: Not really. It was a part of the game before release,
: before changes were made. Besides, we have to go by
: the latest information presented to us, such as where
: Myth II changes things from TFL, so we go by what m2
: says is true. Pre-release is now as useless as TFL,
: and even more-so because of the fact it wasn't
: intended to be anymore than a preview, just like we're
: getting from m3 now.
TFL is just as valid as Myth II--one might consider it more so, because the Mythworld was smaller then and hence most likely more consistent. We sometimes believe Myth II over TFL where they conflict, but only because Myth II has more detailed textual info on some matters. By your argument, we might as well go entirely by what GURPS says now, because it's newer.
Pre-release info is useful because it affects the probabilities. The fact that The Faceless Man, say, was left out of the Myth games doesn't mean that he's not part of the final Mythworld as envisioned by Bungie. It just means they didn't find a good place to put him in the game. For all we know, he's still alive and well in the design docs. Or maybe he's not. But the chance is certainly better than it would be if he was *never* mentioned by Bungie, and that provides useful info on the world of Myth.
: I can live with this; Pre-release is at the bottom :-).
Sure. But 3rd-party stuff is off the graph. :-)
: Not really. As I said elsewhere previous, the game that
: is presented to us, in the levels as well as the
: journal entries and cutscenes, is like a movie that we
: happen to play out. Sure, those are actors on the
: screen with their own, real lives, but they perform
: and act out something, as does the scenery and
: direction, indicating what it is supposed to be and
: what it represents. That's what theatre is. This
: happens to be a theatre type we can perform ourselves,
: and therefore keep from being entirely as it was meant
: to be.
If there's anything you should learn in this world of popular entertainment, it's never trust the movie version. :-) The nature of the medium makes it more persuasive, but generally less accurate, than simple text. "Pearl Harbor's" proving this right now, I imagine. I'm dead sure quite a few viewers are leaving convinced that FDR once stood up publicly to demonstrate the power of determination.
Video games have the same problem but more so. The in-game level designers have to make every depicted challenge solvable by telling your units to kill the right people or keep from getting killed. They have to make them hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that only a genius could master them. They have to make crude approximations of the objects they envision, so that the Great Devoid's 10 yards deep and Balor's fortress is a wall in front of a cloudy region of blackness. They have to make the units' behavior and properties far more simplistic than in real life--people don't eat or sleep, or figure out where you are if you shoot at them from 30 feet away.
: Your example of Dec or a Mahir versus Balor doesn't work
: because it was never presented to us. Never ingame or
: inlevel were we told that those guys ever had a face
: off, and equally were never forced to perform in it.
: It's just a group of actors these sprites. The story
: is still there, and we can certainly look past
: something that never happened.
So is Balor really such a drooling moron that you can surround him with your units at the beginning of "The Last Battle" and hack him to death while he just stands there, no Eblis Stone needed? Is Alric, the Light's greatest archmage, really defenseless against a single Mahir? Does he really have a grand total of two combat spells--the Dispersal Dream and a blow-up-Soulblighter's-rock spell? I don't think so.
The in-game stuff is convincing because we see it happening and help it happen, but for those same reasons it has to twist the story. Text, on the other hand, is there for no other reason than to explicate the story. You can copy the manuals and Tales down directly from the world in your head, no scripting, unit-making or playtesting needed.
: No, that's what the point of that scale was. Things
: outside ingame are fraught with flaws, especially
: GURPS. The manual also says that the Great Devoid was
: in the middle of the Barrier, so we make sure to
: realize that the manuals are not perfect, as GURPS,
: though they are very close.
But in-game stuff is just as flawed. 100 Berserks in the narrator's manual become 30 Berserks in the game. Sure there's a reason for it, but it's still a departure from the story.
: GURPS recognizes nothing but a flaw in writing, a typo at
: best in the manual. Even so, Myth II made the changes
: clear.
: Sure you can. The Fallen Lords during the Great War were
: Soulblighter, The Watcher, The Deceiver, Shiver, and
: two others we were never given the names of. Other
: Fallen Lords maybe in other great wars, or perhaps
: Fallen Lords are simply very powerful Dark Archmages.
: We don't know because we weren't told.
*You* may have a list of the Fallen Lords, just like you may have a list of people you call "conservatives," but that doesn't mean other people will agree with you. The TFL people (and in the narrations, not just the manual) often refer to the "Fallen Lords" without adding "and Balor." They just don't care to make a distinction. Myth II didn't make it clear--it just added another wrinkle. You might as well say that GURPS made it clear that Myth II was wrong and TFL was right.
: Yes they are. We would have been given the names if we
: were meant to know them, but the movie was changed and
: the story altered, so it's not what happened anymore.
: It's like the original ending to Casa Blanca, as seen
: on The Simpsons; they stay together and everyone is
: happy. Obviously, that didn't happen. It's also like a
: rough draft to a revised draft of a novel or any other
: book. It simply isn't so until officially presented.
That ending to Casablanca didn't happen because we saw what *did* happen instead. That's very different from this case--absence of proof is not proof of absence. No one in Myth ever says that the last Fallen Lord *isn't* Darth Vader--does that mean we're supposed to think that he *is*?
We don't know whether pre-release stuff was scrapped because it wasn't part of the story, or whether it just didn't fit in the *game*. The only thing which would show that the Avatara don't have some of the names found in the prerelease file is if the TFL narrator actually listed all their names and they were different.
: This whole thing about Ravanna and such sounds like
: something Gene Seabolt invented. He has no credit
: whatsoever by how many mistakes are in GURPS. It's
: like a real debate; lose credit one place, credit lost
: every place.
Real debates don't work like that, if the participants are actually aiming to get to the truth. Every statement is judged on its own merits.
And the origins of the Ravanna bit are obvious. In-game, Myth II Shiver is named "Ravanna." When Myrdred calls her by that name--emphasizing it--she gets pissed and talks about his big mouth. Seabolt worked off this and what Bungie told him and wrote down what he did. Whatever it "sounds like," we have no reason to think that he made it up.
: LOL! Quite clearly what happened, you say? Including the
: part where its says that Myrdred yet walks Sword Age
: Earth? He didn't finish the level; he is utterly
: flawed himself. It's a shame, but we just need the
: original documents.
GURPS had better than the original documents. It had the Bungie employees who edited it, did the art, playtested it, and publicized it. Seabolt had access to the group that wrote the documents in the first place. Sure they made some mistakes when they looked over his stuff and gave him advice, but they made mistakes when they wrote the games in the first place. GURPS has flaws, but they ain't utter ones.
--SiliconDream
