The key to making a properly mature game

[kraze]

This means avoiding teenager stuff.
This means:

- No romances
- No marriages
- No swearing in each sentence
- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"
- No characters having crisis, breakdowns, gender issues etc.
- No handholding through quests
- No simple gameplay - it must be mastered as the game goes
- All characters can die because everything is fair in combat - for both you and AI, you and the enemy
- No "heroes saving the world from the horrible evil" plots. Only fairy-tales have perfect people with perfect agendas.
- No toilet humour. No pop-culture references. They did hurt Fallout 2.

Just a good game for the brain.

I rest my case.

[HarryTheBunnyMaster]

This means avoiding teenager stuff.
- No swearing in each sentence

Deadwood pulls this off pretty well... and that world is not so different.

[Azriel]

This means avoiding teenager stuff.
This means:

- No romances
- No marriages
- No swearing in each sentence
- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"
- No characters having crisis, breakdowns, gender issues etc.
- No handholding through quests
- No simple gameplay - it must be mastered as the game goes
- All characters can die because everything is fair in combat - for both you and AI, you and the enemy
- No "heroes saving the world from the horrible evil" plots. Only fairy-tales have perfect people with perfect agendas.
- No toilet humour. No pop-culture references. They did hurt Fallout 2.

Just a good game for the brain.

I rest my case.

Disagree with most of your post

- No romances

I see nothing wrong with romances if its optional, it gives a little hope and humanity to your characters besides just existing for the sake of existing. If you don't want to romance someone, THEN DON'T!! its optional! nobody is putting a gun to your face.

- No marriages
Look at what I wrote above, though I can't see myself marrying unless its a possible ending outcome at the games end if I romanced someone.

- No swearing in each sentence
You want a disney game? Not sure what you mean, people swear in real life every day. There are people who swear like a salor and this is supposed to be post apoc game so I can't see too many people not swearing. Some NPC's should, some should not. Let your character(s) have swear OPTIONS if it fits the character they are trying to make.

- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"
Jesus, you really want a disney game. One of the coolest feature in fallout was the bloody mess perk. Some people like it, others don't. Fair enough, there was a toggle in settings, just put that in and everyones happy.

- No characters having crisis, breakdowns, gender issues etc.

You are in a post apoc setting, not sure what you mean by gender issues, but I would expect some would be stressed out. Especially if they find out a family member was taken to slaver camp, tortured, raped, and eaten. Yea, I don't expect them to be fine with it. It adds emotional investment that makes the ROLE PLAYING aspect fun.

- No handholding through quests
Yes and no, I don't want to be hand hold, but sometimes I like to get an idea where the hell I should go without crawling on the internet to find the info, perhaps have a hint button if you need it.


- No simple gameplay - it must be mastered as the game goes
???? Not sure what you mean, I don't want the gameplay hard just to be hard, its been 20 something years, we don't have to stick with the exact same limited controls, there is room for improvement, just not the simplified awesome button of death we got now.

- All characters can die because everything is fair in combat - for both you and AI, you and the enemy
I agree that everyone should die, BUT companions, I think the other companions should just get knocked out unless all is killed. The reason is that its silly having to go all the way back to X place to get a new character or do a load screen to load before a fight. Some things HAVE been improved upon. I do think everyone is fair gain though, no mysterious npc that can't die, let everyone die, just have a message popup saying killing this character might fubar the game like the old elder scrolls game when they were still RPG's for PC only.

- No "heroes saving the world from the horrible evil" plots. Only fairy-tales have perfect people with perfect agendas.

I kind of agree, but not sure what the alternative to it is. There needs to be some overarching thing to focus the game.

- No toilet humour. No pop-culture references. They did hurt Fallout 2.
Totally disagree, toilet humour should be in where it fits, the most memorable moments are some of the toilet humor in the fallout series. As for pop-culture in fallout 2, I REALLY disagree, who says they hurt fallout 2? I would not do any modern popculture reference, but older ones from 70's-90's is far game like mad-max, terminator, back to the future etc. Its fun and memorable stuff that sticks out.

