Tag Archives: epic nerd rant

On Romance and Horror

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Romance and horror are two genres of storytelling that I would traditionally have told you I don’t like. They just don’t appeal to me. But lately I’ve been thinking that’s not quite right.

A piece of horror-themed artworkAs I’ve grown older and more experienced, I’ve come to the conclusion that romance and horror are both genres that I actually enjoy quite a lot. It’s just that my idea of what makes for a good romance or a good horror story are very different from mainstream society.

There’s very little romance or horror that fits my unusual ideals for how they should be executed, and it took me a long time to find any at all. Once I did, I realized I could love them as much as an other style of story. It’s not the genres themselves that bother me, but merely how they tend to be executed.

I thought it’d be interesting to do a post examining what it takes for me to enjoy these genres.

Horror:

With horror, I enjoy a much subtler touch than you normally see in mainstream culture. Most horror that I’ve experienced relies on grotesque monsters, buckets of gore, jump scares, or a combination of the above.

Those all work, but they’re cheap. They’re the path of least resistance. They’re lazy. What I crave is more ambient, more about thought and feeling. To give you an idea what I mean, my favourite literary work of horror is Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven:

Not ravens, but close enoughAnd the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
    And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
    And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
            Shall be lifted—nevermore!

 

I could also draw attention to The Secret World, a game I truly adore despite my normally lukewarm (at best) feelings toward horror. That game has its horrid monsters, its jump scares, and its gorey scenes, but it doesn’t use those things as crutches. TSW’s horror is at its finest not when the Wendigo jumps out at you in the parking garage, but while standing in the woods outside Kingsmouth, looking up at the stars and feeling alone in a hostile universe, or amidst the bright lights and cheery colours of Fear Nothing, reading the anguished words of a tortured child you came too late to save.

With horror, I’m not really looking to be scared. I don’t particularly enjoy fear. It’s already an emotion I have entirely too much acquaintance with.

But what I do like is being unnerved. Creeped out. There’s a certain strange allure to being nudged out of your comfort zone, to being reminded that the universe can be a strange and cruel place.

I’ve been reflecting lately on how fantasy, my favourite genre, and horror are closely related. Fantasy says, “Anything is possible, and that’s awesome.” Horror says, “Anything is possible, and that’s terrifying.”

My Dragon under the moonlight in Blue MountainThe horror that I enjoy isn’t about making you jump in your seat or squeal in terror. It’s about mystery and ambiance. It’s about reflecting on how much of the universe we still don’t understand, about hearkening back to when I was a child and I looked into the darkness and wondered what was out there, not entirely sure I wanted the answer.

Romance:

My issues with romance as it is usually presented are more complex.

I’ll grant that a lot of it is just that a great deal of romance is, in my opinion, poorly written. It seems to me as if the golden rule of “show, don’t tell” is almost invariably thrown out where romance is concerned. In literature, it always seems to devolve into lengthy, tedious exposition on the depth and power of the character’s feelings, and romance in other mediums is rarely less hamfisted.

I would really like to see romance focus more on the characters’ actions, and action in general. Don’t just tell me how much they love each other. Show me how they’ll go to Hell and back for each other. Show me how their love strengthens them and makes them better people.

A fantasy romance-themed wallpaperI’ve talked before about how King and Lionheart by Of Monsters and Men is one of my favourite songs. To me, it’s an exemplar for a better, more dramatic style of romance.

Howling ghosts – they reappear
In mountains that are stacked with fear
But you’re a king, and I’m a lionheart.
And in the sea that’s painted black,
Creatures lurk below the deck
But you’re a king, and I’m a lionheart.

And as the world comes to an end
I’ll be here to hold your hand
Cause you’re my king, and I’m your lionheart.

It is, to my interpretation, all about the strength that one draws from love. About what one can face with their love at their side.

As I’m putting the finishing touches on this post, I’ve just finished rewatching Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and Liz’s decision to save Hellboy even at the cost of everything is, to me, a great example of romance done right. It’s powerful, but not overwrought. It’s hard to defend her decision, but also hard to imagine making any other choice in her place.

Perhaps it’s just because I’m a guy. I have a guy’s vision of what romance should be — involving swords and shouting and epic adventure.

All the feelsAnother major complaint, which I’ve mentioned before, is how romances tend to focus almost exclusively on the beginning of relationships. There are some compelling reasons for this, but it’s still incredibly myopic, and it’s one of the main reasons that romance tends to be arguably the most formulaic style of fiction in existence. There’s only so much variation you can put on infatuation and the honeymoon phase.

