The Khitai/expansion writing is powerfully dark. I'll assume JAD wrote at least some of the stories/characters/lines that I'm thinking of and give him a /bow. It's easy to get self-indulgent or lazy as a horror writer but both TSW and the expansions' content are sophisticated stuff. Horror as a vehicle, not a destination.
Well, of course you do. (Did you write the Corrupted loading screen blurb, about mouthfuls of your neighbors?
I knew that was written by a HoX.) Please write Xotli into the storyline, we need all these Crom-humpers to see what a pissed-off deity really looks like. :kiss::kiss::kiss:
Reading about JAD's use of source material, I'm curious again if the devs/writers thought about doing the game in non-linear storybook format, like a cross between TSW and the Conan stories themselves. I feel like it'd work especially well with level-less gameplay like TSW or Conan's end-game.
- Replace the zone teleporters (wagoneers, etc.) with a book UI. You travel to a zone simply by flipping to that chapter. Travel consists of a cutscene illustrating the journey -- possibly events along the way -- setting the tone for the zone and foreshadowing the zone's backstory.
- Each zone -- smaller than the full "adventure areas" that we have now, but more of them -- is a self-contained story like one of the Conan tales, with side quests. (Kind of like Dead Man's Hand.)
- You can return to a past zone any time and repeat the quests (and the writers wouldn't have to contrive reasons why the quests need repeating because the inference would be that you're going back to that time/story by going to the zone.)
This would take "theme park" to a new level, but there are a lot of plusses:
- travel would be more convenient yet at the same time the game itself more immersive (for example, you could have a story set hundreds of miles from civilization without having to have a city and vendors);
- "repeatable quests" would be less at risk of feeling contrived;
- and best at all, it would solve the problem of not being able to use content where everyone is dead, because the stories could be set in any time/place you wanted.