Tobold's Blog

Wrath of the Righteous - Start of Act 3

2026-08-12T13:28:30.197+02:00

So I ended my excursion into the Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous DLCs, and went back to the main game, where I was at the very start of Act 3. That turned out to be a slow and confusing start. In Wrath of the Righteous you are playing a Heroes of Might & Magic -like game in parallel with a roleplaying game. And in Act 3, the map for both of these parts is huge, much bigger than in Act 2. Now I started Act 3 at level 10, which is normal if you don't do some special trickery in Act 2. But I found it hard to reach level 11, which many locations being small and not giving much xp, or feeling a bit out of my level range. If I need to roll a 20 to hit a monster, I probably shouldn't be there at that level.

The solution turned out to be waiting, as at some point my Mythic Quest suddenly appeared one day. For me playing on the Angel mythic path that involved visiting a temple and its surrounding lands. And one quest there, collecting 21 special daggers, rewarded me with 23040 xp, which is about half a level at this point, and made me reach level 11.

A bit of research revealed that I should now first do the continuation of that mythic quest instead of all the other quests. Because that will get me to mythic rank 4, which is another huge boost to my power. And the crusade management part of the game goes in parallel to that, and sometimes provides me more power boosts, for example by doing decrees that repair relics. Only then should I return to the quest locations that were available earlier to me, like Whitesun, and with all this added power I should be more easily able to deal with that.

The Treasure Of The Midnight Isles

2026-08-06T12:25:07.939+02:00

I am still working my way through the DLCs for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, which I bought for cheap in a bundle in a recent Steam sale. I finished both Through the Ashes and The Lord of Nothing, and now started The Treasure Of The Midnight Isles. Which is a bit of a weird one when you play the standalone version, as it turns the game into a roguelike dungeon crawler. And that brings me to some thoughts about the dual nature of roleplaying games in general.

What I mean by the dual nature of roleplaying games is that they are both tactical games and narrative games. "I rolled a 20 and my barbarian deals 24 critical damage to the orc" and "Thrud the barbarian rushes forward, swinging his battleaxe, splitting the orc's head in two" are actually both describing the same event. While Wrath of the Righteous has lots of tactical combat and character build optimization, there is also a large story spanning five acts, plus numerous side quests and companion-specific quests. And the two parts can get into each other's way, when for example you play with a group of companions who aren't exactly the classes or builds that would have chosen if you had made the full party from scratch.

In The Treasure Of The Midnight Isles you make your whole party from scratch, starting with two characters and gaining more until your group is full over the course of the game. There are no companions, and there is only a very thin story leading your through a series of procedurally generated dungeons full of random monsters and treasures. So if in the main game you never got the party of your dreams, if you play this DLC standalone, you can build this dream party and try it out against various combat challenges. Or you can build various parties with the more exotic classes and builds that you never had the opportunity to try out in the main game.

The downside is that other that combat there isn't much to see in The Treasure Of The Midnight Isles. There are a few token opportunities to use skill checks, but succeeding a Lore skillcheck rewards the party with a buff instead of giving you any actual lore. At the end of each 5-dungeon run is a boss fight, but you've never heard of that boss before, and he is just a final, harder challenge for each run. You don't have history with the bosses, like you often do in the main game. And that makes the DLC a bit more boring than the main game, because the narrative of the main game is a motivating factor in the game.

I don't think I will play The Treasure Of The Midnight Isles very long. I'm trying out some character classes and builds for fun, but I will probably only do a handful of runs before returning to the main game. I am happy that I can try out some things, but after a few dungeons a character build without a story isn't enough to carry the game for me.

What is the purpose of holidays?

2026-07-31T13:30:14.465+02:00

Let me show you my holiday selfie:

As you might have guessed, this image was created with AI (ChatGPT). If I actually wanted to visit the Greek island of Santorini with the famous blue roofs, that would probably be a rather horrible experience. Every day, thousands of people disembark there from their cruise ship, only to stand in line for hours at the best spots to make holiday selfies. The purpose isn't to actually have a good time, but to produce an image for Instagram or some other social media platform. Producing the same image with AI to me seems the better solution. At least it was a lot faster, cheaper, and less unpleasant.

At this time of the year, end of July, I always used to be on summer holidays. Europeans have up to 6 weeks of holidays per year, and taking something like 3 weeks during the summer is very common. As many people have children, they take holidays during the summer school holidays. And although I don't have children, the absence of so many colleagues meant that there were few meetings at work during the summer. So it was better to take your holidays during this time where there wasn't much going on at work anyway.

If you had asked me a few years ago what the purpose of holidays is, I would have said rest and relaxation. We used to go to the seaside, stay for 3 weeks in a vacation rental, and not do very much at all other than taking walks and going to the beach. But then I retired. And out of habit we tried the exact same type of holiday again, and neither I nor my wife liked it anymore. It turns out that retirement has a lot of rest and relaxation and doing not much every day of the year, and a holiday to do nothing isn't really a break anymore. So we now take shorter holidays, and rather go to places where we can have some activity visiting things, cultural or historical. We also take holidays in June or September, rather than July/August, to avoid the rush. And we rather visit places that few people want to make Instagram holiday selfies of. There are a lot of beautiful spots within a few hours drive from where we live, in Belgium, Germany, or France. We take the plane to go on holidays a lot less than previously.

Despite the permanent narrative of a cost of living crisis and how badly everybody is doing, in 2025 global tourist arrivals hit 1.52 billions, breaking the pre-COVID record of 2019. As these tourists aren't evenly distributed, there are spots that you simply can't visit anymore in comfort, as they are completely overcrowded. Spain now has a number of tourist spots in which the local population stages massive protests against tourism, despite the economic benefit. But then, some forms of tourism, especially cruise ships, do not benefit the visited locations all that much, with most of the profit going to large corporations instead of local population.

European holidays are further complicated by climate change. Here is Belgium, yesterday it was 34°C or 93°F. Large swathes of Spain and southern France have been hit by huge wildfires this month. While previously there was a clear motivation to leave rainy Belgium during the holidays and visit a place in the sun, that motivation goes away quickly if the sun comes to Belgium and the place you wanted to visit is burning. And even if there aren't any wildfires, I wouldn't want to go somewhere where it is 40°C or more during the day. My preferred holiday weather would be 25°C and sunny, but these days this is more likely off season than during the summer months.

The Lord of Nothing

2026-07-30T09:04:31.231+02:00

I finished the Through the Ashes DLC for Wrath of the Righteous, and started playing the next DLC, The Lord of Nothing. And I was able to import my whole party from the former DLC into the latter, with all their gear, xp, and levels untouched, and a direct story continuation. A bit further in the DLC I picked up a mandatory new group member, and thus had to kick out one of my three mercenaries, but other than that I was able to keep my group from one DLC to the next, which was nice.

In many aspects The Lord of Nothing is more pleasant to play than Through the Ashes. While Through the Ashes was an attempt to make a survival RPG, The Lord of Nothing is a lot closer to classic heroic fantasy. I am gaining levels quickly, and loot is plentiful. Furthermore playing level 5 to 11 is more fun to me than playing levels 1 to 5, because characters have more options, spells and powers. In my personal opinion both D&D and Pathfinder are actually best around levels 5 to 10, and get a bit silly at higher levels, especially the spellcasters.

