Oh, and sorry for the front page. WP-Cache plugin is being weird lately.

Well, it is never explicitly mentioned. When you “dominate” an Orc slave handler, the human slaves typically just run away (though it is the exact same reaction script as if you would kill him). Also, you typically only see un-bound Orcs watching over groups of slaves so you could argue that you are more or less “freeing” the slaves indirectly. But, there are always unbound Orcs spawning in the world, and they do keep slaves. Your branded captains are their de-facto leaders and they don’t mind and mechanically you can’t do anything about that.

So Talion, may prohibit his Orc puppets from personally keeping slaves, but he can’t have them influence their underlings to do the same. So systemically slavery continues because there is no “system” for managing it – most likely because the designers did not give a shit. Which is understandable seeing how managing the way game handles player death for example is probably a more immediate and interesting problem than modeling social implications of mind control versus slavery. Still, it does come up, and it does rub you the wrong way if you notice it.

Never mind, now I can see it.

Like, how awesome would it be to order my underlings to free their slaves,

Wait, killing and mind-controlling orcs is okay for our hero because they are evil and keep slaves and etc. but when he ends up ruling all the orcs, he doesn’t bother to have them set their slaves free? Aren’t they actually his slaves at that point? That’s pretty unheroic even for a “darque” brooding anti-hero.

Anyway, procedurally generated NPCs are a really great idea, but I don’t understand why they chose to make them enemies. Allies would be a much more natural application, at least on the first attempt, I think. Now if only someone made a Brütal Legend like game where (some of) your soldiers are generated like that…

By the way, why can’t I see this post on your blog’s front page? I only found the link on twitter.