I had a similar reaction to Ultimatum when I first saw Nioh was around 80 GB on Steam.
it's a living
I mean, we're definitely getting to the point of diminishing returns.
On the other hand you can get a game that's like 300 MB that looks better than most PS 2 games. And it's shorter, sure, but it's not always that much shorter, either. It's just not attempting to achieve triple-A hyperphotorealism. 
I just deleted everything on my tiny SSD to play the 100 GB Final Fantasy XV. Even games like Pathfinder Kingmaker take 50 GB. Games are only getting bigger.
I wish we were still at the days of 6 GB games. I could download KOTOR 1 and 2, Fallout 3 and NV, the Neverwinter Night games, Jade Empire, DAO and DA 2,VTM Bloodlines and god knows how many other RP Gs and it would be about the size of Kingmaker or maybe a little more. Certainly less than FFXV.
Edited by Nikkolas on Jan 20th 2020 at 5:36:54 AM
Not much to do about it besides that next time you buy a new computer to invest in memory space along with other stuff
That all you got?
Or just get an external hard drive.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Game pretty strongly implies that the problems for the Suns come from not being able to actually wield the Water Dragon's power properly. Sun Li has the amulet (which iirc the Water Dragon states allows him to do this which is what makes him harder to fight than Sun Hai), while you are a Spirit Monk and thus does not need the amulet to actually use the Water Dragon's full power.
The Heavenly Court has a morality that is about not overstepping your station, which is kind of a theme park version of Confucianism, really, given that Confucianism as practiced since the Han Dynasty went hand in hand with the civil service examination system, the impact of which is still felt to this day via the process by which one becomes a government official for both mainland and Taiwan. Meritocracy has been a part of the Chinese cultural condition centuries before the Virgin Mary felt Baby Jesus's first kick, and "harmony", as expressed in Chinese culture, has never been about merely accepting your lot in life.
As Nezha said:
Screw fate, if fate is not fair, then fight it to the end! I, not Heaven, control my destiny!
(Nezha is a very very good movie and I don't understand why it doesn't have a trope page yet)
Oh, bother.
It's still hard to defend what they're doing, considering that in the process of defying fate they committed genocide of the Spirit Monks and enslaved a god. And the side effects are causing more problems for the people than the original drought.
Disgusted, but not surprised
They're a bunch of humans rebelling against the gods. It's just the gods, while not particularly perfect, are a lot better than a bunch of Legalist* psychopaths. Jade Empire is basically the Spiritual Antithesis of Shin Megami Tensei.
"Humanity fuck ye...oh, yeah, we had to enslave a bunch of gods and torture and the world is falling apart."
It's also royalist humans deciding for other humans, rendering the entire "choice" meaningless.
- The game can basically be considered Legalism vs. Confucianism/Daoism. Ironically, the Closed Fist basically embodies a Legalist view of humanity.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 21st 2020 at 11:49:43 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Au contraire, Legalism is the best Chinese philosophy.
It's quite easy to defend the Suns' actions. Dress it up in vague koans of "harmony" all they like, there is no justification for arbitrarily denying the Jade Empire the water its people need to live other than the fact that the Water Dragon is powerful enough to be considered a "god". Such creatures are no strangers to Chinese myth, nor are heroes who defy them, which is why there is now only one sun in the sky, rather than ten.
As the Internationale stated:
It's easy to defend their initial position, not their actions.
Their actions are reprehensible.
Word of God is that the reason they're destroying the Empire via drought is because it's a brutal tyranical dictatorship. So, yes, it's using sanctions against a dictatorship.
:)
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
We've had this discussion before, wherein there is no evidence of the Jade Empire being a brutal tyrannical dictatorship before the drought. They became one after, with the Lotus Assassins being formed from the Lotus Order that was in existence before the Drought.
Unless we're going to count all monarchies as brutal tyrannical dictatorships, anyway, in which case it shouldn't have lasted all the way to Sun Hai's reign, and also requires us to believe whichever place that the water was meant to go wasn't a monarchy.
Also, the Spirit Monks chose to commit their entire population against Sun Hai's army, rather than send a portion of them away to safety. I fail to see why we should count this as the commonly understood meaning of "genocide."
Edited by PRC4Eva on Jan 22nd 2020 at 4:20:14 AM
Well the fact that the head of the secret police exists in a big Darth Vader Clone outfit is evidence that way.
Mind you, there's an argument of what exactly qualifies you as a regime needing to be destroyed in Medieval Faux Chinese.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
The game literally tells you that the Big Bad Secret Police only came into existence after the Long Drought, therefore it cannot possibly be the reason why the Jade Empire was being punished. Sun Li's choice of armor should mean nothing, other than the Heavens are willing to consign millions of people to death via starvation because some noble has poor fashion sense.
If we are discuss reality, the Mandate of Heaven was always a ex post facto rationalization of a successful rebellion against the ruling dynasty. Morality doesn't really factor into it.
That all you got?
So if anything the Empire itself isn't shit, it's just the Emperor himself.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Then why was Sun Li dressed up as a demon if not heading the secret police?
Actually, it's not because it's a PRE-rationalization. It's a way of justifying rebellion via resistance against tyranny in a religious monarchy.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 22nd 2020 at 5:05:27 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
it's a living
No point in splitting hairs, here. The Spirit Monks were systematically exterminated in a battle where they weren't the aggressors, weren't given any chance to surrender or negotiate that we can see, and were wiped out to the last even when they'd stopped fighting. Genocide's as good a word as any.