Having said that, Through the Ashes was somewhat original as a story of non-hero "civilians" fighting for survival during a catastrophe. The Lord of Nothing has a far less original story, which is actually rather stereotypical: You need to collect a set of shards, and each shard is in a different location, held by a different boss mob. Conveniently, teleportation portals open always to just the place where you need to go next. And while your characters are still weaker than the characters of the main game, due to having fewer points for attributes at creation, and no mythic powers, they are a lot stronger than they were in the previous DLC. They have much better gear, and they gain shard powers instead of mythic powers.

In summary, The Lord of Nothing plays very much like a classic D&D/Pathfinder game. I read that if you play the DLC at high difficulty, it adds some content to the main game, but I am playing on medium difficulty, so I get nothing. You can't import characters from the DLC into the main game, and you probably wouldn't want to, due to them being weaker. The DLC isn't particularly long, around 15 hours if you do everything, same length as Through the Ashes. At full $12.99 price per DLC I would have wondered whether these DLCs are worth it, but I only paid $12 for *all* Wrath of the Righteous DLCs together in the "Game of the Year Edition" bundle during a sale, so I can't complain about the price. In the end the two DLCs were an opportunity to try out some different character classes than I have in the main game, and were fun enough.

Everquest for wimps

2026-07-28T17:18:26.027+02:00

Around the year 2000, after The Ruins of Kunark expansion was released, I played Everquest for 18 months. I never even reached the level cap in that time, only getting to level 42 with my druid. And I was playing a druid because that was at the time one of the classes that could at least get some xp soloing, by a technique called quad-kiting. But in general, Everquest was brutally hard, you had to be in a group even for killing regular open-world monsters, xp gain was slow, and you got brutally punished when things went wrong; that included xp and level loss, and the possibility to lose all of your gear if you died in a too dangerous spot and couldn't get your corpse back.

Today Everquest Legends releases. It is an officially licensed, authorized commercial product, based on the original Everquest. But it is far, far easier: You get to play initially 2, later 3 character classes in the same character, allowing you to solo as your very own mini-group. There is no more xp loss if you die, no more corpse runs, no more getting thrown back to a bind point several zones away if you die. It is Everquest in easy mode, for people who are at the same time nostalgic, but not willing to play the original, which still exists.

Twenty years ago I might have been interested. Today I'm not playing any MMORPGs anymore, and I'm not tempted by Everquest Legends. Although Everquest is only 5 years older than World of Warcraft, its graphics haven't aged as well. And although I liked soloable World of Warcraft much more than I liked forced grouping in Everquest, I don't think you can "fix" Everquest by making it casual and solo friendly. Those of us who played EQ do remember it *because* it was brutally hard and slow. Somebody who never typed "camp check" in the commonlands zone chat will probably not understand, but Everquest had its own very peculiar culture due to it being so hard. Strangers approached my druid to get a taxi service, because my class was one of the few who had access to limited fast travel. Necromancers were approached for their corpse summoning services. People typed "HG" in zone chat to warn you of the Hill Giant. If you wanted to trade, you had to meet in the East Commonlands tunnel. You would chat with the people you met while waiting for the boat. Everquest was an extremely social game experience, and I don't think Everquest Legends will be.

Through the Ashes

2026-07-26T09:47:03.702+02:00

I am half way through the Through the Ashes DLC of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. There are parts of it that I enjoy a lot, as I generally think that D&D/Pathfinder games get a bit silly beyond level 10; especially due to spellcasters that get both stronger spells and more spells with level, leading to extreme power levels. And thus, playing Through the Ashes from level 1 to now level 3 was a nice change.

Having said that, the concept of Through the Ashes isn't really working. You are playing a group of "non-hero" civilians, which are in fact just regular Pathfinder characters with 15 instead of 25 points to put into abilities, and basically no equipment. You're supposed to avoid combat to a maximum, and combat doesn't give xp, but many combat encounters are still unavoidable, and you'll need the loot they give. Parts of it don't work well in turn-based mode: You need to switch to real-time mode to aggro different groups of enemies to lead them to each other, so they kill each other while you run away. Sometimes you can defeat enemies by dropping something from the environment on top of them, but that usually needs items like ropes and tools, and you don't find that many of these.

In the second chapter, sick NPCs are introduced, and they get sicker and die if you rest. You are supposed to find ways to heal them, but there is only a single cure disease scroll on the whole map, and very few lesser restoration potions. You are playing level 2 characters that don't have many spells, abilities, or healing, and you can't get those powers back through healing. The whole thing feels extremely punishing. And that is not just to me, I watched a streamer with tons of playthrough and guide content on YouTube try to tackle Through the Ashes at highest difficulty, and he was basically reloading every 5 minutes.

I would definitely recommend lowering some difficulty settings for this. The settings where your group members get back up after combat when killed, and get healed of negative conditions on a rest are pretty essential to playing Through the Ashes. It also helps to be aware that there isn't much gear around, and play classes that do well without, for example every class that gets animal companions. I have both a druid and a nature oracle, with two wolves being my frontline tanks. And even with all that, some fights are just hard and tedious. I spent an eternity on the last boss of chapter 2, using multiple grease spells to keep him down, and then rather ineffectively reducing his health with cantrips and ranged weapons to which he was mostly resistant. I also used spoilers like the Survivor Guide, because in the text sequences where you need to assign NPCs to tasks it isn't really obvious who would be suited for which task, so it is either looking that up or trial and error with save scumming. Or letting the survivors die and enjoy the ability to rest as much as you want, in exchange for getting a "bad" ending.

On the positive side Through the Ashes pushes you to use every scroll and every potion you find effectively and get creative to play around the severe limitations of your group. Tactics like kiting help, but aren't usually used in the Pathfinder games. I kited a necromancer in circles, because his animate dead spell only lasts one round per level, which takes a very long time if you do it in turn-based mode. The maps in Through the Ashes have more narrow paths, which works great for spells like grease and AoE effects like alchemist's bombs. Unfortunately the engine used for the Pathfinder games makes blocking a narrow path with a tank much harder than it is in Pillars of Eternity, which I played previously.

Overall, Through the Ashes is a very different experience despite using the same rules and engine as the main game Wrath of the Righteous. But I still think that the follow-up DLC The Lord of Nothing might be a bit more enjoyable, being less punishing.

The Resting Game

2026-07-24T09:06:33.575+02:00

In Dungeons & Dragons, spellcasters have a certain number of spells (based on their level) "per day". They recover their spells when they take a long rest. The result of that is that a group of adventurers is strongest right after a rest, when they have everything, and are weakest just before the next rest, when they have spent most of their spells and other "daily" abilities. Clever players thus ignore the implied day / night cycle and rest frequently. As many other RPG and CRPG systems have been heavily influenced by D&D, this recovering spells and powers by resting is a feature in many of these games.

In Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous I just finished Act 2, after about 40 hours in the game. And the last 10+ hours of Act 2 are spent at a large event, called the Siege of Drezen. While in most of the game you can usually rest as much as you want (there is a section with time pressure at the start of Act 1), in Drezen a different rule applies: You need to find a location of crusader supplies to rest, and resting consumes those supplies. That forces the player to make do longer between rests, which is an interesting twist.

Having said that, how much you want to rest depends a lot on your party composition. If you have mostly non-magical melee and ranged characters, maybe supported by a healer/buffer or two, you don't consume a lot of spells in each combat. With the help of alternative healing methods, like potions, you can last very long without needing a rest. My current Wrath of the Righteous party has several spellcasters. My main is a crusader, a hybrid melee / healer, and I have both a witch and a wizard in my group. So I used nearly all the crusader supplies I found during my Siege of Drezen. And the limitation forced me to watch my "daily" powers and not waste them, as a wizard throwing fireballs and a wizard ineffectively shooting a crossbow from behind are not the same power level.

