A matter of taste

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Kaw wrote:

Later on Act 3 contains more piles of bodies with the Piety fight as crescendo where rivers of blood surround your descent and your path is sometimes blocked with piles of naked bodies. I am used to it now, but if you look at it from a neutral perspective its just bad taste and even kind of pubertal.

Nothing pubertal about piles of naked corpses. Now the painted red penis of Marceus the Defaced on the other hand...

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Kaw wrote:

The first real religious theme is suddenly introduced with a god and a high priest called Dominus wich is a latin name for the christian God. I was really sad when it happend.

Actually it's latin for "owner" or "master". Nothing religious about that...

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Kaw wrote:

Summary: for further expansions, please give us a nice theme instead of bad taste pubertal horror and misplaced religious references.

Please no. :)

I mean this with all due respect. If your religion is keeping you from enjoying the game, maybe you should find a game that is a better fit with your beliefs.

Edit: Forgot to give scale_e a +1. hehe

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Kaw wrote:

I don't see the game element in this. What's the purpose? To shock? To learn? To entertain?

It's a horror themed game, with an emphasis on the terrible monsters men can in truth be. The purpose is to horrify, and it sounds like it worked on you as well as it did on me. I'll admit: it's not for everyone. I'm not so good with gore myself, but I'm into horror, just not gore-porn 'Slashers'.

The church/spiritual/authoritative corruption thing is there through the whole game on every level, sorry but you missed something obvious here. Don't worry, we've all made stupider mistakes than this, I can promise you. I'm christian myself, and while this is a direct analogue for the church, the worst part of the metaphor isn't that GGG is just making fun of an organisation, but that that organisation has suffered corruption beyond what the game depicts... much worse than wholesale slaughter of innocents for a purpose.

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pneuma wrote:

There has always been an extremely strong religious focus in the story of PoE. One of the playable characters is an exiled Templar of the church. Every character was exiled because of the machinations of the church by Dominus himself. The big bad had existed in PoE lore long before he was ever introduced as a fightable character.

Great posts, man, but I thought I would point out that my extrapolations of what the exiles were exiled for. A few of them are reasonable, some of them are trumped up, and some of them are deserved... sort of. I might be off, but still:
Witch: child murderer... and witchery
Scion: murdered her abusive husband, & not being a good woman and getting in the kitchen
Karui: I'm not sure
Templar: asking the wrong questions
Shadow: directly says
Ranger: Poaching
Duelist: Murdering... a noble. He murdered for a living, so it's only that the guy leaked blue blood

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rokstoned wrote:

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pneuma wrote:

There has always been an extremely strong religious focus in the story of PoE. One of the playable characters is an exiled Templar of the church. Every character was exiled because of the machinations of the church by Dominus himself. The big bad had existed in PoE lore long before he was ever introduced as a fightable character.

Great posts, man, but I thought I would point out that my extrapolations of what the exiles were exiled for. A few of them are reasonable, some of them are trumped up, and some of them are deserved... sort of. I might be off, but still:
Witch: child murderer... and witchery
Scion: murdered her abusive husband, & not being a good woman and getting in the kitchen
Karui: I'm not sure
Templar: asking the wrong questions
Shadow: directly says
Ranger: Poaching
Duelist: Murdering... a noble. He murdered for a living, so it's only that the guy leaked blue blood

I took some liberties.

Templar and Marauder are the most wrongly exiled -- both are pretty well understood to be bogus. Both were punished for pushing back against an evil occupation; an act which seems to me to be the most noble act of any of the exiles.

The Ranger is similarly defensible, if only a little bit less so. It's seems always wrong to punish people for trying to feed themselves, especially when they probably had been doing so on that land long before the land had owners (or before the owners changed hands multiple times).

Scion, Witch, and Duelist were all punished for vengeance, in descending order of the importance of what they were avenging. The Scion was a battered woman, and the loss she fought against was the loss of her freedom and choice. Witch had her home burned down. Duelist lost his "honor", which seems pretty trivial compared to the others.

Shadow is the least defensible -- live by the sword, die by the sword. It's impossible to cry about an assassin getting punished for, well, assassination. He really doesn't fit in with all of the rest of the exiles.