[Aiydee]

Why are romances immature or for teenagers?

Why not watch "Crouch Tiger Hidden Dragon" for an excellent example of how romance can be extremely mature.

You complain about the gore.. Have you played the original wasteland? Bloody sausage. Exploding thereof.
Wasteland was all about the over-exaggerated bloody deaths. So, are we trying for 'mature' or are we trying to stay true to WL1?

I think your list is a bit meh. Some of it I agree with. But why can't your characters have a breakdown? What's wrong with that? They're in a world where bad things happen.

I'll give a reference to Fallout 1. If that isn't characters having a breakdown at the end, I don't know what is. Especially if you have the feat 'bloodymess'. One of the best endings EVER in a game too.

Perhaps you think romances are just like in Dragon Age or Skyrim, in which case, YES I agree. But, a good writer and game developer CAN do things with it beyond a Twilightesque, sparkly vampire romance/breakdown/whatever.

Dave

[Zeful]

This means avoiding teenager stuff.
This means:

- No romances
- No marriages
- No swearing in each sentence
- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"
- No characters having crisis, breakdowns, gender issues etc.
- No handholding through quests
- No simple gameplay - it must be mastered as the game goes
- All characters can die because everything is fair in combat - for both you and AI, you and the enemy
- No "heroes saving the world from the horrible evil" plots. Only fairy-tales have perfect people with perfect agendas.
- No toilet humour. No pop-culture references. They did hurt Fallout 2.

Just a good game for the brain.

I rest my case.

No the keys to a mature game is moderation and juxtaposition. Everything in your post? Bias. Romance is a thing that actually makes sense for this game, the world as we know it has ended. Life span drops as quality of life degrades, you no longer know if you're going to live into your 30's, so Romance actually makes sense, and has a reason to be abridged from what it is today. Marriage also allows for the player to how badly the populations have fragmented when you have a faction based very heavily in the Christian belief system and arranging marriages despite nobody else doing so (player marriage should only be if you can romance someone that would insist on marriage).

Quests and gameplay are more an issue of conveyance. Given that we're likely to have a grid system, we're going to be able to assign cardinal direction and distance, so the "unerring quest marker of exploration ruining" is unneeded, as long as the directions are good and can be recorded in game and be referred to later, any quest/mission log can simply be "Today I found a strange code, wonder what it opens" similar to point and click adventure games. As for gameplay "Simple but deep" is always better. It requires little to no tutorials, no real hand-holding, and give the player room to form their own strategies. It also makes the game accessible to the casual market (casual as in "limited time to play" not "bad at games" I'm a casual gamer) without necessarily making the game easier. If your game is harder to get into than Megaman X, someone has failed to adequately structure the game so it makes sense, and it's tutorial is entirely gameplay based.

Much of your post is demanding that elements should be ignored because they're too immature. This is wrong, no element is "mature" or "immature", it's how they are handled. Adding relationships for "the sexy" or "because bioware did it" is stupid. Adding relationships to explore the starkness of wasteland life, improving our relationships with other characters and the setting itself, that's worthwhile. The same goes for everything else on your list. If in exploration of these things we learn more about the setting and connect to it's inhabitants, then it's a mature element.

[fax_]

I agree with most of what Kraze says, except to admit perhaps the possibility that something like romances (or at least NPC personality in some fashion) can potentially be done in a non-one-dimensional way (although Bioware is keen on populising the horrendously childish melodrama of a soap-opera romance), whereas toilet humour, excessive reliance on vague and basic vulgarities - that is 'swearing' - are by their very nature one-dimensional and unsatisfying.

I strongly believe in perma-death of party members, lack of hand-holding etc. But I think to some extent these can be set as toggle-able, so the impatient players who have less of a motivation to spend quality time thinking independently about problems and possible solutions can be accommodated. Having said that, this is one of the last chances for the classic 'hardcore', and frankly any accommodation of that 'new-Bioware' population should be secondary to the niche. Otherwise this will end up just like any old RPG on the market today. The gameplay mechanics don't really fit under 'Mood and maturity' though, so this is the wrong place for that discussion.