I will now take a break from the main campaign of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, but only to play the separate DLC stories Through the Ashes and Lord of Nothing. In an unusual design decision, it isn't the main campaign which affects the DLCs, but the other way around. I already "missed" some minor content in Act 1 and 2 because it would have appeared after playing Through the Ashes. So I want to play the DLCs now, so I don't miss whatever else they add to the main story.

And as far as I know before starting, especially Through the Ashes is a story in which your group is more resource constrained than in the main story. So it will be interesting to see how resting is handled there. What are the restrictions put into place to prevent the player from resting after every fight?

Barrier to Entry Games

2026-07-22T09:43:11.294+02:00

For Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, I have the "Devoured by Darkness" achievement, which you get if you finish the tutorial. Only 59% of players have that. I also have the "Burning City" achievement, which you get at the end of Act I, and only 40% of players have that. In other words, of all the people who actually launched Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (Steam doesn't count owners, but players for achievements), 40% didn't make it through the tutorial, and 60% didn't make it through the first chapter out of six. The game has a high barrier to entry in the form of the very complex Pathfinder ruleset, and that drives people who try it away.

But as JFK once said, we don't play highly complex games because they are easy, but because they are hard. Which is why I for example increased the difficulty level of my Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous run after overcoming that barrier to entry. Creating one character in Pathfinder is hard, creating a whole group of 6 that works well together is extremely complex. I am now at the end of Act II, which is 15 hours of battle in the Siege of Drezen, and there is joy in finding that you built a group that is able to handle the various different combat situations that arise in that huge battle sequence.

As a consequence I ended up buying all the DLC content for both Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. That adds other, smaller campaigns to those games, and things like a rogue-lite endless dungeon crawl mode. In short, more content to play without having to replay the same main campaign again.

I was especially interested in the modes which let me actually create my whole party from scratch. I do understand why with the given barrier to entry to just creating one single character and then adding companions to the group, the developers didn't want to force players to create six characters. But once you understand the Pathfinder system better, there is interest in exactly that from me. And the main campaigns are very much linked to the companions, so playing it without companions and using self-created mercenaries instead would actually make some story lines go very weird, like the Lost Chapel sequence.

So I am finding a lot of depth and fun behind that barrier to entry. I am happy the two games, Kingmaker and Wrath, are implementing the full rules for maximum depth. But I do see how a lot of players don't make it over this barrier to entry and to the fun point, which is kind of a shame.

Using AI to play complex games

2026-07-20T09:27:47.842+02:00

I am currently playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Great game once you understand it, but with a huge barrier to entry from the highly complex Pathfinder ruleset. It is the Paradox of Choice turned into a videogame: A CRPG with too few choices for classes and skills would be boring, and more choice would improve the game, but at some point adding too many choices just produces overload and makes the game less fun.

So it regularly arrives that I have questions, e.g. "for companion X, what would be the best feat to choose at level Y". Back in the days, a Google search for "companion X build guide" would direct me to one of several possible websites that would have the answer for that. But over the years these websites became less and less pleasant, due to the use of search engine optimization (SEO). The useful information would be buried way down, so the reader has to scroll through a maximum of advertising.

The solution to that today is AI. I can simply type my question into Google, and get an AI answer directly, without having to follow a link. Wrath of the Righteous is already 5 years old, and reasonably popular, so there are a bunch of guides as well as discussions on Steam and Reddit available. If AI is good at anything, it is at sifting through a multitude of text sources and summarizing the answer. If I want to know the best feat for my companion, Google will now give me a list of recommended feats immediately, with some explanation of why I should choose them.

This is far from perfect. Sometimes the AI hallucinates, for example recommending me a feat that is in the Pathfinder ruleset, but not in the Wrath of the Righteous game. So sometimes I have to rephrase a question, or follow a link to double check a suspicious answer. But hey, it's for a game, not for anything professional, so I can live with a certain amount of errors. Often enough the answer is good enough on the first try, and having an answer quickly without having to read too much is an advantage in itself.

Of course that completely destroys the SEO business. If the AI gives me an answer which a game guide carefully hid way below the advertising, I am taking a shortcut and never see the advertising. Which reduces the revenue of the owner of the game guide website, and ultimately leads to there being fewer game guides available. There is a sort of poetic justice to that, that an AI algorithm ends up defeating the SEO, which was created to abuse the search algorithm.

Gaming Status July 2026

2026-07-15T09:54:35.632+02:00

I am now 20 hours into Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, reached the end of Act 1, and am enjoying myself a lot more than I did in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. While Wrath of the Righteous sure is to a good extent scripted, it gives you a lot more freedom to play, you're not just watching the story in cutscenes. I increased the difficulty level of the game to core, but modified that with a few quality of life options, like turning permadeath for companions off. Realistically, all permadeath does is to force you to reload an older save game and try the combat again. With the increased difficulty I am now also leveling up my companions manually instead of automatically, but I am not overly optimizing that. I think I got the difficulty about right now, because it happens that I lose a harder fight and have to retry. Which then usually isn't a problem, because knowing how the lost fight went helps a lot doing better next time.

I am also enjoying Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous a lot more than I did Pillars of Eternity. While both games are isometric, with similar controls, the ability to turn the camera and have real 3D environment instead of pre-rendered 2D is a lot better. There are details I preferred in PoE, like the better zones of control that enable you to block the enemy from passing through a doorway, but in general the gameplay flow is better in Wrath of the Righteous. The looting and crafting systems are also better, and the army management part is much superior to PoE's management of the keep.

Having said that, Wrath of the Righteous suffers from the same, previously mentioned problems of you having to choose between a selection of companions. As I am playing a cleric destined to become an angel, I am choosing my companions based on their alignment. That works out nicely, because the best healer in the game is evil, but I don't really need him due to my own healing powers. And by playing a tanky crusader cleric, I have room in my group for all those squishy ranged and magic companions. Overall I would have preferred being able to create all group members, as many classes simply don't exist as possible companions in the game, and sometimes you find loot specialized for a class you don't even have. But that is more of a replayability problem, and my previous run never got past Act 2 and was 5 years ago, so for my current run I am fine as it is.

In board games my campaign group is playing Stonesaga, in which we are playing a tribe of stone age people. The game is a bit more open world than our previous campaign games, with the story a bit more emergent through the challenges the game gives you, and how you overcome them, rather than being strictly scripted. We are still relatively early in the game, we'll have to see how long this game system remains interesting. Other than that, I'm still going to board game nights twice per week to play shorter games, that fit into a 3-hour window and don't require having the same people around the next week.

Wrath of the Theorycrafter

2026-07-10T12:38:08.302+02:00

I decided to put Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth on hold, and restarted Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous instead, to play a roleplaying game that gives me more player agency. The hurdle to that is the Pathfinder system, so I'll talk about a bit of pen & paper fantasy RPG history.

Around 2007-2009, a major schism occurred in the world of pen & paper fantasy roleplaying games. Dungeons & Dragons was in edition 3.5, and had accumulated a lot of rules baggage. Some people loved that, others feared that the game would become increasingly inaccessible to new players. So Wizards of the Coast decided to launch the 4th edition of D&D, with the goal to streamline the game and make it easier to understand, and more similar to popular computer RPGs like World of Warcraft. While the 4th edition sold well, lots of people disliked the more procedural and balanced rules approach of that edition. So Paizo published Pathfinder, a game that went in exactly the other direction, taking the already very detailed rules of D&D 3.5 and added another layer on top of it. For a time, Pathfinder was more popular than D&D, until D&D released the 5th edition, which was more true to the original D&D while still being more accessible. But Pathfinder retained a lot of fans, especially those who liked theorycrafting, finding the best combinations of classes and abilities in a huge selection of options.