Obviously I'm applying my own culture here, but even trying to think from the perspective of some other late Middle Ages society, the punishment for these actions ("exile" as code for being shipped to the experimentation factory) far overstepped the original crimes.

Coming back to the OP, it always frustrated me that GGG used physiological attacks in act four.

"We know your just going to plow through it anyway so we are going to unnerve you and make you uncomfortable so we are actually the ones that win."

The design philosophy the art team used in act four bothered me because Path of Exile is a game, and I play it to have fun. Not to see how creatively you can stitch human corpses together.

I just find the whole beast-part of act 4 disgustingly ugly. Overall not a fan of mob design either. Flying eyeballs? Come on, you can do better than that... I hope.

I feel like there's been some laziness in act 4 mob creation though... Now, this isn't about complaining how utterly stupid some of their damage output is, but the fact that many packs spawn only one specific type of rare. Examples: Kaom's chosen / Hyrri's sister / burrowing dogs always get a rare Rakango or that wannabe ceaseless discharge fire golem.

Stygian Revenants and whatever black skeletons it has with it, Stygian is always the rare if that pack spawns one.

Maelström and zombies, Maelström is always the rare.

Knitted horror, Pocked goliath.

Eyeball hatcheries being only rare makes somewhat sense, but it's still another example.

This is indeed a matter of taste. Personally, I love everything the OP listed that makes him/her uncomfortable. Hearing the screams of Tolman when I enter the Crematorium in Act 3 sends shivers down my spines and puts me on edge. This game does a great job with immersion.

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pneuma wrote:

The Ranger is similarly defensible, if only a little bit less so. It's seems always wrong to punish people for trying to feed themselves, especially when they probably had been doing so on that land long before the land had owners (or before the owners changed hands multiple times).

Again, kind of myopic on my part, I completely agree with 95% of your reasoning: Historically speaking stealing food's been disproportionately offensive. Poaching was a highly punishable offence, by death or mutilation; especially so in a nobles territory, like she did. Hell, even today stealing to feed yourself is tabou in the Americas, we get propaganda daemonising poor wretches who just want to see tomorrow. I'm not saying it's fair, she's quite in the right by our perspective, but Oriath isn't quite as enlightened.

Similarly: yeah, we know the Duelist is a dick, and murdered over some insult, but in the game world, the only thing he did wrong was killing one of the few people who was off limits. Hell, he might have gotten away with it if he were lucky; it might be that the family he damaged was particularly mouthy or influential.

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mynameisonlyforthegods wrote:

I just find the whole beast-part of act 4 disgustingly ugly. Overall not a fan of mob design either. Flying eyeballs? Come on, you can do better than that... I hope....
Eyeball hatcheries being only rare makes somewhat sense, but it's still another example.

I'm not a fan of the eyeballs either, they seem rather lazy and not really related to the other daemons.

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octo7T wrote:

This is indeed a matter of taste. Personally, I love everything the OP listed that makes him/her uncomfortable. Hearing the screams of Tolman when I enter the Crematorium in Act 3 sends shivers down my spines and puts me on edge. This game does a great job with immersion.

I enjoyed the Tolman bit too.

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rokstoned wrote:

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mynameisonlyforthegods wrote:

I just find the whole beast-part of act 4 disgustingly ugly. Overall not a fan of mob design either. Flying eyeballs? Come on, you can do better than that... I hope....
Eyeball hatcheries being only rare makes somewhat sense, but it's still another example.

I'm not a fan of the eyeballs either, they seem rather lazy and not really related to the other daemons.

I think that's the idea. Inside the beast is basically a giant spare parts bin where the beast, and now Malachi, make horrible monstrosities.

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rokstoned wrote:

I think that's the idea. Inside the beast is basically a giant spare parts bin where the beast, and now Malachi, make horrible monstrosities.

Eh, I'd call the cacodemons from Doom horrible monstrosities. The floating eyeballs? They're almost cute.

Exactly. The bloodshot giant eyes on every surface watching you? Great, but hovering eyeballs are like mascots.