this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
347 points (98.1% liked)

Asklemmy

43945 readers
609 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The moment that inspired this question:

A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.

The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.

One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”

I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.

… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.

I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] CumBroth@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Disco Elysium was full of such moments for me. Here's one:

You spend a lot of time in the game basically talking to yourself and your inner voices, and one of these voices is volition. If you put enough points into it, it'll chime in when you're having an identity crisis or struggling to keep yourself together and it'll try to cheer you up and keep you going. At the end of Day 1 in the game you, an amnesiac cop, stand on a balcony in an impoverished district reflecting on the day's events and trying to make sense of the reality you've woken up into with barely any of your memories intact. If you pass a volition check, it'll say the following line:

"No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive."

This line in combination with the somewhat retro Euro setting, the faint lighting, and the sombre-yet-somewhat-upbeat music was very powerful. The image it painted was quite relatable for me. I just sat there for a minute staring at the scene and soaking it all in. Even though this is a predominantly text-based game with barely any cinematics/animations, I felt a level of immersion I had rarely, if ever, experienced before.

Oh, look at that. Someone actually made a volition compilation. 😀 This video will give you a better idea of what I'm describing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0 Minor spoilers alert!

[–] RagnarokOnline@reddthat.com 5 points 1 year ago

This thread is filled with comments on DE, but it was your comment that convinced me to finally play the game.

Thanks for the story!

Fucking hell yeah, brother, volition is the best

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Volition may be one of the "boring" companions, but what it lacks in dynamism it makes up for by being uplifting.