Wrath of the Righteous is based on Pathfinder rules. For a computer RPG it is extremely complex. People have been known to start the game and not make it all the way through the character creation process, as that is so scary. The game has 25 base classes and 160 subclasses, which you then combine with over 200 feats, over 500 spells, and a range of other game subsystems. If you have any ambition of creating the "best" possible character, you are in for hours of work.

I never played the pen & paper version of Pathfinder, as it was just too much work for me. I don't enjoy theorycrafting all that much; I always fear that rules overload distracts from the narrative and roleplaying aspects of a game. But Pathfinder: Kingmaker is an excellent CRPG, which I played for over 180 hours. And the only reason I stopped playing Wrath of the Righteous was that at release it was still a bit half-baked, an experience I had again with Rogue Trader. I now know that games from Owlcat are good, but need several years of work after release before playing them.

So, if you don't theorycraft, how do you play a computer version of Pathfinder? The trick is simply to realize that theorycrafting doesn't change the fundamentals of the game, it just modifies the statistical probabilities to succeed in rolls, and thus the survivability and damage output numbers. If you don't want to do the theorycrafting work, you can achieve the exact same result by simply modifying the difficulty level. So I am now playing Wrath of the Righteous at "normal" difficulty, and not at a higher difficulty like "core", which is very explicitly for experts in the Pathfinder system. Putting in all the work to deal 10% more damage, and then increase the difficulty by 10%, didn't appeal to me. For my own character I'll choose abilities by what looks fun, and for my companions I use automatic leveling.

Instead of minmaxing and optimizing, I based my choice of character on my experience with the previous, partial run. I went for a character which fit perfectly in the story, a cleric crusader with an angelic background. Unlike Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous has later game "mythic paths", where I can actually become an angel. In a game that is all about the battle between demons and angels, I found that very fitting. There are other fun classes in Pathfinder, for example the bomb-throwing alchemist, but that wouldn't have related to the main story that much.

Soap opera

2026-07-09T18:35:40.363+02:00

I am now 7 hours into Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, in the middle of chapter 3. So how does it play? Well, it doesn't. I don't have the feeling that I did much playing in those 7 hours. I mostly watched cut-scenes. I was occasionally able to move freely and do some random trash mob fights, and gather random loot on the street. But up to now there was only a single small "dungeon" that remotely resembled a role-playing game activity. The rest of the "game" consisted of walking to the next point marked on the map and watching the next cut-scene. Sometimes there was no walking, just a sequence of several cut-scenes.

I wondered when the game would open up, and found out that it would do so somewhat around the 15 hour mark, in chapter 5, twice what I played up to now. I'm not sure if I'm not getting too bored of this "game" before. Right now, the best I can describe it, is that it is a soap opera. Things happen continuously to the main character, but the sequence of events doesn't form anything like a coherent story. Funnily enough, the Synopsis section of the Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth page on Wikipedia starts with an editors warning of "This section may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. When this tag was added, its readable prose size was 1,518 words.". That pretty much sums the game up, even a plot summary of the game is a wall of text.

There is a pretty blatant absence of player agency. Everything that happened to the main character up to now just happened in a scripted cut-scene. None of it had anything to do with any decisions I was allowed to take, not that there were many. I can decide what moves to do in combat, but there is no difficulty setting, and the one default difficulty is pretty trivial. I do kind of like the turn-based combat system in which characters move slightly around between turns, and you can modify your attacks with your location; for example you move next to a bike, and then your standard attack is transformed into grabbing that bike and hitting the enemy with it, or if you manage to line them up, you can hit one enemy into another for extra damage to both. There are also some mini-games, although I haven't reached the "major" mini-games yet.

So all I can do right now is watch what happens to the main character, Ichiban Kasuga. It doesn't help that he is kind of a dumbass. Nice guy, strong sense of honor, but not very bright. Spent 20 years of his life in prison for a crime he didn't do, and still gets tricked and scammed several times per chapter in the story. Not the kind of hero I would identify with. In fact, he feels a lot more like a victim than a hero. This might be just me being old-fashioned, and preferring old-style heroes to the new-fangled "cult of the victim". But there is also some sort of dissonance when in the gameplay you win every fight, and then in the cut-scenes you always lose out.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Tutorial

2026-07-08T11:45:08.865+02:00

I decided on which game to play next, and it is Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. That is the 8th game in the Yakuza series of games, but I haven't played any of the previous ones. Mostly because the previous games were beat 'em up action adventures, and this latest game is a turn-based roleplaying game, which is much more the kind of game I like.

Starting this right after Pillars of Eternity, I couldn't help but notice a major difference in starting a Japanese CRPG compared to a western CRPG: Many western CRPGs start with character creation, and you need to make a lot of choices before even knowing anything about the game. In Pillars of Eternity I could play character classes like cipher or chanter, having no idea what those classes do. I also had to distribute stat points, and was supposed to read and understand a lot of small print to find out things like that the "Might" stat was necessary even for wizards to increase spell damage. In Baldur's Gate 3 that was less of a problem for me, but only because they used D&D 5th edition, a system I am very familiar with. If you never played D&D, good luck guessing in advance what the difference between a wizard, a sorcerer, and a warlock are. There have been a number of western CRPGs in which I started the game, played for a few hours, and then started the game over from zero to make different choices during character creation.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth doesn't have that problem. There is no character creation, you simply start by playing Ichiban Kasuga, the main character, and you have no choice of character class or stat distribution. All that comes much later, where you can change jobs, but at the start you just play him as a generic level 1 "hero". At the start of the game, you get a *lot* of cut scenes explaining the situation, your character, and his motivation, and the gameplay elements like combat are gradually introduced and explained in much detail. If anything, the problem at the start of this game, and many other Japanese CRPGs, is that it takes several hours of handholding tutorial before you are given the freedom to actually really take any decisions.

I have always felt that the optimum would be somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. Some gameplay to explain how things like combat work, and only then having to choose things like character class and stat distribution. But that sort of tutorial shouldn't take hours and hours either. I read that the tutorial of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is about 5 hours, which is somewhat balanced by the game taking 80 hours overall. But I still think that this is a bit much of a tutorial; I certainly wouldn't want to restart such a game and have to go through 5 hours of handholding with little freedom again.

Too much game, don't want sequel

2026-07-07T06:30:00.000+02:00

How long is a game? As it is frequently possible to play any given game faster or slower, there really isn't a simple answer to this. There are sites like HowLongToBeat, which can give you an average number of hours which people took to play just the main story, the main story plus some side quests, or everything. Pillars of Eternity, which I am currently playing, apparently has about 36 hours of main story, and takes 64 hours if you add a usual amount of side content. I just finished my run in 60 hours.

By chance I stumbled upon information telling me that if I finish Pillars of Eternity, I can use the final save game to load into Pillars of Eternity 2, and the sequel would remember my major story decisions of the first game. Nice idea, but my instinctive reaction to that information was negative: I feel absolutely no desire to play Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire anytime soon.

Come to think of it, a game doesn't have one length for me, but two: The HowLongToBeat length it takes to reach the official end, and the number of hours it takes for me to get bored with the gameplay. In Pillars of Eternity, I reached the "I'm bored now" end hours before I reached the "game over" screen. And thus I really don't want to play the sequel, which, while not being exactly the same, would still have very similar gameplay. That doesn't make Pillars of Eternity a bad game. I did have 50 hours of fun before getting bored. I just didn't reach the official game end in those 50 hours. I decided to rush the last 10 hours, to see the end of the story, but the gameplay for that wasn't much fun to me anymore.

