What Happened To Wortox?

[viblym]

I think most people know at this point just by looking that Wortox's character has taken an absolute nosedive since his release. Initially, he would rhyme on occasion, cracking a few jokes now and then, he would self deprecate, and express guilt when innocent creatures come to harm. His quotes fit his personality of a fun loving imp that often goes a little too far with pranks, but genuinely means no harm. Over time his quotes have tragically not been given as much care as they should, as he's sort of been lobotomized into a constant rhyme machine, of poor taste too. His entire personality now feels so devoid of himself.

Like oh my god? EVERY quote here is a rhyme. And I cannot even say most of them are "good" rhymes, they're so forced it's outright painful to read. Not in a "oh some puns are funny even if they're painful to hear." this is just outright painful. Last time he slided he almost dieded? What HAPPENED.




Compare to some on-release generic interaction quotes for a variety of things. Notice he only rhymes organically in sentences?

He's still capable of making a lot of rhymes, what happened to him came from somewhere



These are just here for example. This isn't always who his character was. The deterioration of character quotes is a long time coming, I've talked to a decent number of people who have noticed that characters haven't been doing too good lately. Remember when they had to redo some Wormwood quotes because he sounded like a caveman? I feel like a lot of others have flown under the radar because not many people really notice when something is off until Every Single Quote starts getting out of hand like it did for Wortox. Wortox is outright flanderization, one aspect of his character has gotten completely out of control and he suffers as a result. Nevermind his skill tree- I think the theming of Wortox's skill tree was a terrible idea. As he is Wortox treads a careful middle ground of existing as a selfish creature that feeds on the lives of the innocent in order to sustain himself, he still has morals, he still feels that what he does is wrong and harbors guilt for what he does. The entire design of his skill tree takes his nuanced character and pushes him in the extreme in either direction. People joke about "MUST EAT TASTY SOULS" a lot but even with that quote removed it didn't fix his character. 

This quote in specific frustrates me to no end


He would HATE what the hail does to innocent birds, but he's so detached, like the imp that refuses to even pet critters at risk of harming them would gleefully remark on the bird blender in the sky. Not even his followup quote for hail dials back this extreme. He just doesn't care at all anymore. Every update has been a jump to see if his quotes have improved at all and the answer is always no. They somehow just keep getting worse. 

Many people mention "The beast is reviving, who did the unaliving?" quote for Wortox and I hardly consider a quote like that to be the great indicator that something is wrong- it was just Klei making a painful joke, but every single one of his quotes reads like this now. Maybe an outlier or two is fine, but this is just how he talks now. It's BAD bad. This has been a long time coming, but it feels like such a large issue to tackle nobody has really gone through the effort of putting a full post together. I myself am being lazy and pulled only a few stand out examples and comparisons, but there are many, many more. 

I understand there's a lot of quotes and that there's a lot of characters to cover with each update, but it feels like more effort at this point to make Wortox rhyme constantly than it would be to just give him actual quotes. 

[Well-met]

wait 'till you find out they turned wilson into a breathing forced pun machine

[crushcircuit]

I have more to say on the topic so i'll likely be back here at a later date, but i'd also like to link back to my post about his skill tree characterization that brushed the surface of the issue through the lens of his inclination dialogue:

notice how most of my examples here are his quotes from launch? there's a reason for that. (the reason is that his new quotes give not an ounce of characterization. In fact, i'd dare to say his modern dialogue straight-up isn't indicative of a person. He doesn't share opinions. He rhymes, and he will say anything if it rhymes.)

i wanted to like his skill tree theming because i think his strong sense of morality and justice is very integral to his character but it just... didn't explore that at all.

Edit: Important to note that wortox is a poet. he does poetry and wordplay. rhyming is not the only thing that could include, but it is the only thing that is done nowadays, and he didn't even do it that much to begin with.

Edited March 31 by crushcircuit

[Radicaljoe]

I was gonna make a terrible wortox pun reply, but I couldn't in good faith. Because it's genuinely kinda upsetting that Wortox is like this now. 

[Bumber64]

I don't the issue with some of these. The first one seems fine, for instance.