Looking for Group - Alexis Hall Page 0,8

you sleep through the last patch or something?

[Group][Solace]: I was distracted by all the shiny things

[Group][Solace]: plus I’m not a massive lore nerd

[Group][Ialdir]: :P

[Group][Orcarella]: lol

[Group][Ialdir]: so it turns out the whole world of Heroes of Legend is actually built on this giant ancient machine god thing

[Group][Ialdir]: and when Raziel returned from the Underworld he opened this fissure

[Group][Ialdir]: that unleashed a bunch of crap

[Group][Ialdir]: so all this stuff is like prototypes for the stuff in the world

[Group][Ialdir]: like Irontongue’s a prototype dragon and this dude’s a prototype giant

[Group][Solace]: oh right

[Group][Ialdir]: aren’t you glad you know a massive lore nerd now

[Group][Solace]: *hugs*

[Group][Orcarella]: whatever this guy is i’m killing him and taking his stuff

They killed that guy and took his stuff. Well, the stuff wasn’t very good, so they ripped it apart for the raw materials. Then Drew said a hasty good-bye to his new guild, logged off, and rushed out to meet his mates in the pub.

Drew’s mates were a bunch of fairly typical randoms who had come together and stuck together over the course of their first year. Sanee and Tinuviel were both on his course. He’d bonded with Sanee over Dark Souls, which Sanee thought represented the epitome of ludonarrative coherence and Drew quite enjoyed. Tinuviel was exactly like you’d expect someone to be if they’d grown up with the sorts of parents who named their kid Tinuviel.

Apparently her mother was a graphic artist and her dad was some kind of Oxford don, and she was here at De Montfort pursuing her bliss. Which was the sort of thing she actually said. That just left Andy, from Drew’s ultimate Frisbee team, and Stephanie, known as Steff (or Smidge if Sanee was talking to her) who was here on a nursing and midwifery course. She and Sanee had been inseparable since fresher’s week. They were very slightly unspeakable, and right now rubbing noses and sharing a basket of curly fries.

“Sorry I’m late, guys.” Drew grabbed a stool from a nearby table and squished in between Sanee and Tinuviel. “Instance overran.”

Sanee pulled away from Steff and made the loser sign.

“You know only losers do that, right?” asked Drew.

“A loser is well-placed to recognise loseriness in others. You need to play some proper games, man. Not ones where you kill the same stupid wizard every week for six months.”

Drew rolled his eyes. “It’s about mastering the fight. You don’t go up to Man United and say, ‘Why are you playing Liverpool again, you played them last season?’”

“Dude, it’s a game, not a spare. A game should be a self-contained experience that does what it needs to do without wasting your fucking time.”

“What, you mean like Dishonored?”

“Okay, what was wrong with Dishonored? And if you say it was too short, I’ll punch you.”

“You see.” Steff grinned at them. “Video games do make you violent.”

“Too short, too easy, Blink, Dark Vision, Shadow Kill: game over.” Drew stole one of their fries. “Also, it’s from like 2012.”

Sanee had that outraged look, meaning a serious lecture was on the way. “Dude, so not the point. Dishonoured is totally a designer’s game. What it does is create a space and give the player total freedom to interact with that space. If the player decides to take the easy option, then the player doesn’t get to whinge about the game being too easy. And it’s still relevant today because nothing has done that since.”

“So what you’re saying,” said Drew, “is that the designers didn’t bother to balance their gameplay properly and that’s somehow my problem. The game has to provide the challenge, not the player. Don’t give me an ‘I win’ button and then have a go at me for pressing it.”

Tinuviel waved her burger in the air, scattering iceberg lettuce and bits of tomato over the table. “What I thought was really interesting about Dishonored was its embrace of found narrative. Mission objectives are delivered through dialogue, but story is inherent in the world and emerges with the player’s visual engagement with the environment. So where I look and what I see creates the story for me. But where you look and what you see creates the story for you.”

Drew suspected Andy had a bit of a thing for Tinuviel because he’d been listening with a kind of rapt look. “Oh wow,” he breathed, “that’s really fascinating.”

“Yeah, I know. Isn’t it?” She smiled. “It’s similar to what I find so compelling about Twine, the way story is constructed not just through words but through text.”

Drew and Sanee sighed