The boredom counter kind of resets over time. Thus if I play a current game, even if I had gotten bored with it at the end, by the time a sequel comes out years later, I might well be willing to play that. Playing an older game like Pillars of Eternity means the sequel is already available, and I could play it right away, but my boredom counter hasn't reset yet. In this particular case, curiously the turn-based mode of Pillars of Eternity has been added years after the turn-based mode of Pillars of Eternity 2, and is considered better. So I am even less tempted to play the sequel, unless they rework the turn-based mode for that one.

Note that getting bored before the end isn't unique to videogames. I did not buy Frosthaven, the sequel of the highly successful Gloomhaven board game, because Gloomhaven was already too long for me. We played like 20 scenarios of Gloomhaven, out of 95 existing scenarios, or around 65 for a full playthrough, and decided that we had enough of that game.

I'm still unsure what I will play next. But it probably won't be any 2D with pre-rendered maps CRPG. So it isn't just boredom with any specific game or series of games, but after X hours playing one genre of game I am ready to play something completely different, or at least different enough.

I don't want to resync

2026-07-06T06:30:00.000+02:00

In November 2014, I profited from a Steam sale and bought Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, Digital Standard Edition for 14.99 EUR. I played the game for 46 hours, reaching the end, and I liked it more than any other Assassin's Creed games. While the graphics of 2013 do look a bit dated in 2026, I'm pretty sure that the game is still totally playable as it is. Which is why I am a bit puzzled why Ubisoft thinks that I would like to pay 59.99 EUR for Assassin's Creed: Black Flag - Resynced, a "faithfully enhanced remake" of the original game with only a minor part of new content.

Now for somebody who never played the original game, the best Assassin's Creed game with better graphics and minor gameplay improvements could well be worth $60. But having already paid a much reduced price for the original, and neither Steam nor Ubisoft giving me any rebate for already owning the original, paying full price for the prettier version doesn't seem like a good deal to me. I might have been willing to pay $10 or $20 to upgrade my existing game to 2026 graphics, but certainly not $60.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe "Civilization VI Resynced" would have been a bigger success for Firaxis than Civilization VII was. I didn't buy any of the Final Fantasy VII remakes, because those are too different from the original game; I might have been more likely to buy a more faithful remake with mostly just the graphics improved and a few quality of life improvements, but the same story and game mechanics as the original.

But somehow Assassin's Creed: Black Flag - Resynced appears like the ultimate admission of failure to me. Ubisoft clearly was unable to make a new pirate game people liked with Skull & Bones, and so they are trying to sell me the one good pirate game they did make for full price again. It is as if game companies who tried to milk popular franchises by releasing endless streams of sequels have now reached the limits of that model, with the new sequels being much less popular than the original games that started the series. And they decided that "more nostalgia, less innovation" was the way out of that dilemma. It is like saying that they lost the knowledge of how to make new good games, and cloning an old game is the only way they know how to try to reproduce the secret sauce.

Ultra-powerful labor unions

2026-07-05T12:39:39.851+02:00

Imagine you are an employer, and all your employees and everybody else who can do their jobs are organized in a few ultra-powerful labor unions. The day the union decides that they want twice the money for their work, you are powerless, and only have the choice of either shutting down your business or paying whatever the labor unions demand. That is a pretty nightmarish scenario for most entrepreneurs, and especially in the USA, history has gone exactly the other way, with the power of unions much diminished over the past decades. No US company faces any risk that their human employees could successfully demand twice their current salaries and get away with it.

But what if the workers aren't human, and the name of those ultra-powerful labor unions are "OpenAI" and "Anthropic"? If you as an entrepreneur fired most of your human employees and have the majority of the work in your company done by AI, how much power do you have against the few companies that can provide that AI? If these companies raise token prices, and thus your labor cost, what can you do?

The push of employers towards AI, grading human employees by how much AI tokens they use, has led to those employees complying with that company policy and engaging in so-called tokenmaxxing. In many companies the cost for AI tokens has gone through the roof, with some companies blowing their annual budget in the first 4 months of 2026. This has resulted in more and more companies having to review the costs and benefits of AI labor versus human labor. And strangely, human labor being a decentralized market in which employers have more power than employees, could turn out to become the decisive advantage of human labor.

There are only a handful of AI companies that have models powerful enough to replace human employees. And these AI companies all make enormous investments into data centers, while currently selling their services at a loss. The old tech playbook of gaining market share by selling at a loss, and then raising prices when a monopolistic situation is reached, is pretty obvious. And that is a huge risk for the potential customers. Employers spent decades preventing unions to control a large percentage of their human labor, so now voluntarily handing over control of a large percentage of your (AI) labor force to a single organization sounds rather counter-productive. For a boss, human employees not only have the advantage that you can shout at them when things go wrong, but also that the power dynamics of job contracts are a lot more in the bosses favor.

Pillars of Eternity - Second Impression

2026-07-04T14:28:43.352+02:00

I am approximately halfway through Pillars of Eternity, having finished all quests in Defiance Bay and Dyrford, and now entering Clîaban Rilag. And I have to say that my motivation is waning. To explain that, I need to talk a bit about what a roleplaying game actually is, especially a computer roleplaying game.

All roleplaying games have at least a dual nature. It helps to know that the company that invented the first one, Dungeons & Dragons was TSR, which stands for Tactical Studies Rules. It was a company making wargames, and D&D at its core is a squad-based fantasy wargame. Tactical combat is an important part of nearly all roleplaying games, and even more so in the computer games. The other layer of RPGs is the story layer. What is that group of fantasy heroes fighting for or against? There frequently is an archvillain or some other greater evil, and in high fantasy settings the heroes might well end up saving the world, or at least a part of it. Now pen & paper RPGs usually just stick to those two parts, but in CRPGs there is quite often also a bit of a management part to it. The group of heroes has resources, for example spells, which deplete over time and recover by resting, and you need to manage these resources. You also need to manage equipment and inventory.

Pillars of Eternity has a big world-saving kind of story, about a very peculiar type of world. In this world, reincarnation is real, and magic / technology can be used to meddle with the souls that are transferred during reincarnation. The story deals with various aspects of that, from the main characters ability to remember his previous incarnations and speak with errant souls, to the major story about what gods are in such a world of reincarnating souls. While the writing is often quite good, it has to be said that the story is very complex, very long, and somewhat esoteric. It doesn't have the "tadpole in your eye" immediate directness and urgency of Baldur's Gate 3. Much of the story of Pillars of Eternity is only presented by text without voice acting, and that involves a lot of reading. In the end you don't really know whether you are chasing the archvillain because of what he did to the world, or just because you want to get rid of your status as a "watcher", as that is driving you crazy.