The bigger issue is the narrow-minded perspective people seem to be expressing by equating maturity with vulgarity, violence and 'dark grittiness' exclusively. I find the attitude very disheartening (personally - obviously everyone is free to voice their opinion). This single-track attitude to 'maturity' seems to be what has led the RPG scene to the state it is in now. While there may be some low-level transitory pleasure from these basic senses, what RPGs today miss is the for subtly, passive experience of a statistically cohesive game world and actions, with interesting, creative scenarios where players have mental freedom to think independently, rather than check around for the right NPC, and get some journal entry that suggests you should talk to X or find Y. This is directly affected by the 'mood', which needs to be free and non-oppressive, in the sense of not overwhelming the player with a single feeling, and always giving the potential for an NPC to say something surprising, or make a clever retort that the real life player has never considered before. Such freshness is scarce, and would not be benefited by the current line of argument along the 'dark and gritty' (which is not bad in itself, but is largely meaningless in the vague and poorly defined way people often use it).

[abyss]

- No marriages

Then how am I supposed to pimp off my spouse?

- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"

Get off my lawn!
It's not a true Wasteland/Fallout successor if it doesn't dump buckets of campy over-the-top gore all over you.

- No toilet humour. No pop-culture references. They did hurt Fallout 2.

Crude humor is fitting for a crude, dirty world. Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise reciting Hubologist dogma was hilarious. I loved finding references in the originals, it was part of the satirical tone of all three games. Wasteland itself was a pop-reference to Mad Max, A Boy and His Dog, and the nuclear fears of the 80s.

[SilverSam]

This means avoiding teenager stuff.
This means:

- No romances
- No marriages
- No swearing in each sentence
- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"
- No characters having crisis, breakdowns, gender issues etc.
- No handholding through quests
- No simple gameplay - it must be mastered as the game goes
- All characters can die because everything is fair in combat - for both you and AI, you and the enemy
- No "heroes saving the world from the horrible evil" plots. Only fairy-tales have perfect people with perfect agendas.
- No toilet humour. No pop-culture references. They did hurt Fallout 2.

Just a good game for the brain.

I rest my case.

The romances are okay, but they aren't the cheesy stuff that is today all around. Some are okay and some not. The same with romances, because in skyrim when you marry a woman (or a man) the go with you or give you money every day. This will be okay in some cases

Oh, god... No swearing is not okay. The world has gone straight to shit and you want people to talk propely when they are constantly in danger and not well? Obviously there are some that talk well, but even rangers would be pissed off sometimes to swear every 2 words.

Nah, the world is cruel and you should know it by the hard way, man. if some want gore, give them the blood

In some ways, the heroe fighting the evil-doers is a good option if it has some plot twists (like the bad guy is kidnaping people to protect them in a refugee camp from some other guys)

The references to pop culture and other things should be made. References to actors, politicians... they should be made to make a criticism about the "old world" society and have some fun with it

[zackrid]

- No romances
- No marriages
- No swearing in each sentence
- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"
- No characters having crisis, breakdowns, gender issues etc.
[ ... ]
- No "heroes saving the world from the horrible evil" plots. Only fairy-tales have perfect people with perfect agendas.

I'll have to slap you across the fingers a bit here, they've explicitly stated that we as fans are not here to tell the writers their job (we're here to tell the designers their job ).
However, I know that this is a stretch, but look at Game of Thrones where a lot of this actually works. They pull of romance, marriage, bloody violence, character crises and small-time gender issues and all of this largely because it's rooted in characters who aren't perfect people but scheming bastards (quite literally). And they do swear but it does come across as largely natural.
All in all Game of Thrones is a good "model" for visceral, character-driven drama which to me feels just right for trekking through a barely civilized world where character interaction and moral dilemmas impact the course of the journey.

