124262-fantasy-and-sci-fi-in-wildstar

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I don't mind it being a damage type, it's the fact that "magic" as a power thing exists only for one class, and arguably the wrong one, when the lore could easily be redefined to identify that class' abilities as some other more-sci-fi-appropriate thing.

Agreed - the fluff just doesn't work. Arbitrarily dumping magic in an otherwise firmly-sci-fi setting... well, it fits about as well as having Darth Vader summon demons or something.


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This is the part that bothers me most right now. Every time I think about queuing for dungeons or adventures, it boils down to whether or not I feel like playing a fantasy game. :( I've started thinking that Nexus is actually what 'causes' most of the fantasy.

It's a good question, though I'll ask you to expand on "in essence they're exactly the same thing". It's easy to say that in essence everything is exactly the same, should you want to simplify that much. :P To answer your own challenge though, I'll lean on Miriam Allen deFord's concise explanation: "Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities" Basically, sci-fi deals with stuff that could happen (based on what we know through scientific evidence) but likely won't. Fantasy, however, deals with stuff that could not happen (shooting fireballs from hands through willpower or some inner mysticism, talking beasts that don't have the physical anatomy to actually talk, etc.), but which we are capable of believing without the presence of evidence— I would say mostly due to the power of 'suspension of disbelief', and the weight of myth/symbolism's connection to religious belief and traditional culture. deFord's explanation isn't immune to criticism, since genre is always a little subjective. But I think she's provided a good, general guideline. edited to clarify a bit


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Honestly, this does get done. In fact, having thought about it a while, Wildstar owes a lot more to Star Wars than anything else. It gets muddied in Wildstar, but I think a lot of what they're doing is based on the Star Wars theme. Essentially, that is a fantasy story set in the future using technology instead of (mostly) magic. I remember having this discussion a long time ago, that the Star Wars crew is essentially a Warrior, a Paladin, a Rogue, and an Elven Princess coming together and then joining a pitched battle later. If it was set in a fantasy setting, it would have been perfect. They just set it in a futuristic setting (though not nominally the future). However, Star Wars kind of blends this in a relatively seamless way. Wildstar very intentionally is NOT seamless. Wildstar is what would happen if Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino directed Star Wars. Random blasts from other sources and genres just hammer it from all sides. You've got cyberpunk, steampunk, western, horror, and those are just a few major influences. That doesn't even get into the bits taken from its other myriad sources. It leaves the whole ensemble a bit jumbled. Which is fun, in a way, because it keeps you on your toes. The only downside is a lack of focus that results from not having a fully central vision. But at least it's variable and entertaining. In a game struggling to not take itself too seriously in a climate of games that are taking themselves WAY too seriously, I think it comes out as a net win for Wildstar. And, of course, you can always roll Dominion if you want to minimize the randomness. The Exiles seem to have a lot more of that randomness jammed in on every side; the Dominion in play comes off as a pretty straightforward fantasy kingdom.


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I read Neuromancer about four years ago and it blew me away. The prose is dense, though the language was too technical/modern for me at the time (I was leaving a high fantasy obsession). Read Mona Lisa Overdrive in Fall '14, loved it, realized I was reading the last book of the trilogy... ungh! I'm reading Count Zero now. Fantastic stuff. :D


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Clarke's Law: Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.


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Clarke wasn't talking about magic in Science Fiction. He was talking about reality (as he was with the first two laws) - assuming supernatural forces don't actually exist. Granted, a Science Fiction universe can operate that way, but it's not a definition of what magic is in Science Fiction. Even if you want to apply Clarke's 3rd Law, magic in WildStar isn't any more advanced and mysterious than the technology that's available to the inhabitants of the WildStar universe - I mean, there are people who know how to cast spells - so it doesn't really fit Clarke's 3rd law. The "magic" that Clarke was talking about is something that is well beyond what we understand through current technology and science that can be explainable with advances in technology and science. People who are used to being teleported around the arcship by technology aren't mystified about Spellslingers charging their sigils. Magic in the WildStar universe is simply not "sufficiently advanced" enough to be what Clarke is talking about in his 3rd Law. Also, magic in fantasy obeys understandable laws. It may be fickle or dangerous, but the means of manipulating it are well-understood by those who do. That seems more like magic in WildStar than some form of advanced technology. Magic in WildStar is, essentially, manipulating Primal Power and the Void - which is pretty much the stock definition of magic in any number of pure fantasy genre games/novels. It's just accepted by the denizens of the WildStar universe that magic exists as a force that doesn't exist in our universe.