The walls of text problem of Pillars of Eternity is made worse by the game having been financed by crowdfunding. This allowed backers who paid more money than others to add their own text to the game, in the form of NPCs with their own backstories, or in the form of epitaphs on graves. You quickly learn that clicking on an NPC with a gold nameplate and reading his backstory is just a waste of time, as that story was written by a backer, and doesn't really have anything to do with the story of the game. Kickstarter stretch goals also added other unnecessary ballast, like an "endless dungeon" to crawl through for no reason, or a half-baked system in which you manage a stronghold, much worse than in Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

I am playing Pillars of Eternity now, because the game this year added a turn-based mode. For me, the tactical combat is more fun in turn-based mode, as I find real-time with pause frequently confusing. Having said that, I reached the point where the tactical combat isn't that much fun anymore. To me it seems there are some rather fundamental balance problems in the system. Due to enemies damage reduction being deducted from any damage you do, weapons that deal lots of damage slowly to me appear much more powerful than weapons dealing smaller packets of damage more frequently. And because the world of Pillars of Eternity has firearms, and firearms are slow and deal lots of damage, all of my group is now equipped with firearms or heavy crossbows. While against a large group of enemies some spells like fireball are very useful, against a single enemy my mage is dealing more damage with a pistol than with a spell. And the spell is a resource that depletes, while the pistol has unlimited ammo and shots.

Another reason that the game has become a bit too easy for me is the structure of many computer roleplaying games that have a main quest and optional sidequests. The dungeon I am in is apparently meant for level 7, but my group is level 9, because I did every single available sidequest. And that is without the DLC, of which is part is designed to be played at level 5+, and which results in your group being even more overleveled for the latter part of the main story. But the sidequests to me actually were more fun that the main story, as these smaller stories are easier to understand, and often deal with interesting moral dilemmas. They are more relatable than the main story about souls and reincarnation, because the moral dilemmas are of a kind that could also occur in our world, not just in a world with a specific way souls work. Being somewhat completionist with the sidequests and exploration also led to the management part of the game having become trivial, as Pillars of Eternity allows you to take all loot everywhere into a stash with unlimited capacity, and sell it from there later. I have far more gold, gear, scrolls, potions, and materials for crafting than I will ever need.

I think I am going to somewhat rush the rest of the game, and if that doesn't work, I'll stop playing before reaching the end. I can't remember a single computer roleplaying game in which I found the grand finale big boss fight satisfying. Some games do better than others by making the end feel better from the story aspect, but the final tactical combat is almost always somewhat tedious. Which isn't surprising, as even in pen & paper Dungeons & Dragons I find character progression at lower levels a lot more interesting than the high-level stuff.

Games vs. Movies

2026-07-03T11:50:11.611+02:00

In the Steam best-selling games of the week, this week there is a game called Meccha Chameleon. It is a so-called "friendslop" game, of hide and seek. That is to say that it is cheaply produced, but fun to play with friends. Cheaply produced as in two Japanese indie developers made it in two months. Fun to play as in going viral on social media and selling over 10 million copies. That is a problem for large game companies. There are a lot of triple A games out there that cost hundred of millions of dollars to make and that didn't sell 10 million copies. And even if Meccha Chameleon costs only $6, and the triple A game costs $60, or $70, or $80, the return on investment is obviously better for the indie game. And the people currently happily playing Meccha Chameleon are somewhat less likely to buy a triple A game this month; not that they don't have money left after paying $6, but because disposable time is also limited, and an indie game can eat up as many hours as a big game.

Why do big game companies make triple A games for hundreds of millions of dollars? It seems to me that the model for this was the movie industry. When I was young, cinemas still showed a mix of large blockbuster movies and smaller production, even B movies. But the economies of scale of movies made it so that the huge blockbuster movies were more profitable than the cheap movies. These days, indie movies are something only a few specialized cinemas in large cities might still show. The general movie market only has films that cost hundred of millions of dollars, and these crushed the smaller competition.

Games have very different economies of scale, especially when distributed digitally. The moment a game arrives on the Steam platform, there is nothing to prevent it from being sold millions of times at no additional cost to the developer. But there is also nothing to prevent it from being a total flop and selling just a few thousand copies. It then becomes a consideration of risk vs. reward: The two Japanese developers only risked two months of work, and if their game hadn't sold much, it would not have been a big loss for them, and maybe a fun experience. They got lucky and made millions, and after the share that Steam takes, they only need to split the money between the two of them. In comparison, 6,000 people are working on GTA 6. Now GTA 6 is extremely unlikely to flop, and will probably also sell millions. But its budget is over $1 billion, and it can't possibly reach the same return on investment as Meccha Chameleon. It can get its production cost back, and make a nice profit for the game company and its shareholders. It can't sell ten times more or hundred times more than expected, because the expectation is already selling 40 million copies, and that is approaching market saturation.

Of course any videogame of any size and budget can be a failure. The trouble with triple A games is that they aren't guaranteed to make their development money back, even if they just sell an average number of copies. That is especially bad for live service games, which are expected to not only sell well, but produce much additional revenue over the further lifetime of the game. The larger the company and the bigger the budget, the more people lose their jobs when the game just gets a lukewarm reception. Smaller studios and indie developers can more easily recover after a failure. The difference between the games industry and the movie industry is that there doesn't seem to be much correlation between the budget of a game and the probability of it being a commercial success. You can spend a hundred million dollars on making a game and sell less well than Meccha Chameleon. That is a pretty bad business proposition.

Garbage in, garbage out

2026-07-02T10:10:10.366+02:00

If you are reading this, I do hope that you feel that you get some sort of value from my writing, whether that be in the form of entertainment or insight. But the true value of the total content of my blog is limited: Most of it is about low-value activities like games, and while I certainly write down some facts, there is a lot of opinion here, and that pretty certainly has a lot of bias in one way or another. As AI scrapers are reading pretty much everything available on the internet, I am pretty sure that my writing is part of the immense mountain of data that did feed various AI models.

People like Elon Musk and Sam Altman for years have been promising that AI would reach "PhD level" intelligence. Now I happen to have a PhD degree. Over the course of my life, I have been producing piles of "PhD level" research work, starting from my actual PhD thesis and covering 30 years of work as a researcher in industry. But while my biased opinions about World of Warcraft have been scraped by AI and are now part of the models, my "PhD level" work isn't in those models. My PhD thesis is not available in electronic form anywhere, it only exists in paper form. My industry research is either long lost, or locked away in the computer systems of my employer, and not accessible to the public or AI scrapers. I have a number of scientific publications that are available, and my 32 patents are also public, but these are small windows into my scientific work. The bulk of my scientific work is invisible, proprietary to my employer, and not being shared. While in theory a patent protects an invention in exchange for sharing that invention, in practice there is an internal process that makes sure that the protection is maximized, and the sharing is minimized. Having done applied industrial research, I did do research studies that made my company millions in profit, but none of that will ever make it into an AI model.

I assume that this is the same for quite a lot of people. Many of us produce some written output both in our private lives, e.g. on social media, and our professional lives. But our professional output is legally owned by our employer, and guarded as proprietary and secret information. The part of as any AI model can possibly know is just what we produce publicly, in a private capacity. You can find a video on YouTube on how to change a spark plug, but not the totality of the professional knowledge of a car mechanic. And the useful information on social media is heavily diluted; already for a human it is hard to separate the useful stuff from the chaff, but an AI model just takes everything, and has notorious difficulties in separating facts from beliefs or jokes. It takes just one joking Reddit post telling you where you can stick that spark plug before the AI might end up repeating that as medical advice.

Long before ChatGPT was released, we already knew that a lot of the stuff you read on the internet is garbage. In the early days of LLM models, humans moderated the input of those models, feeding it for example digitally available books rather than unmoderated forum discussions. But with growth came the need for more and more data, and the AI companies became less and less fussy about the quality of the data being fed to the models, because they needed so much of it. If you grab terabytes of data from the internet, very little of it will be "PhD level" intelligent, and very much will be garbage. Garbage in, garbage out, is one of the oldest truths in computing.

