Grey wrote:Essentially removing the description of the sexual organs, which I think is what people are most unhappy with. That + non-hostile babies + no item drops + clearer dialogue before entering the zone should hopefully help the situation.
Thoughts?
I don't think it will be enough. I can't tell you if it is essentially the problem (I'm in the camp that doesn't have a problem with the Orc Breeding Pits), but people were disgusted that you are 'describing' the Orc Mother and Greatmother's physical selves and surroundings.
I think quite literally you'd have to change the descriptions to a more relative theme if they were to pass muster with the other crowd.
I have yet to even reach this part of the game. I am frankly not such a good player. While I was aware of the orc mothers, I was unaware of the specific descriptions and from what is said in this thread, regret even mentioning this game to people I know. Gray's descriptive changes, however are an improvement, I think. They mean essentially the same thing, just slightly less explicity. Having not yet seen the tiles, it is possible they might be a problem too, but could easily be drawn in a way that conveys the same horror and concept without being a problem. Just IMO, of course.
"I am the cat that walks by himself. All ways are alike to me."
--Rudyard Kipling, "The Cat That Walked By Himself"
I'd probably remove the 'Mucus and slime ooze from every orifice' part too, that's a little too much. The rest is, well, still kinda gross but without entirely reworking their concept I don't think it can be changed. Personally I'd have preferred them to be relatively normal looking (for blight mutated orc anyway) and non-hostile but attackable, just to beat the player over the head with the moral implications.
However, the tiles should definitely be changed to something slightly less explicit.
Apart from that I think these are all positive changes and a great step forward in making Tome more appealing and less needlessly shocking, without impacting the tone of the plot.
Hello! I am a goon. I haven't posted about this before and thus was not quoted on the OP, but I give silent agreement to a lot of it.
My problem with the Breeding Pits is twofold.
1) It's really gross! I'm not too hot on stuff that's overtly disgusting, and Breeding Pits is just 100% gross all the way through. It's not really horror so much as it's "yuck." It's not even the same kind of yuck you get elsewhere - I dislike playing Oozemancers because, as awesome as it is that chunks of you that get chopped off gelatinize and turn into slime, it's also pretty gross, but I'm totally ok with them being in the game. With Oozemancers you get a yuck that comes from body horror. It's a horror thing that you chop off a guy's arm, and it flops on the floor a bit, turns into green ooze, and begins moving towards you, while the guy's body starts to reform itself from a hive of fungus. That'd be super scary! But the Breeding Pits aren't really scary, they're just...gross.
2) This one is longer and way more important.
It detracts from both the horror and the lore.
Like, I like the lore a lot (seriously go through that SA thread I'm just vomiting words about the lore nonstop) but the Breeding Pits hurt it, at least for me. Check it: here you are, you've read all this stuff about how desperate the orcs are and how monsterous everything is and how messed up it is that you're going to be murdering them all and yet you're still at least vaguely justified (in some senses) because one side of this war isn't going to be ABLE to walk away. And then you see a giant titty monster.
Uh.
It really took - and takes! - me out of the game. I do indeed recall the first time I went down. I was dumb and was doing it AFTER all the other orc places, so while my lore wasn't complete, I knew that they weren't the always evil monsters forever people thought they were, and their entire race was dying but they couldn't stop. I saw the name and went oh man, this is gonna be messed up. And it was! But it also wasn't. It was not "messed up" in the sense of "horror." It was messed up in the sense of "Ok I'm fighting a vagina golem." I kinda lost all ability to feel for the orcs at that precise moment. Not because it was horrible, but because it was actually kinda funny in a dark and dumb way. My mind went from "Ok, the orcs are all kinds of messed up, and I'm going into the BREEDING PITS and I'm probably going to do bad things in here" to "Now that I've personally murdered every orc child, it's time to kill the giant vaginabeast that spawned it. WHAT."
To some degree I think the axiom here is "less is more." Check it: the best line in your description of the greatmother is this:
"Dazed eyes peer out with a mixture of sadness and pain, but as they fix on you they turn to anger, the creature's face contorted with the fierce desire to protect its young."
This is that connection. I'm doing something terrible. It expresses a lot: the greatmother is messed up but she is still sentient. Everything about her state is horrifying and she's still going to fight you because those are her kids. And you killing her is probably a mercy thing but that doesn't stop all of this from being terrible. That's where the horror kicks in: I'm doing something wrong, but it's the best thing I can do. It's why zombie movies always have that scene where the Best Friend is now a zombie and has to be shot. Maybe it doesn't do much nowadays because it's kinda cliche, but back in the day that's a big deal. "You have to do something extremely horrible. And you HAVE to do it."
Talking about vulvas detracts from this. I don't think you actually need to change the lore so much, just change how it's presented. "The orcs have done horrible experiments that have finished the work of dooming them as a race and you have to stop them in a set of mercy kills." Personally speaking I'm ok with this. But again, less is more. We don't need to read about orcginas.
Grey wrote:I'd really like to hear from people that have played the zone and were unhappy with it before.
Shambling mounds of grody vaginas are so needlessly edgy that it makes the entire thing just feel silly. I don't know, what is really added to the game through the presence of slimy vagina golems? I'm not shocked or horrified, I'm kinda wondering what the point is. It's funny. Professor Cirno's comments essentially nail it, but I think a lot of the events in this game are kind of hilarious and just 'dark' for dark's sake, or are at least trying their hardest. When you pour it on non-stop it effectively becomes satire.
