player. It appears to be a scam, but from the perspective of their-game civilization, it could be interpreted as justification for their religion.

Didn't Captain Kirk meet Apollo in TOS.

He did, Yes. Who Mourns for Adonis. He also met "god" in Star Trek 5. But those events didn't happen in the game and neither have anything to do with the klingon religion.

Dragon Age is definitely the best example

The Amarr from Eve Online are a very strong example too. It's an entire theocratic, playable race with no in-game gods or religious powers of any kind, and their religious materials are attributed to a singular god channeling written works through prophets. I haven't read all the in-game religious books, but so far as I know, they don't even claim to have met their god personally even prior to the game.

sambojin

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Battlemaster. It's a text driven MMO where people make their own religions (and boy do they come up with some whacky shit). While peasants can be converted to a religion by priests, and it does have some effect on their happiness, at no point do gods exist or intervene.

You can make temples, have theocratically based kingdoms, and even entire wars are fought based on religion from time to time. There's religious ranks, prophets named, symbols of faith etc. There's even a pseudo-orrery to work out just where the Bloodstars are at any given time in one of the worlds, for no good reason.

But there are no gods.

There's demons on one continent, monsters and undead on all of them, but no gods anywhere. Heaps of religions though.
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Neonivek

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Dominions is actually a good example.

Because there are hints that there COULD actually be a real god outside these people who pretend to be one (several pretenders actually refer to other realms)... and that Pantocreator could just be real or fake as well.

Yet it is never answered. Sure... Religions are fake because they are co-opted by other beings to be their deity. Yet religion itself isn't necessarily fake.
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Nick K

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Dominions is actually a good example.

Because there are hints that there COULD actually be a real god outside these people who pretend to be one (several pretenders actually refer to other realms)... and that Pantocreator could just be real or fake as well.

Yet it is never answered. Sure... Religions are fake because they are co-opted by other beings to be their deity. Yet religion itself isn't necessarily fake.

The term "pretender" doesn't mean that they're pretending to be a god. It's used in the context of "pretender to the throne" and means "claimant". I haven't played the latest version, but assuming the lore hasn't changed then the idea is that the world can support one supreme deity. The previous deity has just vanished, so the pretenders are all fighting to claim its place and become a true god.
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Neonivek

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Dominions is actually a good example.

Because there are hints that there COULD actually be a real god outside these people who pretend to be one (several pretenders actually refer to other realms)... and that Pantocreator could just be real or fake as well.

Yet it is never answered. Sure... Religions are fake because they are co-opted by other beings to be their deity. Yet religion itself isn't necessarily fake.

The term "pretender" doesn't mean that they're pretending to be a god. It's used in the context of "pretender to the throne" and means "claimant". I haven't played the latest version, but assuming the lore hasn't changed then the idea is that the world can support one supreme deity. The previous deity has just vanished, so the pretenders are all fighting to claim its place and become a true god.

It is multiple meanings.

Pretenders to me are all pretending to be the one true god.
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Shadowlord

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This doesn't meet the criteria at all

I admit it's a borderline case because the priests do have "magic powers" that could possibly be attributed to a deity. But in terms of actual game mechanics, those priests are using the same life magic that's available to every player. It appears to be a scam, but from the perspective of their-game civilization, it could be interpreted as justification for their religion.
Oh, sorry about that. I meant Dominions, not Master of Magic.

Dominions is actually a good example.

Because there are hints that there COULD actually be a real god outside these people who pretend to be one (several pretenders actually refer to other realms)... and that Pantocreator could just be real or fake as well.

Yet it is never answered. Sure... Religions are fake because they are co-opted by other beings to be their deity. Yet religion itself isn't necessarily fake.

You've gotten a bit confused here. The word is Pantokrator*, and it means, essentially, ruler of all. For Dominions 4 and previous iterations in the series, it's basically just the previous god who ruled the world: It's just the title given to whoever wins out in the battle between pretenders and becomes the one true god, basically.

According to the message you get when you win a game, (if I'm remembering it accurately) you eventually get bored with ruling, see something interesting in space, and fly off to investigate, leaving the world up for grabs again.

* sometimes rendered in Dominions 4 as Pantocrator, but since the original word is greek (παντοκράτωρ) anyways...
« Last Edit: October 15, 2015, 09:12:11 pm by Shadowlord »
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gomez

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What about Unreal World? You can preform rituals and sacrifices to the gods, but you have no way of knowing if it makes any difference.
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Neonivek

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Yes Shadowlord

But the Pantocrator is.. well... a fake as well.

There are some hints that there is a great deity out there who is genuinely divine... But they are completely unsubstantiated.
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Bohandas

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Re: Games with ambiguous deities?
« Reply #44 on: October 15, 2015, 10:38:36 pm »

Neonivek: Nonsense. The Bajoran religion is the one true religion :P. Voyager disproved the Klingon religion conclusively.

Didn't Captain Kirk meet Apollo in TOS.

Yes but Apollo was a "fake" god. This powers came from an incredibly advanced technology.

Kirk's last words were only that forms of worship isn't bad.

I got the impression that he was an incredibly powerful psychic, ranking somewhere between the Organians and the Q
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