A LLM model could probably replace me as a blogger. I have been feeding the models enough data to be able for them to simulate that part of my activity. But as they have extremely little data on my professional work, I don't see how a LLM model could do my job as a researcher. Even if there was actually some "intelligence" in artificial intelligence and those "reasoning" functions could actually reason, the models simply don't have the professional data that would allow them to do professional jobs. And no company would ever open up their proprietary company data to a public AI model. It is not about the quantity of the data, but about the quality. If I get stuck in a game, I totally trust AI to tell me how to proceed, because that sort of data is readily available. I wouldn't trust AI to engineer anything or to research anything.

Ditching your friends

2026-07-01T11:05:11.559+02:00

In Pillars of Eternity, the game I am currently playing, there are 8 companions in the base game, plus another 3 in the DLC. However, there are only five slots for companions in your party. Baldur's Gate 3 has a similar problem, with 10 companions in the game, and only 3 slots in the party besides your main character. There is some logic to that in the class-based system these games use: If you choose for example a wizard as your main character, you might not want a wizard companion. But besides those class considerations, each companion also comes with his own story and personal quests.

I have to say that I dislike swapping companions in and out of my party repeatedly. Of course, with some foreknowledge it is possible to always choose the optimal party configuration for every hard battle. But I am more likely to swap companions because I'm going somewhere which relates to a personal quest of that companion. You will want to have Lae'zel with you when dealing with the Githyanki, because otherwise you are missing out on the specific content of that interaction, and so forth.

But from a pen & paper roleplaying point of view that companion-swapping doesn't make much sense. Characters in a tabletop RPG would only change if either a new player joins the group, or a player for some reason switches to a new character. I over 40 years of D&D I never had a player switching back to a previously played and discarded character. A new player with a new character would also simply just add to the group, not necessarily replace a previous player with a previous character. But games like BG3 or Pillars of Eternity have hard caps on the number of characters in a group, so you can't just take an extra with you for the occasion.

I tend to get used to the characters I am playing with, and interested in their stories. Thus I am reluctant to bench them, just to get to know a new character and get involved in his story. It feels like ditching a friend. So maybe a better way would be if a game just had as many companions as there are free slots in the group, but those companions could adapt their class to result in a balanced group around the main character class choice, while keeping their personal stories constant.

Climate change, practically speaking

2026-06-27T13:48:06.238+02:00

I live in Belgium. Historically, the average summer temperature in Belgium is between 18°C and 25°C. Belgium also has on average between 180 and 200 rainy days per year. But then there is climate change, and averages don't help much if meteorological conditions are extreme. Right now, much of western Europe, including Belgium, is suffering from a heat wave. As I write this, it is 36°C outside and rising. It was 25°C in the middle of the night, so airing during the night didn't help much.

In general, I am well equipped against temperature extremes, as my house is built do "quasi zero energy" standards, with 36 cm thick walls in three layers and triple glazing on the windows. But after several days with daily temperatures in the mid-30s Celsius (up to 100°F), and not much cooling during the night, the rooms in my house are around 27°C (80°F) and it's getting uncomfortable.

The obvious solution, as all my American readers will immediately say, is air conditioning. A few years ago, when heat waves went from being very rare to occurring occasionally, I bought a good quality mobile air conditioning unit. It is a monoblock unit on wheels with 12,000 BTU of cooling power. At the start of the current heat wave it still managed to cool down our bedroom to 20°C before we went to bed. Enough to turn it off, fall asleep, and not get too hot by the end of the night. Right now that air conditioner is struggling. The problem is that you need to open the window to put the vent hose outside; and as much as I'm trying to seal the window around that hose, at 36°C outside I can't get the inside much cooler than 24°C. Which is an improvement to the 27°C before, but not a huge one. And if I cool my bedroom to 24°C, it gets too warm to sleep during the course of the night.

So I am considering adopting American habits and installing a fixed split air conditioner. Which might be expensive and difficult due to those thick insulated walls. In any case, while my monoblock air conditioner cost several hundred bucks, a fixed unit will be several thousand bucks with installation. On the positive side, a fixed unit with the vent going through the wall means that I wouldn't have to open the window to run the air conditioning, and I could achieve a higher difference between inside and outside temperature. In a situation where 40°C becomes possible in Belgium (the current heat record is 39.9°C) and heat waves are becoming more frequent, more intense, and longer, this investment might become necessary.

An Eternity later

2026-06-22T09:39:55.454+02:00

Once upon a time, around the turn of the millenium, the state of the art of computer role-playing games was the infinity engine: 2D, with sprites on a pre-rendered map that looked isometric, but didn't really have a third dimension. Famous CRPGs like Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale 1 & 2 used that engine. Then 3D CRPGs turned up, and the popularity of the 2D pre-rendered maps declined. Until Obsidian Entertainment launched a Kickstarter project that was backed by 74,000 people to the tune of $4 million to bring out Pillars of Eternity, released in 2015.

I played Pillars of Eternity in 2015. But only for 16 hours, never even finishing Act I. In 2015 I was still playing World of Warcraft, and we all know how time-consuming that can be. But as I wrote in my previous post, I have been watching a streamer playing Baldur's Gate 1, and that revived my interest in games that use this sort of graphics engine. Now I have two problems with games like Baldur's Gate 1: Real-time combat with pause isn't really my favorite, and the pre-rendered rectangular maps are often too large; that is to say, the game doesn't really have enough content for the size of the map, and you end up spending hours walking all over the map just to uncover the fog of war. Now Pillars of Eternity, having been released 17 years after Baldur's Gate, is already a lot more modern, didn't fall for the same trap, and made maps somewhat smaller than BG1. And then Obsidian Entertainment in a somewhat surprising move added turn-based mode to Pillars of Eternity this year in April.

So I decided to give Pillars of Eternity another try. To my surprise my save game from 2015 was still there due to the power of Steam cloud saves. But I prefered to start afresh. In my 2015 game I had played a rogue as my main character, for the simple reason that this was the character class most notably missing from the early companions you can pick up. In my 2026 run I went with a priest as main character because I like playing priests, and they are rather strong in Pillars of Eternity. And then I used previous knowledge as soon as I reached the first village to hire a rogue hireling to fill that lockpicking / trap disarming gap; and I skipped ahead a few zones to collect the first 4 companions: Edér the warrior, Aloth the mage, Durance the priest, and Kana the chanter. This allowed me to do the quests and the first dungeon of the starting village with a full group, which worked very well.

I'm only 8 hours into this second run. Apparently doing the main story plus side quests without the DLCs takes up to 70 hours. I don't know if I'll make it to the end game screen this time, but I'll give it a try. And then there is a still unplayed Pillars of Eternity 2 in my Steam library, so I'm unlikely to run out of 2D pre-rendered isometric map games anytime soon.

Playing older games

2026-06-19T17:40:09.507+02:00

I am watching a rather ambitious series on Youtube where a streamer is playing *all* Baldur‘s Gate roleplaying games in order. He is still at BG1, but due to the enhanced edition of 2012, this rather old game is still very playable. Personally I am not tempted: I played BG1 decades ago, and I still don‘t like the flow of the game; the player spends a crazy amount of time walking over large zone maps to uncover the fog of war, and much of the time you find either nothing or just trivial stuff like a few low level monsters to kill.

As the game predates Steam, I have absolutely no clue how many hours I played of BG1. But I did play it through, and I did play BG2 and BG3. Baldur‘s Gate 3 I played for 340 hours, and in my opinion, it is the best game of the series. I‘ll play more BG3 before I‘d come back to BG1 or 2. But the Baldur‘s Gate series is special insofar as there is this huge gap of nearly a quarter of a century between 2 and 3. Even with the enhanced editions, the technological advantage of BG3 over the previous games is huge, and the design philosophy of computer roleplaying games has also evolved in that timeframe.

