UTBS, God, and Wesnoth (*SPOILER WARNING*)

[Eleazar]

I'm looking over the campaign. The religion seems to be a random mixture of Christianity and polytheism. Some of the statements are inconsistent...

This is off topic, and not very helpful, because you apparently haven't played it.
In the end, UtBS makes sense, but maybe not in the way you would expect.
If you haven't played it, i'd recommend steering clear of spoilers until you beat it.

[Dave]

Well, I was hoping someone would make a point I wanted to make, since I was hoping to avoid this discussion entirely. I find discussions such as this one incredibly tiresome. However, no-one has, so here goes:

Just because we include a campaign, or any content, doesn't mean we agree with every aspect of it. Sometimes content needs to be included inspite of various features that have been frowned upon in the past. Deciding whether to include content often involves deciding whether features we don't necessarily like are bad enough to overshadow its other qualities.

I don't want to make some hard and fast rule saying "if your campaign does xyz, then we won't put it in the official version", because many campaign designers hope that if they do a good enough job, their campaign may one day become official. This would stifle creativity.

Rather, we tell campaign designers to go off and make as good campaigns as they can, trying different things, and if we like them, we may make them official one day. If we don't like some aspects of them, we may try to rework those aspects. If we decide those aspects are too difficult to rework or are too fundamental to the work, we have to decide whether they are severe enough to exclude the campaign, or if the campaign's quality overshadows whatever features we don't like about it.

If someone made a very good campaign that involved discussion of primitive firearms, I can't say it would be excluded because of that, even though our 'policy' in the past has been to keep the topic of firearms mysterious within the game.

I think that developing an Open Source project involves a few hardline, non-negotiable points, and alot of compromising on other points. I am quite happy to compromise on any point which I don't feel is fundamental to the project's success, if it means we can get better content in the game.

And now, hopefully I can quietly shrink back into the shadows and leave this topic be.....

David

[Dacyn]

This is off topic, and not very helpful

er, sorry...
As I said, I was looking over the campaign... mainly that means looking at the messages in the scenario files. I don't see why I would actually have to play the campaign (as I am not planning on doing)

Actually, I was trying to answer my question above:

I don't really see why they would continue to believe in their god after that

It seems the reason is that Eloh represents some sort of values which are necessary for survival:

She taught us that alone we are weak, but together we can still strike fear into the hearts of our enemies. We learned that the only way to survive in this new harsh world was to always value the needs of the many over the wants of the individual. We must all work together, for without each other we are nothing. Even as the plains dried up into deserts we continued to follow her will and walk in her path, remembering our ancestors and the sacrifices they made that we might live, and always looking to create a better world for our children.

This seems an odd basis for a god to me, but I guess that is just my opinion

[turin]

Well, I was hoping someone would make a point I wanted to make, since I was hoping to avoid this discussion entirely. I find discussions such as this one incredibly tiresome. However, no-one has, so here goes:

Just because we include a campaign, or any content, doesn't mean we agree with every aspect of it. Sometimes content needs to be included inspite of various features that have been frowned upon in the past. Deciding whether to include content often involves deciding whether features we don't necessarily like are bad enough to overshadow its other qualities.

I don't want to make some hard and fast rule saying "if your campaign does xyz, then we won't put it in the official version", because many campaign designers hope that if they do a good enough job, their campaign may one day become official. This would stifle creativity.

Rather, we tell campaign designers to go off and make as good campaigns as they can, trying different things, and if we like them, we may make them official one day. If we don't like some aspects of them, we may try to rework those aspects. If we decide those aspects are too difficult to rework or are too fundamental to the work, we have to decide whether they are severe enough to exclude the campaign, or if the campaign's quality overshadows whatever features we don't like about it.

If someone made a very good campaign that involved discussion of primitive firearms, I can't say it would be excluded because of that, even though our 'policy' in the past has been to keep the topic of firearms mysterious within the game.

I think that developing an Open Source project involves a few hardline, non-negotiable points, and alot of compromising on other points. I am quite happy to compromise on any point which I don't feel is fundamental to the project's success, if it means we can get better content in the game.

And now, hopefully I can quietly shrink back into the shadows and leave this topic be.....

David

THANK YOU, dave! This is exactly the sort of answer that makes sense to me. What you're saying is that basically Wesnoth follows, to use my analogy earlier in this thread, the "publishing house" model, rather than the other yet-to-be-analogized model.


I will now withdraw my complaint, but not because I am no longer opposed to UTBS's religious characteristics.