Tobold's Blog

Star Wars Zero Company First Impressions

2026-08-30T09:36:14.431+02:00

I am playing Star Wars Zero Company for a day now, and up to now I am loving it. The tactical combat is excellent, with lots of variety, and the narrative is very well done, giving a solid Star-Warsy feel. But most of all, Star Wars Zero Company solves my problem with other games I played this year, dealing with companions. I don't think I have ever seen a game that lets me respec so freely and easily.

Take for example your starting companion Kabb Uppercut, who starts the game out as a scoundrel. While that isn't a bad class, there isn't much synergy between Kabb's special uppercut ability and the rogue abilities. I could have turned Kabb into a soldier, getting the soldiers melee damage bonus for the uppercut. But instead I decided to turn him into an assault, as the uppercut's refund of AP works really well with the assault's repositioning game. I can turn Kabb into any of the 8 classes, and give him any of the 4 basic weapons, for a huge range of possibilities. And if I wanted, I could have him be a different class in every mission without the slightest disadvantage other than it being confusing to me. I can even get any focus points I specialized him with refunded anytime, and put them somewhere else. So if you and me both do some story mission with Hawk, Kabb, Trick, and Jae, we might be using completely different character classes and loadouts and have a very different experience.

On the negative side, if we both do the same story mission, it will be on exactly the same map. And any triggered events like reinforcements will happen with the same triggers, which can be time or some player action, like reaching an objective. And side missions can actually reuse maps you've already seen in a story mission. The semi-procedural map generation system of XCOM 2 does produce better map variety.

So we can summarize Star Wars Zero Company with having challenges that are relatively fixed, and solutions that are very flexible. With dialogue only happening at the base, there isn't really any practical difference between a companion and a freely created mercenary. It will be interesting to see how much replayability this system produces.

Aurelio

2026-08-29T10:12:44.745+02:00

Being a big fan of the XCOM series of games, I couldn't resist buying the just released Star Wars: Zero Company. It is described as an XCOM game in the Star Wars universe, but that at best describes the gameplay loop and setting; the narrative feel differs a lot from XCOM games, and is closer aligned to typical Star Wars vibes.

As usual, I started the game by playing the tutorial. Even if I am not new to tactical games, and am in fact playing on hard, tutorials are mostly useful to learn about the user interface. Nothing interesting ever happens in a tutorial ... I thought. And then Aurelio, one of my 4 starting characters, died in the tutorial. The tutorial is on rails, you can't actually prevent Aurelio from dying. Even if you turn the tutorial off and set permadeath to off, Aurelio still dies a permadeath. It is start of the "things aren't looking too good" starting situation exposition.

In a way Aurelio's death reminded me of those mobile game ads, where you see somebody playing the game in question deliberately badly, in order to make the viewer think "I can do better than that!" and download the game. Aurelio dies a stupid death, after having been previously wounded as consequence of an equally stupid move. It does somewhat teach the player how not to move your characters forward. Although that is to some degree counterproductive, as moving forward to flank is a very essential part of the tactics of the game.

I saved the game after the tutorial and am now busy downloading the latest Nvidia graphics driver, released a day before Star Wars: Zero Company. Apparently that one fixes problems with stuttering cinematics. Apart from that stuttering, I didn't have any technical problems yet. I liked what I saw in the tutorial, but of course it will take a lot more time to see how solid the gameplay loop and long term motivation is.

Grand Theft Certainty

2026-08-28T12:38:44.810+02:00

I can't drive virtual cars. If you consider the totality of video games, and all the activities there are in these games, there are things I am good at, and things I am bad at. I am bad at driving a car in a video game. I am not bad at driving real cars, but the controls for virtual cars and their behavior in games are very different from reality, and I'm not good at making that jump. Because I am bad at driving in games, I rarely play video games in which driving is a major part. I did play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on the PS2, but that is about it for the GTA series. I own GTA V, but only because in 2020 I got it for free from the Epic Games Store, and I haven't even found the time to play it since.

Given all that, you can understand that my excitement about the upcoming November release of Grand Theft Auto VI is limited. Netflix doing an exclusive preview of the game baffles me, as I can't remember them having done that for other games. But what puzzles me the most is the general feeling of absolute certainty: Everybody is sure that Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch in November without the slightest technical problem, it will be the greatest game ever, it will immediately sell millions of copies, it will suck all money out of the video game market for weeks, so nobody else can have a successful game launch in November, and shortly after GTA 6 will switch on a live service multiplayer online part of the game that will not have any server problems and somehow not cannibalize GTA 5 Online either.

