A subtlety I noticed about the campaigns in almost every DLC.
These three words describe not the quality, but atmosphere of the story, its protagonist’s character, the mood that the authors conveyed to us.
Lords of the West (2021)
Hauteville dynasty - the good (child listens to stories about how his ancestors created a new prosperous nation)
Edward Longshanks - the bad (he enslaved peoples, killed Scottish protagonists, also narrator is a failed king)
Grand Dukes of the West - the ugly (burgundians fought for independence but in the end lots of intrigue and internal mistakes, their people afraid of themselves)
Dawn of the Dukes (2021)
Jadwiga - the good (we worry about her and suffer along with her widower)
Algirdas and Kestutis - the bad (they keep the narrator in prison, one of the protagonists becomes a dictator)
Jan Zizka - the ugly (the Hussites fought with themselves and didn’t really achieve anything)
Dynasties of India (2022) + 1 free campaign
Prithviraj - the good (we feel for his love story, Indian version of Romeo and Juliet)
Rajendra - the bad (dictator who went so far as to confuse good and evil)
Devapala - the ugly (confused in himself and only thanks to the instructions of his brahman he took the right path)
Babur - breaks out of this formula, I can’t classify Babur as one of these sides, but it’s a well told deeply personal story
Return of Rome (2023)
Trajan - the good (a calm story about an emperor who wanted to be better than his predecessors)
Sargon of Akkad - the bad (story of the first ever mad dictator)
Pyrrhus of Epirus - the ugly (comedy story about unlucky commander)
Mountain Royals (2023)
Tamar - the good (heroic defender of her country and her suffering daughter-narrator)
Thoros II - breaks the formula (he did banditry, but we still sympathize with him)
Ismail - the ugly (the story is about everything and nothing in particular, in this case the word characterizes not only the character but also the quality of the campaign)
Overall I like this formula, although I think it was born by chance. I could advise the devs to stick with it further.
Interesting observation. It is my opinion that Rajendra is one of the best campaigns in the game. It has a very compelling negative character arc that gets one to think: Would I really be any different if I were a ruler?
I believe that storytelling should always get people to think about larger truths, and while most campaign narration just provides historical context for the scenarios with a mild narrative, this one tells a compelling story just within the narration.
Rajendra and especially his ending was the first and only case when I got really scared by playing AoE. And that is a special type of enjoyment from gaming experience.
I personally think it’s kinda immature to divide so neatly between good and bad and that’s exactly what the Rajendra campaign shows you. As he grows up he learns to understand the reason of his father, meaning that he acknowledges he wasn’t a mad dictator but just a man forced to adapt to difficult times. This doesn’t save him from an harsh moral judgement of course but it helps the player to see things more in perspective, as an adult should do. Situations in real life where the good and the bad are neatly divided are very rare, that’s a scheme we have in our mind. One thing is our ideals, another is reality: this is the philosophical point of Rajendra.
Pyrrhus instead is a tale about the meaningless of life, again an extremely intelligent parallel with Sisyphus (and existentialism and Camus for who’s into philosophy) while Jadwiga (my favourite campaign) is again a tale about maturity and growth: it starts as the typical teen tragic love story but it shows, like Rajendra, how at times you won’t understand the wrongdoings of life until you won’t be adult enough to acknowledge the consequences of them and the bigger picture. And like in Pyrrhus it seems to want to prove how “life is not a perfect ideal we hide in our mind but a mistake to be embraced and lived through every day despite its meaninglessness” (I kinda adapted a Kierkegaard’s quote, another existential philosopher).
So you can clearly see a trend in lord basse’s campaigns and when you see a trend it means you’re dealing with an author and an artist, one who has a style and a philosophy behind his creative method. I think lord basse may be the only one deserving this title among the official creators. I like almost all campaigns of this game in some way but he’s different and it’s pretty obvious at first glance. He doesn’t fall in none of the traps of rhetorics and clichés of epic tales and tragedies (the good and the bad scheme being one of those) and he’s very smart in how he challenges common moral beliefs, with subtlety, at the point I’m sure most people never noticed how Jadwiga could be seen as a “combined marriage for political reasons was not necessarily always a bad thing” or “women giving up on their desires to serve their people” story because if people would have noticed this I’m sure there would have been some kind of reaction against it.
I wish all stories were on the same level of these (the original ones like Saladin and Attila are close though) because in the end everyone of these characters is a tragic one, if you look at it from nowadays, and human history as a whole can be seen as a huge mad tragedy, as shown in Sargon. Actually all campaigns from Ror are very good story wise although the scenarios themselves are often forgettable unfortunately.
Still to me the plot, the theme and the narration are extremely relevant and few campaigns are interesting in this sense. Most are pretty forgettable and mediocre like Devapala, Suryavarman, Bari, Tariq, Alaric…
Those impersonal almost documentary like narrations are what I try to avoid when writing my own plots along with typical tropes like the epic of war, empires, glory etc. Not necessarily for political reasons but because it’s so standard and obvious. I prefer to take the occasion to express something more personal. I mean imagine if Shakespeare instead of using history as a mean for telling a good tragedy would use it for narrating of the greatness of the western world: that would probably be what today we call propaganda and it would be extremely boring and predictable.
That’s why I imagined all the characters of my campaigns as tragic ones, from Dihya to Alaric and Samo through Fredegar but if you play the official Alaric it makes it look like he sacked Rome cause he was evil, mad and barbaric, you really don’t understand what his motivations as a human being (although of course conjectured in some measure) could have been, it’s good Vs bad indeed, quite childish if not one-sided and rhetorical.
You’re right, my apologies, I used a strong language but it wasn’t directed at you, rather to an idea, still it was too strong so I’m sorry.
While I mostly agree with the categorization you did of good Vs bad what I wanted to say is that often it’s a matter of perspectives, also from the pov from where the story is told. A french nationalist would say they love Jean of arc and she was good but maybe a peasant living around Soissons (the destroyed city in the last scenario of the grand dukes) has no interest in siding with either her or the English so in his view she’s neutral to evil.
Gengis khan I think is still some kind of national hero today in Mongolia although he was not much better than Hitler when you think of it. And so on.
Everyone of them is good and bad for someone! The point was something else. It’s how the game shows the story about them. Positive, negative narrative or smth tragic-weird. It’s the talk about atmosphere, storytelling.