Creating Oshabi

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Fireldakuraito wrote:

While very nice story and touch to the story. It feel bad to see NPC sacrificed to become a boss of its own content.

If she could be redeemed through to boss fight, just to be corrupted once again after and after, again and again. Would open the possibility to have her as master.

After the first iteration she would discover just how bad the groove and life force was and would seek to find means of destroying it. - By using it.
She would eventually end up failing and becoming the boss again.

It felt nice thinking that there could be master whose specific reward was crafting, instead of loot explosion.

This man/woman (or w/e) deserves a cookie!!

It is a nice story, but the way it is presented as some optional conversation options and mandatory commentary whenever you interact with seeds kinda shoves it to the background.

As a result; i couldn't care less and will be happy when i get to a point where i can make her go away.

If you guys ever decide to invest into a more inclusive storytelling perspective you have my support; it might not appeal to everybody (the go fast as fuck boys just want one thing) but the setting of wraeclast allows for so much more. Would love some more quests with meaningful choices that actually impact gameplay and story and not just the bandit reward 2 pointer.

I only feel pity because of my Final Harvest Bossfight bugged, locked all Harvest progress, 100 red maps for nothing and also Oshabi gone now.

But really nice touching story tho.

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NickK_GGG wrote:

And we decided that once that point was reached, she'd be gone. Not just temporarily, but permanently.

This part really stings. She's a great character, and we've already lost Nessa (even though there are audio files for her long goodbye)! I was really looking forward to adding Oshabi to my hideout, so I could finally use all of the decorations from the Mystic side of the Fairgraves box in a colour-coordinated way. From a player experience perspective, without her presence, going to the Sacred Grove is as cumbersome as going to the Labyrinth, which just seems wrong.

And more protractedly:

Dear Nick,

We know you want Zana to be a villain. Either you pitched her as taking Sirus's place (hence the similar colour palette) or possibly as the final boss in Path of Exile 2. TarkeCat made an offhand remark in a Baeclast video after Exilecon that seems to implicate you in particular as pushing for this plot development. If I've mistaken you for another Nick on the writing team, I apologise.

Please stop doing this. It's already a tired cliché in PoE's writing that Nightmare/Rapture/Corruption/Lifeforce/the Twist/the Cataclysm grinds up and spits out characters who act selflessly. Good stories need catharsis, and if every plot has a dark ending, lore-sensitive players will start finding the world of Wraeclast simply too bleak to return to. These are the players you're writing for, the ones who actually care to engage in the setting. People didn't watch Game of Thrones just to soak up the negative emotions of the show's villains. They rooted for the heroes, and for hope. Writing a dark setting is not an excuse for bludgeoning your audience repeatedly with tragic fates.

There is also cause for concern when this is applied to the players themselves. When Zana started worrying about the player's well-being in Conquerors of the Atlas, you began backing us into a false dilemma: we haven't been given an alternative way to engage with Wraeclast, and the game is actively built to encourage infinite replayability, so it's ludonarratively dissonant to tell players they're bad people for simply choosing to play your game in the way it was intended to be played. I understand that this seemed like an extreme novelty at the time the idea was invented, but the ramifications of it are dreadful. The game Hotline Miami was famously built around this whole premise—what if the player is wrong for playing the game?—and now this cynicism is so baked into the identity of their publisher that it limits the appeal of their games.

I will probably write more on this in the future. On Reddit. With a big cardboard sign that says "THE END IS NIGH AND THE WARCRY REWORK IS PROOF." You'll see.

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hexadecima wrote:

They rooted for the heroes, and for hope. Writing a dark setting is not an excuse for bludgeoning your audience repeatedly with tragic fates.

You're wrong.

I really like Wraeclast setting precisely because it's not about the heroes. It's about the exiles, the survivors, who are not good people, they are just want to survive and increase their power (first, to survive, then, just for sake of getting of greater and greater powers).

There are plenty of games when you can play as "good hero" already. No need to turn Path of Exile into another of those. Playing as mad Exile who wants to kill millions monsters to get better loot fits the idea of ARPG perfectly.

Let Exile finally beat Zana as an enemy and let Sin be actually killed by Sirus' "Die" beam in the Epilogue offscreen, that would be fitting end for him.

Keep the good work, Nick.

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hexadecima wrote:

Good stuff about the possibility of Zana being a villain that I cut for space.

I am sorta worried about this too, specially with PoE2 looming in the horizon. I am afraid either Zana or our own current team of seven Exiles are going to turn out to be villains. I wouldn't charge any specific developer with this, but... It does seem to be a cliché of the genre/industry.

OOTH... I think PoE may have been darker in the past. The first three arcs have this whole thing about the Beast and the Nightmare and the inherent Corruption of Wraeclast... And then later Acts qualify the statements... Gods exist and are jerks, but at least a couple of knew can learn to do better. Thaumaturgy and virtue gems are not inherently immoral. Yes, things did go horribly wrong, but they can be fixed. Heck, some Sin dialogues even express hope at a peaceful afterlife! I don't know how much of the later acts was planned from the beginning and how much was changed as the story progressed, but it does feel like the Lore has gone Lighter and Softer sometimes.

So... I dunno. I guess I am cautiously optimistic they won't do a sudden turn towards Doom and Gloom, even though I am wary of the possibility.

She's so beautiful... It's tough to , but I guess it's a fair outcome given how the story progresses. She kinda reminds me of Einhar and at the very beginning I thought they could be related somehow, but it doesn't seem like it.
I hope we .

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SirPatrick92 wrote:

Yes, things did go horribly wrong, but they can be fixed. Heck, some Sin dialogues even express hope at a peaceful afterlife!

No, they cannot.
Look at the latest addition of Winged Scarabs.

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I am cautiously optimistic they won't do a sudden turn towards Doom and Gloom

I really hope they will turn towards complete Doom though. The Corruption is rises again even without Kitava and Malachai in PoE2, after all.
No need to turn Path of Exile into another heroic fantasy like Diablo.
It's unique and it should be preserved as that.

Allying with Sin and his stupid "humanity needs us" phrase (I want to beat him right after every time when I upgrade pantheon power) was bad anough already, why would playable Witch or Ranger care about "humanity" at all?
At least, everything that he's doing going backfire hard.

Eh. I wouldn't say it's anywhere near "unique". You don't need to dig deep to find cynical settings with similar narrative themes as Doom and Gloom Wraeclast. Tyranny, Divinity Original Sin 2, Pillars of Eternity, Dark Souls... And that's just games.