I would really like to see more time spent on mature relationships. What happens after the couple rides off into the sunset? Let’s see relationships grow and evolve over time. Let’s see how they shape and change the characters. Let’s see the challenges in each relationship and how the characters overcome them.

I’ve really been enjoying Liv and Major’s tribulations on iZombie. These are two people who clearly love each other with all their hearts, yet fate and cruel circumstance are constantly throwing them curveballs and keeping them apart. But they won’t give up on each other. It’s such a refreshing change of pace from the unbelievably stale formula of most fictional romances.

Even when fiction does present challenges in romance, it’s almost invariably in the form of a love triangle. Basically just more infatuation, but now our hero has to choose between two options! Oh, whatever shall they do!

I hate love triangles. All the same tedious “will they/won’t they” you get stuck with in a regular romance, the same milking, but times two, and you usually end up hating the protagonist. And once again, they’re so. Over. Done.

All the feelsAhem, sorry, bit of a tangent, there. My point is that romance lacks variety.

Another angle I’d like to see more of is unrequited love, though it depends on how it’s done. It can easily become overly morose, but it has potential. I’d particularly like to see more of characters who have feelings that simply aren’t returned, and they just have to live with it. That can be an interesting angle for character development. Can be a good way to make a character seem more heroic; if they’re still willing to move Heaven and Earth for their love, even if their love doesn’t love them back, that says more about their character than most anything else.

Fictional romances just seem so incredibly narrow to me. Even in my short and largely empty life, I’ve seen that love is a far more varied and complex thing than fiction tends to paint it as.

…As I’m getting ready to publish this, it occurs to me that I’ve managed to do a passage on romance I like without mentioning James Maxey’s Greatshadow, which is a terrible injustice. It would take me sometime to fully explain all the reasons why it’s my favourite fantasy romance, and this post is long enough already, but I think it’s some combination of humour, unique challenges for the characters’ love, and heartfelt emotion. Regardless, it deserved a mention of some kind.

Tyler Versus the MMO Trinity, Part Three: My Solution

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Over my past two posts on the so-called “holy trinity” of group roles in MMORPGs, I’ve discussed my problems with the trinity, and some of the good times I’ve had outside the traditional role system.

My warlock battling Ragnaros the Firelord in pursuit of Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest in World of WarcraftNow, we reach the end of this long journey as I outline my personal plan for how to “fix” the trinity.

For some crazy reason I decided to do all three of these posts at once. It’s well after midnight, we’re approaching hour three, my fingers are sore, and my brain is fuzzy, but Hell, let’s do this.

First, some caveats:

I was hesitant to do this for a very long time because I don’t like playing armchair game designer. Well, actually, I like it a lot, but I don’t like the risk of being seduced by the idea that I actually know what I’m talking about, or giving anyone the idea I think I’m better than I am.

I am not a professional game designer. I know this. I’m not going to pretend I can do a better job than they can, because I can’t. This seems like a good idea to me, but what do I know?

And I really doubt anyone particularly wants to hear my pie-in-the-sky ideas for how games should be designed, hence why I haven’t done posts like this before now. But if I’m going to talk about the trinity, I think this is a necessary part of the discussion.

My Templar tanking a lair boss in The Secret WorldSecond, I want to stress once again that variety is what I want. What I’m about to outline is a solution to the trinity. It is not the solution to the trinity. I obviously think my idea is good, but I wouldn’t want to see it become the only system used by MMOs. I want a mix. Some games with traditional roles, some with softened or modified roles, some with no roles.

That said, this is a plan that I believe would solve most of the problems with the trinity while preserving much of its virtues. Your opinion may vary.

On with the show!

Where Guild Wars 2 failed:

Unfortunately, Guild Wars 2 has become the poster child for trying to break the trinity. I say “unfortunately” because they did an awful job of it. Of all the games I’ve played with no trinity or a relaxed trinity, GW2 is the only one that fails to provide fun group dynamics. Ironic considering how much of a selling feature it was.

Things are supposedly a bit different now that raids are in, but at launch, Guild Wars 2 essentially eliminated tanks and healers. This solves some problems, but it also made pretty every class play mostly the same. It made a lot of things into mindless zergs, and combined with dungeon design that wasn’t sufficiently removed from that of trinity games, it was just broken as all Hell.