Technological advancement of PC games has slowed down. A game of 2026 isn‘t necessarily much more advanced than a game from a few years ago. And game series other than Baldur‘s Gate with more sequels than 3 and shorter time between sequels have a bit of a problem: The latest sequel isn‘t necessarily considered by everybody as the best in the series. As a consequence for example right now there are more people playing Civilization 6 than Civilization 7, and more people playing Europa Universalis IV than EU5.

If you look at the currently most played games on Steam, a lot of the games in the top 50 are older games. Newer games of the same series or at least the same genre exist, but players prefer the older games. The top 3 games are Counter-Strike 2, PUBG:Battlegrounds, and Dota 2. And people busy playing older games simply often don‘t have enough time to also play all the latest games, and so they don‘t buy them.

On the one side one can argue that making every game better than all previous games is an impossible task. On the other side we all know lots of examples where a new game feels like a beta test, being full of bugs and/or balance issues. I stopped playing EU5 because every patch is still messing very much with the game systems and that often has unforeseen consequences. I can see how other people would prefer a stable and established EU4 to this mess.

The „live service“ genre of games is most affected by this, and it is rare that a new live service game can gather critical mass and survive, while people are still happily playing much older games. But while things are less visible for single-player games, Steam player counts do at least suggest that sales of newer games must be down, seeing how many people are busy playing older games of the same genre. And game companies increasingly release remakes and remasters of older games, to make at least some money from all these people preferring the older games.

I don‘t think that the games of next year can beat last year‘s game just on prettier graphics. At some point graphics are „good enough“ and stop being a major criterion when buying a new game. But while good new games are still being made and have success, these all work with original content rather than using better technology. In a world where you can‘t watch the news without hearing the word „AI“, the progress being made on video game AI providing more realistic opponents or NPCs is practically non-existent. Many of the top-selling games of 2026 could have been made a decade ago, they don‘t use any technological progress at all. And unless that changes, older games will continue to occupy a large space in this attention economy, making life difficult for new games.

SpeculativeX

2026-06-13T11:09:49.645+02:00

Having worked nearly 30 years for the same large company, I do own shares of that company. Many long term employees of many large companies do, for various reasons: The companies are trying to buy loyalty by giving employees shares for free or at a discount, and there is usually some tax advantage to that compared to giving the same amount of money in cash. The company I own shares in is profitable, and has been profitable for a very long time. It reinvests part of those profits, but another part of the profit is given to the shareholders in the form of dividends. Over the decades I actually already received more money in dividends than I ever spent acquiring those shares. This is what is called a value stock. The share price of the company is in a mathematically logical relation to the companies revenues, profits, and dividends.

Yesterday was the IPO of SpaceX. It's IPO price was $135, and over the first day of trading the share price stabilized at around $160. If you multiply the total number of existing shares in SpaceX with that share price, the company SpaceX is worth a bit over $2 trillion. That makes is roughly 10 times as valuable as the company I own shares in. But if you look at SpaceX revenues, profits, and dividends, there is no logical relation to the share price. SpaceX has no profits or dividends. It makes roughly 10 times *less* revenue than the company I own shares in. In other words, the company I own shares in has a share price to revenue ratio of slightly over 1, while SpaceX has a share price to revenue ratio of slightly over 100. SpaceX is what is politely called a growth stock. The numbers only make sense if you assume that the revenue and profits of the company will grow at a rather fantastic rate.

Are the people buying SpaceX shares all fools? No, many are very rational people. For example there are people who undersigned the IPO, got shares for $135 from SpaceX, and then directly sold them on the first day for $160. $15 pure profit per share in just a day, nothing foolish about that. IPOs these days are carefully orchestrated. SpaceX only sold 5% of its shares, to keep the supply of these shares lower than the demand, more or less guaranteeing the share price would "pop" up on the first day of trading, creating a positive narrative.

But what about the other 95% of SpaceX stock, not currently traded? Elon Musk owns around 45% of SpaceX (in a special class of shares with higher voting power, giving him around 80% of votes and thus total control). Elon probably doesn't want to sell those shares, and is actually contractually prevented from selling them for a year. That still leaves 50% of shares in the hands of other SpaceX founders, early venture capital investors, and SpaceX employees. They too are still under a contractual lockout, preventing them from selling their shares, but not for long. SpaceX has a staggered lockout, in several tranches from day 70 to day 180 after the IPO. In other words, other than Elon Musk, over the next half a year, all SpaceX shareholders become free to sell their shares.

Thus the supply of SpaceX shares is going to increase a lot between now and the end of this year. That makes the trajectory of the SpaceX share price somewhat predictable. So predictable that is has a name, the "IPO pop and drop". It is very basic economics, supply and demand. Supply of SpaceX shares is increasing over the next 6 months, demand probably by not that much, thus a drop in share price is rather likely. In fact, some people are planning to make a lot of money short-selling SpaceX shares.

Now this certainly isn't financial advice. But if you were a strong believer in growth stocks, a believer that everything Elon Musk touches will turn to gold, and you do think that one day SpaceX will reach revenue and profits that are more reasonably aligned with its market capitalization, you might still want to wait for several months before buying SpaceX stock. There are a lot of stocks that are worth more today than they were on their first day of trading, but there are very few for who the first day of trading would have been the best day to buy them. And that is much more true for growth stocks than for value stocks.

Many of the people buying SpaceX stock now don't plan to wait until the company makes a profit and they get their money back via dividends. Instead they believe in the greater fool theory of investing: It doesn't matter whether the share price of a company is justified by that company's revenue and profit; you can make a profit from an overvalued share as long as there is somebody out there who is a "greater fool" than you, and who values that company even higher than you paid for it. That is purely speculative. But it is the explanation for the valuations of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and many growth stocks, especially in AI. You are not betting on a company reaching certain goals, you are betting on the mood of the market. That isn't investing, it is gambling. There are certainly people that made money that way. And there are people who still own a bored ape NFT, who bought Bitcoin for $100,000, or bought Pets.com shares at the IPO. In a market dominated by professional traders, how likely do you think a regular retail investor is to outsmart the bankers? If you want to get rich quick, you are probably better off betting on the outcome of soccer world cup. If you want to save money for your retirement, you should stick to boring value stocks.

Civilization uncanny valley

2026-06-12T21:42:36.153+02:00

So I wanted to try out Civilization VII after the Test of Time update, which was supposed to reboot the game. But as I hadn't played it for over a year, that turned out to be a rather weird experience. I fell into a sort of uncanny valley, where some things were familiar enough for me to make me think that I knew the game, while others had either changed or I had forgotten, so that they felt strange and off.

While I managed to play the same civilization over the ages, that actually was never really my problem with Civ 7, and I had enjoyed other 4X games in which you didn't stay the same for the whole game. My problem with Civ 7 rather was that the second age, exploration, feels very scripted and sameish to me, regardless with which civilization or civilizations I play it. It is just the tech tree that allows you the exploration, and the whole reward structure is designed to push you into that exploration.

So between the uncanny unfamiliarity with the game and feeling that I was still following the same scripted gameplay, I stopped half way through the age of exploration and gave up. For me this wasn't the patch that fixed all of Civ 7's problems and made me come back. And when I see the concurrent player numbers, it seems that the rest of the world feels the same. After a short peak Civ 7 is back to have far fewer players than Civ 6.