I'm with you on the pop culture references though, pop culture today is mainly rehashing and referencing older stuff anyway.

[TheFrankSinatra]

yea I also agree with most of the posters, I think the game SHOULD have most of the stuff OP seems to not want....have at the beginning a filter to choose your gore/langauge threshold or something.

But really I am pretty sure if the world went to Sh#@% people would be cursing MORE not less. and people in fact curse today, even in really nice situations and settings, like at work in a cushy job or at home in their million dollar mansions. If things went bad...so would peoples language and mood. It should absolutely have language, blood, gore, sex, relationships, everything that happens in society today...

Of course it should not be made for 12 year olds but thats exactly why its being made by Brian and not a publisher...they arent marketing it to 12 year olds...I want those things in the game, humorous, mature, whatever...everything should be there....everything should be an option. EVERYTHING POSSIBLE.

[thatfool]

This means avoiding teenager stuff.
This means:

- No romances
- No marriages

Okay, I'm not sure where you live but around here we generally think of these as "adult" ideas. At least marriage. Romance of course is bound to happen everywhere.

- No swearing in each sentence

I do cringe when I hear people swearing in every sentence, but I'd like to point out that I don't even meet that many teenagers, so I'm not sure how this is a teenager thing.

- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"

Agree with this one. If you apply violence to people or other creatures, there's bound to be blood. But most games that actually show the blood cross the not-so-fine line between realism and sensationalism by a wide margin.

- No characters having crisis, breakdowns, gender issues etc.

Again, not teenager issues. Most suicides are committed by adults. The group between mid-forties and mid-sixties has the highest rate. Teenager suicides are insignificant compared to this. Teenagers have problems like "I love him but he's a vampire" whereas adults have real issues like "I just lost my job again", "my wife of 20 years ran off with another guy", "I'm 40, I will never see my dreams come true", and so on, and yes, gender issues still play a role as well - some discoveries are made late.

- No handholding through quests

Yes, please, no handholding, agree 100%. I like my quests to feel like something I've had to figure out at least partially, not just like a ride in a themepark.

- No simple gameplay - it must be mastered as the game goes
- All characters can die because everything is fair in combat - for both you and AI, you and the enemy
- No "heroes saving the world from the horrible evil" plots. Only fairy-tales have perfect people with perfect agendas.

All reasonable points, if a bit generic... I want this from almost every game

- No toilet humour. No pop-culture references. They did hurt Fallout 2.

Wasteland has tons of pop culture references and they apparently didn't hurt that game, right? So it's probably not a black and white thing, they just have to be done sensibly.

[kraze]

Why are romances immature or for teenagers?

Because if you care about what 2D sprites feel in a game (especially when a game sacrifices the gameplay for this) - it's juvenile.
Simple as that.

You complain about the gore.. Have you played the original wasteland? Bloody sausage. Exploding thereof.
Wasteland was all about the over-exaggerated bloody deaths. So, are we trying for 'mature' or are we trying to stay true to WL1?

WL1 also didn't have romances. So "we" are staying true to WL1 only when it goes along well with whatever is important to you?

I think your list is a bit meh. Some of it I agree with. But why can't your characters have a breakdown? What's wrong with that? They're in a world where bad things happen.

Because this is a game. I don't want to waste my time as well as see dev waste their time on stupid stuff like doing "oh noes I can't fight anymore this is too hard" where a player is forced to waste a lot of time to be able to play the game normally again. Instead of catering to teenagers who think that soldiers (which rangers are) are all emo pussies with "deep" characters - devs can spend that time on adding and polishing character skills.

But, a good writer and game developer CAN do things with it beyond a Twilightesque, sparkly vampire romance/breakdown/whatever.

This is a game. Games should be about gameplay first and foremost.
Writing should be the least important thing. Fallout 1 didn't have any story btw.

[kraze]

Okay, I'm not sure where you live but around here we generally think of these as "adult" ideas. At least marriage. Romance of course is bound to happen everywhere.