Personally, I am not so certain that all this will be true. In this day and age, who would believe that a major game studio like Blizzard Activision, EA, Bioware, or Ubisoft could be able to launch a multi-million player, multi-platform game without a hitch? Why would we automatically dismiss this possibility for most game studios, but be absolutely certain that Rockstar will do it? Why are we so certain that GTA 6 will be considered the best part of the series, when we have lots of examples of game series where the latest incarnation is considered less good than previous parts? And why would all our criticism of live service games and all our experience with them failing not apply to GTA 6 Online?

I don't doubt at all that GTA 6 will make truckloads of money. But I am open to the possibility that things could go wrong during launch, or that ultimately GTA 6 will not be considered the best game ever of the series. If parent company Take-Two Interactive would know the recipe of the secret sauce that makes any sequel better than the previous games, why didn't they use that sauce on Civilization VII or Borderlands 4? My general impression of the state of the video game industry is that there is no way to guarantee a surefire success, even for a $1 billion game.

Idiocracy

2026-08-27T11:47:11.778+02:00

The internet promotes simplified extreme views over more nuanced and complicated considerations. Thus you probably have seen somewhere on the internet over the past few years headlines in which the 2006 movie Idiocracy is claimed to have come already true. Or heard about the "reverse Flynn effect", in which Gen Z is the first generation measurably dumber than previous generations, with Generation Alpha doing even worse. Then everybody attaches their own favorite scapegoat to those headlines, and confidently proclaims that it is "social media", or "AI", or "screen time" or whatever that makes young people dumb.

The reality is a lot more complicated. That starts with the question of how you measure how clever and/or well educated a generation is. As it turns out, there is an observer effect, related to the Heisenberg principle, and you can't measure intelligence and education without at the same time affecting it. Thus standardized testing led to schools "teaching to the test", which affected what pupils did and didn't learn to do. But an ever greater problem, unsurprisingly, as it is very often the culprit, is statistics.

Statistics say that by various measures of intelligence and education, the world roughly got smarter in the 20th century, the Flynn effect, and dumber in the 21st century, the reverse Flynn effect. The fundamental problem of headline numbers in statistics is that an average frequently hides the truth. The average wealth between Elon Musk and me is half a trillion dollars, but that simply doesn't tell you anything about my financial situation. Only if you drill a lot deeper and look at more detailed statistical data like percentiles a better picture emerges.

The truer picture about intelligence and education of young people is that even in the latest generations, the top 10% of pupils are better educated and more intelligent than the top 10% of previous generations were, and the Flynn effect continues. But the bottom 10% of pupils today are much, much less educated and are often lacking very basic problem solving skills. The gap between the best and and the worst has gone up very much, and the bottom has sunk so precipitously that the average has been going down.

Now again you can attempt to attach your favorite scapegoat reason for everything to those data. Personally, as I have always been worried about the rise in economic inequality, I can't help but think that a rise in economic inequality also results in a rise in educational inequality. Or to say it differently, the way that things are taught at school are not sufficient for a pupil without additional adult supervision at home to end up with a good education. With the likelihood of a pupil getting adult supervision when doing his homework being very much linked to socio-economic factors. Richer kids have tutors and prep schools, poorer kids are left to their own devices.

Homework in itself is a flawed system. Imagine a page with 20 math problems, all about addition of two numbers between 10 and 99. With some guidance, a kid of the appropriate age could learn a lot about fundamentals of addition from doing those 20 math problems. But chances are that nobody has explained to the kid that the purpose of doing those 20 additions is for him to learn something about additions. He just got handed the piece of paper and been told that he has to return it with the correct results on it. As long as the kid has any access to any electronic device, he'll realize that the fastest way to fill out the results correctly is by the use of anything from a calculator to Google search, without going through the hard and seemingly unnecessary step of learning about addition yourself.

Of course the advances in technology are partially to blame. Calculators existed already when I was young (and led to intense discussion in education). But ChatGPT can also write that essay about "what I did this summer" or do that book summary for a pupil, bypassing the need to develop writing and reading skills. Thus the scary headlines about pupils getting a high school degree without being able to read competently. At the same time another lucky kid is helped to develop skills in reading and writing, PLUS being taught about when to use ChatGPT, and how to competently judge and use the result. Guess which kid will do better in life afterwards.

In summary, if you were to go into hibernation and wake up in the future, chances are that society isn't ruled by idiots then. There will be highly intelligent and educated people around, and they will have most of the power in society. The question is how dumb the least educated people in society are, and that could possibly be some sort of dystopian future. Or humanity learns how to create better education systems, in which pupils aren't left alone with homework and have to decide for themselves whether to use quick fix technology to return it.

Buffed

2026-08-26T10:32:56.287+02:00

In Wrath of the Righteous, I am now level 15, and in the early phases of act 4. As I certainly mentioned several times over the years, I am not a big fan of D&D/Pathfinder systems above level 10. They generally don't scale very well, and tend to get a bit silly. This is even worse in Wrath of the Righteous, where in addition to regular levels you also get mythic ranks, which are even more powerful. Now your mythic path can work more or less well with your class. And every combination can break the game in a different way. If I had for example played a necromancer wizard with a lich mythic path, the story of how I am overpowered would be a different one. But here is my example, of a cleric (crusader) on the angel mythic path.

