Quote from: TheBATMAN on Sep 15, 2022, 05:35:40 PMI wont criticise the excellent RPG, I honestly feel the over-reliance on its source material is starting to harm these stories somewhat.
I think the biggest problem with the Aliens license is that it's just not meant for this volume of material. The Alien universe is one of bleak corporate exploitation among the stars in a very near-future setting. The Marines in the movie are f**king
bored out of their minds. Their dinner table conversations are about bad food and prostitutes. They complain about not getting into any "stand up fights." As a former Marine, the only people who complain about not getting into any real fights are the people who've never been in one.
Frost says "I got a bad feeling about this drop," and Crowe immediately makes fun of him for it.
The Alien was supposed to be the most exciting thing that had happened to humanity, though not in a good way. The rest of it was terraforming worlds, then pulling natural resources out of them. Space travel is slow, ships are expensive, colonies are fairly small and purpose-built.
The trouble for the license is that
because the Alien is the most exciting thing that ever happened, it coming back over and over is the only way to make the setting exciting.
The RPG tried to spice things up with this whole Call of Duty: Space Warfare setting with some three way Not-So-Cold War, but it's almost antithetical to the way the setting has been depicted. The idea of governments fighting over distant planets, when space travel is still so relatively slow, is at odds with a future where corporations have tremendous pull and can control the lives of their employees so completely.
I mean, the RPG didn't even realize that its depictions of Arcturians would be a paradigm-shifting discovery. A near-human alien species that worships a race of other near-human aliens from the sky? It would upend everything we know about human evolution and our place in the universe. The RPG treats the place as a curiosity that only scientists care about. The fact that the RPG seems to dictate a lot of the "canon" for the books is probably a bad thing, because, honestly, the RPG's canon is kinda dumb. A setting looking for a reason to exist as an RPG, rather than a setting so interesting and full of possibilities, it begs for an RPG to be there.
Destroyer of Worlds is a pretty solid example of just how badly written the RPG is a lot of the time. Nothing in the story makes any sense. It's just a sequence of action scenes strung together by a skeletal detective plot. How do UPP operatives arrive on planet if there is one space port? How does a fleet of UPP ships arrive without being detected until they are in low orbit? Why do the orbital defenses only start firing as the UPP invasion is underway? If the setting has no shields, space combat would be incredibly dangerous to all sides, something you'd only engage in if desperate or with some overwhelmingly pressing need.
It's not Firefly or Star Wars with a galaxy full of developer worlds to visit and freebooters with their own Affordable Spacecraft. It's much closer to The Expanse. There's just not going to be a lot you can do with the setting before it's going to feel like everything is a retread, or you have to go so far outside the established canon to introduce anything new.