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Well, that's the point I'm making. The entire idea behind divinity is that we were created by some omnipotent being of unimaginable power that created our universe and can see all the parts of it, though it exists outside our realm of understanding. You see everything from solely our perspective, but the point here is that we have been at that point already. So the argument is, "What is divinity?" Because we have occupied exactly the same position, but at far smaller scales. Which then makes "divinity" a relative term. The idea that we cannot be "gods" is related to an idea about godhood and scale. That's why the Eldan are such a critical element in Nexus's story. Several of them began to believe they were gods, but most simply thought they were scientists and scoffed at the very notion of godhood. Yet they occupied exactly that position. And at the same time, they were attempting to "create" a "god" because they themselves, even in the position of revered deity to races all over the galaxy, wanted to attain a fundamental power over all of creation. So their bar for godhood rose. Remember that people literally DID believe alchemy was magic (and for that reason clergy were banned from researching it in the 1300s, right up until the Enlightenment). People viewed astology the same way; there was a period when science and magic were by and large the same thing. The idea of magic only being aspects somehow unexplainable to science is relatively more modern, but it's inaccurate. To this day, we have no understanding of what actually causes gravity. We understand it exists, we understand how to calculate it as a function of mass, and we can put it into practice, but we have no idea how it is actually caused. We have theories, but no proof. It's still not "magic", though, which it would be if all things we couldn't understand were magic. So what is a God? You are postulating that Gods can't come to being from technology because it has to be effortless for them? How do we define effort? Do we believe that all stories whereby gods had to exert effort (Christian creationism, for example, paints it as a bit more than a flick of the wrist, and even God had to rest for an entire day afterwards) paint them as not gods? And, in fact, it doesn't take us an awful lot of effort to set up a petri dish, generate bateria from cell growth, and let them multiply. Would you not be a god then just because the life you create is insignificant and doesn't have your mental capacity? That argument was the center of European religious thought for millenia, that God has a macroscopic plan you can't possibly understand with your tiny, insignificant, limited human intelligence. Wildstar asks a lot of these questions because, in the end, the Eldan actually had characteristics of many gods. They lived in a different place, observing and interacting with the galaxy through a race they directly built to serve, employing a chosen race of people to spread their word through the galaxy. They were certainly gods to the Cassians, and had ample power to prove it. Some of them even believed it. But at the same time, they themselves were more cognizant of their own limitations. They wanted to create a God because, for the most part, they understood themselves to not be gods, even when an entire galaxy believed them to be. So we're at the point where you might be the all-seeing, all-knowing creator of a world of bacteria, and you'd absolutely be their god. You just feel bacteria aren't significant enough to make us so, even though the entire point behind a god is that they would occupy the same space above us. And that's only the Abrahamaic definition we follow predominantly in Europe and North America. Gods in other traditions, The Greco-Roman, Norse, Pagan, these weren't nearly in as lofty of positions. The Eldan might not have been "God", but they could absolutely have been seen in the position of gods. Most religions don't paint divine beings the same way our historical ancestors did. In fact, the Eldan's own religion (recall they named the primevals after their cultures historical divine beings, which were numerous in nature and seemed to be arranged in a pantheon). It does raise the question, though, because although you might consider our bacteria in a petri dish to grant us unsatisfactory divinity, it could very well be that the whole of the observable universe that you can see is just the ever-expanding nourishing solution on a petri dish for some intelligence which created our whole universe sees you as precisely as insignificant. It's a little humbling to think that scales of time could easily mean our universe is just some experiment being run and "God" could just be some cosmic molecular biochemist trying to get this experiment hurried up before his lunch break. It's all relative. It just feels like it discredits the idea of our own achievements as a race of people that we're accomplishing things that would have been, quite literally, magic. We can have conversations through televisions; that's very literally an old magic staple of having enchanted mirrors that can allow wizards to communicate across vast distances.


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