Somewhere in the last two or three years, I’ve come to the point to picture my hero as some kind of drooling parrot, who is unable to contribute more than one or two words at once. I started skipping dialogue scenes not out of hurry but because I honestly suffer from reading through them.
Questgiver: “Wicked forces are gathering, and we must strike them now to thwart a threat beyond belief!”
Hero: “We fight.”
Questgiver: “But be aware, that an even greater evil may lurk behind the shadows of our foes ahead.”
Hero: “Greater evil?”
Questgiver: “There are rumors, barely dared to be whispered, that the progress bar on this quest fills nine squares, yet only the second one we are facing so far.”
Hero: “We fight”
Questgiver: “So you are ready to face enemies who may be of epic quality, with a legendary to act as the boss?”
Hero: “Yes”
Questgiver: “Onwards then, madness may await us, but our duty to unlock a kingdom gives us strength.”
Hero: “We fight.”
Frankly, even a plain “Next” button and a completely mute hero would be better than to be asked to identify with a character, who chose both intelligence and charisma to be dump stats, and who does appear to be apatheticly dragged along by whatever plot runs over his way instead of being the leader of his team at least every once in a while.
The game has been going long enough this way that I don’t really have any hope left for my hero to become more than an empty shell, but, in theory, do you think this could be fixed somehow without rewriting the whole story from the scratch?
Yup. Almost all of the “story” in this game is pretty bad. Besides the Hero dialogue being insipid, most of the quests are ridiculous and/or make the player and his/her entourage into villains, e.g. Ursakaya and Mirrored Halls.
That said, though, a match-3 grindfest CCG is not the place to be looking for character development and compelling storylines.
One thing to keep in mind is localisation costs when it comes to our stories as well. We are available in a lot of languages!
At its heart gems of war is meant to be a fun parody and romp through traditional fantasy and dungeons and dragons troops, with some pop culture references thrown in. It’s always been light hearted! Also, without branching dialogue, it’s hard to write a hero that appeals to a wide range of people, due to gender, background, age, life experience, etc.
Re: the hero’s gender, it would be good if someone could do another pass through some of the questline dialogue. I’m pretty certain there are kingdom quests where characters have referred to my hero as male, even though I use a female avatar. None of that dialogue should be gendered.
Unfortunately I didn’t note down which kingdoms it happened in, so I can’t help much with specifics to find that dialogue.
@Evelyn@Saltypatra Best of luck preserving ambiguous gender for the European language translations. You’re going to need it.
While I find the troop flavor texts so hilarious* that I hate how weapons don’t have them, I will say that I find the quest dialogues so terrible that I only read them because of how awful they are. They usually have good concepts behind them (ex. Werewoods’ arc about the ethics of killing peaceful werewolves/tigers/birds/whatever else Torbern turns into) but the execution is frustrating.
The hero being a yes man who will always agree, support, and follow the commands of the quest NPC isn’t the only reason for this, but it is a huge part of the problem. The hero seemingly imprints on the first person they encounter in a new region and then will do whatever that person says despite anything else that happens subsequently such as great evidence what they are doing is, at best, not heroic.
Some schmuck: Why are you killing all these innocent people? Not just the men, but the women and the children, too!
Hero: Sorry, but my buddy here said y’all had to go. And I couldn’t not help my buddy! We go way back to about fifteen minutes ago.
I just want a quest line where someone acknowledges it’s weird the hero has a personal army hundreds strong and the officers include multiple literal gods, one of whom is a transdimensional entity that literally attacks this universe every couple weeks only to be destroyed every time by the hero. Well, I guess you don’t have the actual Zuul. Just the knock off clone you forged yourself from the countless souls of your enemies.
If Krystara has a God, the hero character is probably stronger than Him.
*Some of the flavor text puns are just awful. Like crack me up in the middle of a meeting good. @Saltypatra Have they let you write any of these? Which ones are your favorites?
This has always been my problem with the quests too. The hero is mindless and unlikeable, and the people they’re helping are mostly very unsympathetic.
I would also mention that somehow, our character actually builds a reputation as a great and famous hero, with new NPCs having already heard of them, even though very little of what they do is in any way heroic. They just literally just go around slaughtering everyone they meet for pretty much no reason. You’d think they would get a reputation as a genocidal maniac or something.
I may be a mindless brute, but I’m straight up love-able.
And quite a few minions too, in the quest to obtain Dawnbringer. “Join my Horde, and together we’ll conquer Krystara. Unless I need to use you for souls, or dare I dream, Pet Food”.
I swear I read a post by a dev not long ago telling us how they were going to increase lore and dialogue and basically “up their game.” I looked but couldn’t find it…
Surprisingly, she’s not even the worst offender in my view. That honour goes to Brian the Lucky, whose entire questline (Zaejin) is literally “let’s do a genocide against this filthy race!”.
Edit: …filthy race OF LITERAL HOOK-NOSED GOBLINS. Fuck how did I only just catch this one.