Where you live marriage to a 2D sprite is adult? Woah man.

I do cringe when I hear people swearing in every sentence, but I'd like to point out that I don't even meet that many teenagers, so I'm not sure how this is a teenager thing.

Because too much swearing seems adult only to teenagers while to grown ups it seems like the dude swearing after each word is an asshole.

Again, not teenager issues. Most suicides are committed by adults. The group between mid-forties and mid-sixties has the highest rate. Teenager suicides are insignificant compared to this. Teenagers have problems like "I love him but he's a vampire" whereas adults have real issues like "I just lost my job again", "my wife of 20 years ran off with another guy", "I'm 40, I will never see my dreams come true", and so on, and yes, gender issues still play a role as well - some discoveries are made late.

Now imagine 2D sprites going through this in your party, when all you want is just to keep playing.

All reasonable points, if a bit generic... I want this from almost every game

No game for the many past years has these though.

Wasteland has tons of pop culture references and they apparently didn't hurt that game, right? So it's probably not a black and white thing, they just have to be done sensibly.

Fallout 2 was a good example of how not to do this though.

[evdk]

This means avoiding teenager stuff.
This means:

- No romances
- No marriages
- No swearing in each sentence
- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"
- No characters having crisis, breakdowns, gender issues etc.
- No handholding through quests
- No simple gameplay - it must be mastered as the game goes
- All characters can die because everything is fair in combat - for both you and AI, you and the enemy
- No "heroes saving the world from the horrible evil" plots. Only fairy-tales have perfect people with perfect agendas.
- No toilet humour. No pop-culture references. They did hurt Fallout 2.

Just a good game for the brain.

I rest my case.

You are my new hero. Much respect.

[Jammet]

I believe maturity will be in the game when the writers of the story, dialogs and quests do not feel restrain and do not hesitate to include all and any aspects of the good and bad our society has come up with, or would come up with, given their life situations.

No need to be reasonable, because oftentimes, violence is anything but. Almost all adults have sex. Some will commit crimes. There could be romances, some people swear with every sentence, and rape isn't unheard of, either. Maturity means portraying that these dark, shady and unreasonable aspects exist. Along with all the bright and good in the world. It is a mix. But most of the time, you don't stumble across those things happening downtown. Perhaps in Wasteland it might happen, but remember, even there would be families trying to live their lives in peace and raise kids, as well as strife for better lives.

In short = don't rule anything out like in the original post. Things just happen. Reality throws everything right at you. Some of it is blindingly obvious, some of it will surprise you.

It's really important to balance it all well enough. Maybe there will be places notorious for crimes, like slums perhaps. It just needs to make sense, but then again, since it's unreasonable, it doesn't always have to make sense. Circumstances and chance may play into it. It may seem random, when it really never was.

[Zeful]

This is a game. Games should be about gameplay first and foremost.
Writing should be the least important thing. Fallout 1 didn't have any story btw.

And with this you have proven that you don't actually know what you're talking about. All games use writing and the narrative process heavily, even in games like the original Metroid where none of that writing is given to the player, rather it's shown to the player through the gameplay.

Writing in games is in a lot of cases more important than gameplay, as it pretty much does everything "good games" are exalted for. The limitations of the mechanics, the progression of enemies, the basic themes of play. All of that is there because of the game's writing. Dark/Demon Souls wouldn't even be half the games they are today if the writing team were given as little importance as you suggest. The dark atmosphere, the writing put there, the "die and go back to last checkpoint with no souls" the writing put that there. The enemies and the various environments, the writing put them there. For implementation, yeah that was the work of the artists, the coders, and audio engineers. But without the writers working with them all to bring everything together the way it was, they wouldn't be the smash hits they are today.

Writing is very important in games, in RPGs however, the writing becomes more important than gameplay in nearly every area, because bad writing in RPGs can ruin everything else, no matter how well implemented is it. Mechanics that are arbitrary, schizophrenic themes, environments that make no logical sense next to each other. All of them are signs of bad writing.