Just gonna go ahead and repost from the thread on SA:
Yeah, I was kind of on the other side about this issue but I think you and Cirno hit the nail on the head. I like the basic idea of the breeding pits, but giant vagina monsters spitting out killer babies is like something you'd see in a Troma movie. If they really want to run with the idea of the orcs warping their women into horrible reproducing monsters, why not go the eldritch horror route? Fill the dungeon with faceless pit guards and corruptors and make the boss a horror type monster like the abomination or the Reknor backup guardian, or, -, you want to go body horror, make it just one orc that was shaped into a giant - ant queen spitting out orc eggs all day. You could keep the lore the same, replace the babies with eggs or something and then leave the rest of the dungeon intact. Horrifying desperate idea maintained without having to fight through a dungeon of babies and quivering vagina beasts, problem solved.
I like what you did with the original idea, Grey, but the quivering vagina-beasts and orc babies/children is a little too far into absurdist camp when the theme for the Orc storyline overall seems to be serious-as-cancer. I'd like to see the dungeon itself redesigned. I don't want to use the phrase "I like the idea of the orcs warping their women into monsters", because that sounds - horrifying, but it really solidifies the point of "the orcs are completely beyond redemption now". If the overall theme was kept but the madcap nature was toned down and the greatmothers were changed more into formless beasts and less into "quivering vagina blob" it might be better overall and do a better job of matching the orc storyline thematically.
The idea of the breeding pits being more like a zerg or xenomorph spawning pool and the orc greatmother being a horrible misshapen ant queen like monster seems much more horrifying, (especially in the context of ToME's horror segments) to me anyway, as does the idea that the orcs would completely change their nature - making something out of their women that no longer resembles them in even the vaguest sense, going from live birth to spawning, etc. I'm not suggesting my idea is superior or anything, but maybe to take it as a suggestion. I definitely think just removing the genitalia and orc babies is missing the point. If anything, taking that out without overhauling the dungeon is just going to make the place incomplete.
TL;DR - please make the orc breeding pits more "horror" and less "tromaville".
As you've asked for people's input on this, I'm going to be kinda blunt, Grey:
I would love to see the Breeding Pits gone, flat out. It hits the "this is heavily misogynistic/sexualized" button nearly immediately and nulls out everything else for me - disgust, interest in lore, creepiness, empathy for the orcs, any of the qualities you wanted evoked - it just jumps to "this is trash and dumb and I can't justify playing this part for anything other than gameplay". It's an incredibly jarring reaction that just gets me pissed off and - when I managed to get creeped out at it - I get creeped out at you, Grey. Does this represent your views? No. I hope. But it's repulsive to a level where it's not the game world, it's the game itself.
Any of SageAcrin's suggestions will do as an alt - hate filled miasma, disaster zone from the attempt, blight cloning labs with experiments going/gone horribly wrong, ripping apart time to try and get more orcs to this time period, but this basically has always felt like someone else's misogynistic disturbing sexual fantasies to me. Sorry, but that's basically where I've landed with this.
I'm curious where the sex-fantasy vibe is coming from... IIRC the orc women have been biological engineered to produce children as quickly as possible, without any male involvement, but it's been a while since I played through the zone.
For what it's worth I support removing the bit about "vulvae" as being unnecessarily graphic, though I consider the bit pretty much as far from titillating as possible. While I consider myself open-minded about other peoples' fantasies/fetishes, I have to admit I'm a bit disturbed that some people consider the description "sexualized"
So I just beat ToME4 for the 2nd time this week, and I like the game and all...
...but what is the deal with the Orcish Breeding Pits? Game goes from sorta-dark tongue-in-cheek fantasy with achievements named after Dr. Who stuff to some sort of GRRM-Dark super-uncomfortable dungeon full of tit-golems with a Vagina Giant as a boss (A Vagiant for short). It's pretty jarring and lord knows it isn't exactly kid-friendly.
I enjoy the game and the tactical bits of it, but in at least this one case in a world with TIME MAGIC and the like you can certainly do better.
With all the varieties of magic, psionics and other wonky powers at work in the setting, you could have orcish time mages unnaturally accelerating the growth of the young with magic or something with orcish mind-whatevers speeding up their mental growth. It'd be a more interesting series of fights to boot. Or do something else. Nearly anything.
My posts from the SA thread asking DarkGod 'what is the deal here' with the breeding pits. He hasn't been in the thread since, but this seems like a likely place to put this. ToME4 is a good game, but it is also a game I can't play along with my kid or recommend to friends.
Zonk wrote:
But on the issue of killing kids/babies - interesting how there's no issue with killing dragon hatchlings. From what I understand they are quite intelligent beings, not just 'mere beasts'. They could be smarter than the average human!
There's some truth to what he says.. if there were as much "Another point of view" lore for dragons as there is for orcs, would killing their hatchlings be any more acceptable?
belmarduk wrote:I don't want to use the phrase "I like the idea of the orcs warping their women into monsters", because that sounds - horrifying, but it really solidifies the point of "the orcs are completely beyond redemption now".
Except they're not supposed to be beyond redemption...we're playing them in the next campaign, after all.