The idea of the crusader cleric is to have a cleric that is reasonably good at melee combat. Now besides healing, clerics have a lot of buff spells. Those either make you just plain stronger, or they protect you in some way against various negative status effects. In the Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous games that normally results in a game loop where if you unexpectedly encounter an overly strong enemy that does something like poison your whole group and you lose the fight, you will reload and do much better on the second try. Because if you know what that enemy is doing, you can put that specific anti-poison buff on your group. But as there are quite a lot of different status effects you could protect against, and the buffs don't last forever, it is unlikely that you will have the correct protection spell on you when you meet an unknown enemy.

My angel cleric breaks that system. The mythic path allowed me to take the mythic abilities "enduring spells" and "greater enduring spells". That means that any buff with a duration of more than 5 minutes now lasts 24 hours. And the abundant casting mythic abilities increase the number of spells that I can cast every day. Plus the angel mythic path gives even more powerful buffs and increases my cleric caster level, allowing me to cast higher level spells. The overall result is that I can now put a whopping 20+ different buffs on my whole group for 24 hours, increasing their combat stats and protecting them from basically every status effect in the game. And my main character has some additional personal buffs that turn him into a fighting machine. Plus he doesn't have to cast buffs during combat anymore, so he has more turns in which he can hit enemies. And the other group members are also putting out more damage, because it doesn't happen anymore that they are disabled or weakened by some status effect, plus they have some positive buffs making them stronger.

Now act 4 of Wrath of the Righteous is pretty tough in some spots, and being overpowered sometimes actually feels necessary. But personally I don't enjoy that sort of high-level gameplay all that much. At lower levels I used to sneak into rooms to see what enemies were in there, and then cast the right buff for every situation. Now I just have every possible buff on the whole party all the time and just don't care what special status effect attacks the enemies have. So although I very much enjoy playing Wrath of the Righteous and played over 200 hours already, I am still pondering whether I want to finish act 4 and 5 to get to the end of the game, or whether combat at the highest level is just too silly.

Skipping content

2026-08-23T12:22:12.565+02:00

In a game like Wrath of the Righteous, I have a tendency to want to play through all of the available content, including every side quest or companion quest. Experience points are a limited resource, and every side quest you do tends to give you some xp, making you stronger for the main quest line. The disadvantage is that some quests just aren't interesting, or don't really fit with your vision of your character.

Wrath of the Righteous is a very long game, Act 3 is an extremely long part of it, and me playing in turn-based mode isn't speeding things up either. Also the DLC add additional side quests to the game, so that playing through them all might not actually be necessary to have a good level for the main quest. So as I am approaching the end of Act 3, I decided to skip some content.

One series of quests I decided to skip consist of tile-laying puzzles. They aren't very well done, you can't see very well what you are doing, and due to lack of explanation there is a lot of trial and error. On Reddit, a lot of players dislike the puzzles. So I had the option of either stumbling around in the dark, or just following a guide, or skipping the content. As I don't find that gameplay interesting, I decided to skip the puzzles.

Then I skipped a companion quest out of roleplaying reasons: I am playing a good character, a crusader on the angel mythic path, constantly choosing the good options in dialogues. And one of the companions is secretly a serial killer. So at the point where that was officially revealed to me, I fought and killed the companion, instead of sparing her just to have further companion quest content. Maybe one day I'll do another run of Wrath of the Righteous, and play an evil character, like a Lich.

Edge cases of the d20 system

2026-08-22T09:44:05.584+02:00

I am still playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, over 200 hours into the current run and approaching the end of act 3. Now Pathfinder, like D&D, runs on a d20 system. That is to say that the success of an attack, or whether whether a spell is resisted or diminished in effect, is determined by rolling 20-sided dice. At the start of the game you might have an attack bonus like "+5". That means you roll the d20 and add 5. If for example the enemy has an armor class (AC) of 16, you need to roll 11 or more on your d20 to hit, and only if you hit you deal damage. In this example your chance to hit is 50%, because 11 or more is 50% of the results of a d20. This is how the whole game scales. I'm level 14 now, and my attack bonuses are more like "+25". But then the armor class isn't 16 any more but 36, and I still need to roll the same 11 on the d20 to hit.

But in these higher levels I also frequently encounter the two possible edge cases: Enemies with armor class so low, I only need to roll a 2 to hit (a 1 is always a failure, regardless of the math of attack bonus and AC); and enemies with armor so high, I need to roll a 20 to hit, which is always a hit. So the game sometimes puts boss monsters in my way, where the AC is incredibly high for the level. Even with all the optimization of the world and taking the character classes with the highest to hit bonuses, and wearing magical gear, the to hit bonus can only get so high at a certain level. And if the AC of the boss is then higher by 20 than this optimized to hit bonus, my chance to hit goes down to 5%. That ends up being pretty long and miserable fights.