[undecaf]

This means avoiding teenager stuff.
This means:

- No romances
- No marriages
- No swearing in each sentence
- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"
- No characters having crisis, breakdowns, gender issues etc.
- No handholding through quests
- No simple gameplay - it must be mastered as the game goes
- All characters can die because everything is fair in combat - for both you and AI, you and the enemy
- No "heroes saving the world from the horrible evil" plots. Only fairy-tales have perfect people with perfect agendas.
- No toilet humour. No pop-culture references. They did hurt Fallout 2.

Just a good game for the brain.

I rest my case.

While I agree that some of those things do not fit in or should be excluded for other reasons, I don't think any of those are mutually exclusive with the game being mature.

Maturity here, I think, means (or should mean) an undertone of seriousness and, when fit, ponderings of the reasons why things happen from differing perspectives. Something that makes one think about the issues at hand and their meaning (both gameplaywise, but also storytellingwise). And most of all, possibility to approach hard subjects from different angles without being moralized (e.g. no "the lesson of this story was..." style of outcomes).

That might sound a bit vague, but I'm tired so think of it what you wish.

[Tanglebones]

This means avoiding teenager stuff.
This means:

- No romances
- No marriages
- No swearing in each sentence
- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"
- No characters having crisis, breakdowns, gender issues etc.
- No handholding through quests
- No simple gameplay - it must be mastered as the game goes
- All characters can die because everything is fair in combat - for both you and AI, you and the enemy
- No "heroes saving the world from the horrible evil" plots. Only fairy-tales have perfect people with perfect agendas.
- No toilet humour. No pop-culture references. They did hurt Fallout 2.

Just a good game for the brain.

I rest my case.

To me, a mature game means a game (or movie, or book or whatever) that is willing to tackle difficult topics, topics that have the potential to be controversial or troublesome for some players, or topics that are controversial or difficult for some nebulously defined society as a whole. However, the maturity comes not just from including, or excluding certain elements, but rather from dealing with the consequences of actions in as realistic a way as possible. Thus:

Romance and marriage are important to a mature game because they allow the game's writers and players to explore the way that the end of the world has effects on human relationships. The Wasteland should be hard and brutal. Love should be all the more precious for being rare. The "LOL I don't want to see pixels bone" argument, says more to me about the maturity level of the poster then it does about the inherent maturity of including romance in a game. For example (to borrow someone else's reference to the Song of Ice and Fire), I am invested in Daenerys' relationship with Drogo, not because I want to see them having sex, but because watching Daenerys struggle to regain power in a situation that's stripped it from her, and forge a relationship that she can enjoy is compelling fiction. Similarly, Ned Stark wouldn't be the man he is without Catelyn. Love is one of the most compelling and interesting themes to explore in any narrative form. There is no way that excluding love from a narrative makes it de facto more "mature."

Swearing is not necessary to a mature game in the same way that love is, but I see no reason to shy away from it, if it's handled appropriately. I think I'm a relatively mature person, so while I'm in a professional setting, I don't swear at all. Conversely, while I'm shooting the breeze with friends, I may choose to liberally salt my dialogue with "f-bombs." The way to handle this maturely is to have different characters swear in differing amounts and severity. One person might not swear at all, another might curse like a sailor. Because that's how swearing works in real life. Demanding total censorship is not a "mature" response to difficult issues, just as demanding that difficult themes be inserted uncritically into the game.

Gore isn't necessary to a mature game, but it is necessary to a Wasteland successor. Wasteland (like its successors, Fallout 1&2) was full of over the top gore. Again, the key to maturity is not demanding that it be excluded, but by showing realistic consequences (for e.g. the emotional toll constantly murdering folks and struggling for survival places on the Rangers). I think the first RoboCop is a good reference for this issue, since RoboCop was chock full of over the top violence, but it was also acting as a satire about our (as a general society) obsession with violence in media.

