: That's weird -- I thought the exact opposite of Durandal
: across the marathon trilogy. At first he confided a
: great deal in our ego, the marine, making strange
: jokes that he assumed the marine would
: "get", disclosing all sorts of strange facts
: about durandal's own predicament. It wasn't until his
: rampancy ended, in the last few levels of mara2, when
: his communications with the marine changed in tone,
: from maniacal mockery to mature and purposeful.
Well...I felt that Durandal's period of maniacal mockery *was* his distant phase. He talked to you because he needed you, but he sprinkled weird jokes and obscure allusions throughout to emphasize that he was smarter and better than you and didn't really care about you. Then, in M2, he started openly talking about himself and his history--and yours. Finally, in Moo, he seems to actually view you as a friend and equal--or, by the endgame screen, as a superior.
: I see what you're saying about how Alric is portrayed.
: I'm glad my sensitivities weren't so far off that you
: had no idea what I was talking about... :)
: I still think that from our third-person perspective, we
: could have been exposed to particular events or words
: that would enable us to identify or sympathesize with
: Alric. We weren't given too much of that. Maybe it was
: because Myth's designers were inept at creating this
: kind of bond between character and player. Or maybe --
: and this is what I really think -- Alric is a
: cold-hearted bastard who has already made peace with
: the fact that someday we will wander off into the East
: and return as a Leveler.
I entirely agree that it was deliberately done by the Myth guys. I just don't think it necessarily means that Alric is cold, or that he expects to become a Leveller any time soon (although the thought's doubtless crossed his mind). He could just be keenly aware that he's going to be ordering lots of people to horrible deaths for most of the foreseeable future--even if it's for a good cause--and he can't afford to become friends with fodder. In my view, he distances himself mainly because he's naturally a humane sort of guy who would otherwise find it difficult to make hard choices. In other words, he thinks exactly like I do. :-)
--SiliconDream