I mean, the Empire seemed pretty dead-set on making sure there were no witnesses even after the fact, so I'm not really putting much faith in the idea that the monks, boxed in at Dirge (we know their backs were against the wall, the same thing happens to the player party), were all still there because they had the choice and chose *not* to evacuate their noncombatants, rather than because the Emperor and company took them off guard. Sun Li even knows exactly where to find that one fleeing monk and the last infant in the monastery. If they'd wanted wanted to leave any other Spirit Monks alive, it seems like he could have made that happen.
And the Lotus Monks hadn't become the Lotus Assassins yet, but they were involved, Zu tells you as much. The corruption had already started to set in.
Edited by Unsung on Jan 22nd 2020 at 8:07:18 AM
Oh, bother.
Really, Sun Kin was the only one of the three brothers with anything resembling a moral compass. At least he regrets what happened and wishes he had opposed his brothers instead of going along with it.
Edited by M84 on Jan 23rd 2020 at 12:02:04 AM
Disgusted, but not surprised
And when was Sun Li dressed as a demon? You mean the set of armor that looks like typical if somewhat pimped out and fearsome looking samurai armor?
Reasonably certain the reason Sun Kin regrets the attack on Dirge is because it resulted in him being stuck as a zombie bound to a piece of armor, combining the worst parts of being Alphonse Elric and Ner'zhul in a single gross package.
Meanwhile, the decision to attack Dirge to force the Water Dragon to give water has never been wrong for any citizen of the Jade Empire. I fail to see why we must consider adherence to Heaven's will morally superior even when that will is our death. Let's not forget that millions were dead and dying from the Long Drought, or do they not count because it's offscreen?
it's a living
One doesn't excuse the other. Attacking the Spirit Monks out of desperation is one thing. Massacring every last one of them is beyond the pale. And then Sun Hai, already a warmongering expansionist, even after having become an undying ghost and thus theoretically gotten everything he could have wanted, still turns into a paranoid tyrant whose secret police wipe whole villages off the map, in addition to ushering in a plague of murderous ghosts and demons, as well as plain old bandit armies, so it mostly just seems like people are still dying various other ways.
You keep talking about how people didn't simply accept the fate decreed by the gods of the Celestial Bureaucracy, but apart from the assault on Dirge, we don't really hear about any other attempts to deal with the drought even being attempted. We hear from villagers about how they suffered, but it doesn't seem like local nobles were sharing food or water, or that the army, with all the gameworld's advanced steampunk technology, was doing anything to, say, divert rivers, other than building dams that drowned the people they were supposed to save. I mean, I got the impression that the Glorious Strategist was still out actively attempting to conquer neighbouring territories even then. The priorities of the Sun Brothers, as seen when each one takes on the Water Dragon's powers in turn, seem pretty badly skewed.
So yeah. I'm not convinced that the deaths resulting from the Long Drought were part of the plan of some gods who fall very far short of omnipotence or omniscience, or that attacking Dirge and stealing the Water Dragon's powers was the only way to solve the problem. Doesn't really seem like the Suns tried anything other than open war, and given the way the Dragon's powers over weather apparently work, it seems pretty likely there was a genuine need elsewhere rather than that she was just letting people die for the hell of it.
Also, demon or not, samurai masks were mostly designed to intimidate. With the red grimace and the horns it seems pretty cut and dry.
Edited by Unsung on Jan 23rd 2020 at 1:11:45 AM
And the argument you give your fellow rebels is that if you win, you have the Mandate of Heaven. You're basically taking the Marxist assumption that the power players don't believe and that's never actually been the case according to what documents we have about many ruling nobles from the time period. Deliberate Values Dissonance or not but plenty actually believed they were dealing with a mixed Buddhist Celestial Bureaucracy that sometimes fouled up. But this is way off the topic.
A bit like Darth Vader being stuck in an iron lung and seared, being a mind-controlled slave and Body Horror certainly don't HELP his loyalty to the Emperor. They aren't the sole contributing factors to Sun Kin thinking his brothers are shit at their jobs and awful people, though.
Probably because it involves torturing another sentient being for your survival. If you go into someone's house and murder them for food, you're still a piece of shit. There's a difference between a reason and a justification after all.
We don't know the reasoning for the Will of Heaven but we do know the Emperor and his brother were scumbags who allowed a Zombie Apocalypse to go on while the Water Dragon lets the drought end with his replacement.
We can certainly subject it to Alternate Character Interpretation but this is, at best, a Those Who Walk Away from Olmos sort of situation. If you remenber that Doctor Who episode where they've lobotomized an alien to use it as an evacuation shuttle too.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 24th 2020 at 2:56:28 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
The drought happened well before the Sun brothers decided to take fate into their own hands and exterminate the Spirit Monks. It had already been decided that the Sun Dynasty had to die - not because of what they'd done, but because it was the dynasty's time. And then Sun Hai took fate into his own hands, but he, A, went crazy, and B, didn't have the chops to manage the cycle of life and death and didn't really try.
Sun Li apparently does have the necessary level of ability to manage godhood, but of course his ego is even bigger than Sun Hai's. The player character may or may not, but is not allowed to take his strategy - if you poison the water, you're not just doing it to take control, but you're taking Closed Fist to its Nazi extreme (that is, creating a deliberate Crapsack World because dystopia makes people stronger).
It's the usual terrible mishandling of the Last-Second Ending Choice.
I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.
That's making a lot of assumptions. We don't know why they were chosen to die, only that when the Emperor is overthrown, the drought ends.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
The "Mandate of Heaven" concept seems like a poorly understood construct by early Sinologists to understand Chinese historiography's treatment why they believed their emperor deserved to rule, anyways. Found a passing similarity to the concept of Divine Right of Kings, thought that it was just as important to the Chinese people as Divine Right was to Europeans.
should be sufficient to code him and his side as the good guy.
The Chinese attitude to Heaven has never been this:
But this:
Fair. :\