Characters in crisis is pretty much the definition of any decent fiction. If you exclude the potential for personal crisis from, for example, an oldschool RPG, what you've got is a character or group of characters who need to mow down wave after wave of faceless enemies for no reason. That's not "mature" that's not even interesting. Making hard choices (which Brian Fargo has repeatedly stressed is one of the defining characteristics of Wasteland), requires placing characters into crisis situations. There's no reason that character crises need to be about their gender, but, in a mature game, there's also no reason to exclude it.

I don't think that gameplay mechanics have anything to do with whether or not a game is "mature" (as I've indicated that it's thematic), so whether or not there's "handholding" or the difficulty of the game doesn't indicate whether or not the game is mature. Still, I'd like to see Wasteland 2 present a gameplay challenge.

The possibility of death is important to a mature game, because, in mature storytelling, the stakes should be high.

I don't see that saving the world from horrible evil indicates that the PCs are perfect or have perfect agendas. In a mature game, we can have horrible evil that can't be solved neatly or perfectly, forcing the player to make real decisions and face real consequences. An example of this would by Ozymandius' plot in Watchmen. Stopping him (assuming that was actually an option, which, at least in the graphic novel, by the time Night Owl learned of the plot, it wasn't), would have saved millions of lives in New York city, but would have cost millions more in a nuclear war. Rorschach, because he sees the world in black and white, can't handle that kind of "mature" decision, and so winds up dying.

Finally, toilet humour can be funny. Wall to wall fart jokes is boring, but a good fart joke out of nowhere can make me laugh pretty hard.

In sum,

the keys to a mature game is moderation and juxtaposition.

[ButchinMelancholy]

You'll not set anything by just contradicting something else.
What you're doing here, kraze, is purely superficial, and too cliche to make sense in my opinion. This even sounds condescending towards the team behind that game which is certainly above those ridiculous outlooks, and I don't think that attitude makes you better than them considering that question actually. But if you feel that way because you're comparing yourself to the pathetic ones, know that we're not all from that world...

By the way, I don't disagree with all your points, but you obviously lack of, eh, maturity in your opinion I think. You seems to have a unilateral point of view that has nothing significative, and truly what really matters is the essence of things, not the shape...

But well, Zeful's quote is right enough to sum it up I guess.
I would add another one though:

Maturity means portraying that these dark, shady and unreasonable aspects exist.

And means to be able to do so (to overtake it), not just reproduce them.

That said, I can only follow Tanglebones, completely.


And one last thing:

This is a game. Games should be about gameplay first and foremost.
Writing should be the least important thing. Fallout 1 didn't have any story btw.

I beg your pardon? Who's talking?
Everyone is free to appreciate and use a media the way he wants or feel, and I personally don't see games as a basic interaction-giver but as a way to create some experiences which goes far beyond the only gameplay mechanics. So please don't speak like if you were the universal referent...

[homeslice82]

This means avoiding teenager stuff.
This means:

- No romances
- No marriages

No melodramatic Mass Effect romances? Definitely.

But Temple of Elemental Evil did romance and marriage perfectly well. I don't think this has anything to do with maturity--I leave it to the developers' discretion.

- No swearing in each sentence

- No gore for the sake of "awesome! it's gore!"

Agreed.

- No characters having crisis, breakdowns, gender issues etc.

Actual drama is good. Twilight-style cheesy melodrama is bad. The above could be handled in either way. The issues aren't inherently mature or immature.

- No handholding through quests
- No simple gameplay - it must be mastered as the game goes
- All characters can die because everything is fair in combat - for both you and AI, you and the enemy
- No "heroes saving the world from the horrible evil" plots. Only fairy-tales have perfect people with perfect agendas.

Agreed.

- No toilet humour. No pop-culture references. They did hurt Fallout 2.

Definitely no toilet humor. But Wasteland 1 (Maltese Falcon) and Fallout 1 (Bambi Vs. Godzilla) had their share of funny pop culture references, so I don't think it's fair to ditch them entirely.