My thief battling the Sons of Svanir in Guild Wars 2But there are lessons to take from Guild Wars 2’s failure. They were in the right neighbourhood, but they chose the run path.

You see, they got rid of the wrong roles. Tanks and healers are fine.

I say it’s DPS that needs to go.

Death to DPS:

Wait, what?

Tyler, you want to delete the overwhelmingly most popular MMO role? The one you play the most? Are you high?

But think about it. There’s method to this madness.

Imagine what happens when DPS is no longer a dedicated role. You no longer need to tune healers and tanks to have lower damage. In a world where no one is a DPS, everyone is a DPS.

That immediately solves the problem of it sucking to solo as a tank or healer.

My Sith inquisitor in Star Wars: The Old RepublicThen think about what group compositions look like in this hypothetical game where there are only two roles, not three. When you can only include tanks and healers in your group, the responsibility is much more shared.

This solves the problem of the disproportionate sharing of responsibility. It’s not just one tank and one healer. There’s several of each. That glorious double tank run I had in SW:TOR? That could be the norm.

In such a paradigm, if you screw up and get yourself killed as a tank, it wouldn’t be a guaranteed wipe. The other tank(s) would pick up the slack.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds tremendously appealing to me.

Similarly, this makes forming groups a lot easier. Tanks and healers obviously wouldn’t be a rarity, and in theory, such a system could be balanced to no require rigid party compositions. We’re getting far into the hypothetical here, but I think it could be the case that if you have more tanks, your party takes less damage and needs fewer healers, and if you have more healers, you can restore more damage and need fewer tanks.

This would necessitate softening both roles a bit. For example, healers couldn’t simply spam heals all day. They’d need to mix both heals and damage.

My group approaches the final boss of the Slaughterhouse in The Secret WorldThis would require slowing down the pace of both heals and damage. Not slowing combat altogether. You know me; even the standard 1.5 second global cooldown feels sluggish to me. But tanks don’t need to be losing half their health every few seconds. There should be time to recover from a mistake, and on the flip side recovery from bad play shouldn’t be one click a way. Healing is at its best when it’s a tug of war.

I’d put heals on cooldowns or otherwise limit them. Not heavily — healing should obviously be a core part of playing a healer. But it shouldn’t be all you do. Like the devoted cleric in Neverwinter, there should be a degree of adaptation based on the needs of the moment. Sometimes it’s about healing. Sometimes it’s about pouring on the damage.

I’d also like to see a little less emphasis on straight up healing and more on buffs and utility. I like The Secret World’s take on buffs — short duration, dramatic effect — and I’d like to see more of that.

So under my hypothetical design, healers would perhaps be more accurately described as support. They keep their parties afloat through a broad toolkit of heals, buffs, and damage.

As for tanks, I’d soften their role a bit, too. I’m not sure I’d do away with aggro mechanics altogether, but I don’t think tanks should be expected to hold aggro on everything all the time. I’d probably make taunts an emergency cooldown rather than a bread and butter ability. Combat need not be total anarchy, but there should be some unpredictability to it.

My devoted cleric in NeverwinterSlowing down incoming damage supports this, as well. With mobs delivering hits that aren’t so massive, healers (or supports) can take a few hits without collapsing, and combat can afford to be a little less carefully choreographed.

Aggro mechanics are one of those things about the trinity that are painfully artificial, so I’d put a greater emphasis on tanks controlling enemies directly through slows, stuns, pulls, knockbacks, and abilities that manipulate the battlefield. Let them physically impose their will on enemies.

By softening the roles this way, you’re providing everyone a broader experience of combat. Everyone is, one way or another, interacting with enemies, delivering big and satisfying attacks, and aiding their team in a crucial way. At the same time, distinct roles aren’t gone entirely. There’s choice and variety.

It even solves the realism issue to some extent. With multiple tanks, it’s at least somewhat plausible that they could hold off enemies from their weaker team mates. Not because Orcs are magnetically attracted to dudes in plate for some reason, but because they form a physical barrier around their allies. I think I could suspend my disbelief for that.

It’s probably not as simple as I’m making it out to be, but to me, a two-role system seems like an option that avoids the worst flaws of the trinity while still offering much of its benefits.

* * *

Thus concludes my epic series on the trinity. My duty as an MMO blogger is done. Agree or disagree, I hope I’ve at least provided some food for thought, or entertainment value.

While you’re reading epic rants on traditional MMO design by yours truly, why not check out my latest article on MMO Bro: The Case Against MMORPG Button Bloat.