So over the course of the game I collected various means to break that problem: I have now 3 characters in my core team that can apply a -2 to AC onto the enemy. Ember the witch has the Evil Eye hex, which gives -2 AC for at least 1 round, and can then use Cackle every round to keep that debuff going forever. Lann has a relic belt, Malander's Penance, that gives monks the ability to spend a Ki point for a -2 AC debuff. And Arueshalae has the Big Game Gloves, that adds a -2 AC debuff to her quarry ability.

The result is significantly easier boss fights, as long as the main difficulty of the boss fight was the high armor class. If the AC of the boss is 20 above my to hit bonuses, I only have a 5% chance to hit. If I spend one round to apply three times -2 to AC, the AC is now only 14 above my to hit bonuses, and I have a 35% to hit. Making it 7 times more likely for me to hit means the boss goes down quickly.

One tends to think of the d20 system as being linear, with every +1 or -1 changing the probability by the same plus or minus 5%. But if you consider the edge cases, and the absolute chance to hit, if you have only a 5% chance to hit, a +1 bonus to to hit, or -1 malus to AC, doubles that chance to hit to 10%. So I can see why many Pathfinder players are so obsessed with minmaxing their builds. If you have regular enemies which you already hit half of the time, another +1 seems irrelevant. But if boss monsters have too high armor, that +1 might be the difference between being able to beat him or not.

Incompatible loot

2026-08-17T09:58:10.708+02:00

Many computer roleplaying games, or roleplaying-adjacent games, have a constant stream of loot to keep you interested. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous certainly has a loot stream, but it turns out that the "Pathfinder" part of the name poses a problem: Loot incompatibility.

At level 1, every character class has access to some simple weapons. Monks, wizards, and druids have the most restricted list of access. But typical melee classes like fighters have access to both simple and martial weapons, and with a single feat could get access to exotic weapons. However, characters usually get at least one new feat every two levels, sometimes more. And if you want to make an efficient build, you will have concentrate on a single weapon. There are feats like "weapon focus" or "weapon specialization" or "improved critical" that don't work for all the weapons you are proficient in, but you have to specify which weapon the feat should apply to.

At level 1, there isn't much of a difference between a regular longsword and a regular battleaxe, except for how they handle critical hits. You can perfectly choose either one of them and be fine. But a few levels down the road, you'll be stuck with your choice. If you chose longsword, you might end up having a regular +1 longsword and looting a +2 battleaxe with some interesting additional effect; but because you have specialized in the longsword, you won't switch to the battleaxe now, unless you pay for an expensive respec.

Now Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has 56 different types of weapon, but you group only has 6 characters. So the chance of any random weapon you find to be completely useless to your group is quite high. The situation with armor is a bit different, but it also happens that an armor has a magic effect that would be good for one of your characters, but its armor type or other stats aren't useful to that character.

In the end, your group in Wrath of the Righteous ends up selling most of the loot. Which is a lot less interesting than finding loot you can actually use. In a pen & paper game, the dungeon master simply cheats and doesn't hand out incompatible loot. But in a computer RPG, the devs don't know which weapon you would specialize in, and so they just sprinkle a bit of everything.

Changing Wrath of the Righteous

2026-08-14T19:28:07.885+02:00

I am 200 hours into Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and I started some minor use of mods. As I mentioned previously, I am sometimes unhappy with the companions the game gives you. In my game, where I am playing a cleric (crusader), I was especially unhappy with Sosiel, because he is a cleric too, and very similar to my main character. With the main character getting more mythic advantages, Sosiel was just "the same in worse". And you can't fully respec companions.

Well, you can't fully respec companions without a mod. So I temporarily installed the mod, and turned Sosiel into a kineticist. Kineticist is a very powerful ranged damage dealing class. Even with a basic build, Sosiel is now as good as Ember in dealing fire damage at range. And with the Gather Power ability, I can now often start combat by casting a very strong wall of fire into the middle of the unsuspecting enemies at a reasonable burn cost. Burn is the Kineticist's resource, but even when he is out of that, his 0 burn abilities are still very strong. He is a glass cannon, as burn diminishes hit points, but unless the enemies have area damage, that usually doesn't matter.

I wasn't even really aware of the Kineticist class previously. It was one of the classes I tried out in the Treasure of the Midnight Isles DLC, which is good to try out new classes. On the other hand, I now also can access Treasure of the Midnight Isles from the main campaign, and the procedurally generated dungeons feel boring compared to the rest of the main campaign content.

While the mod causes some weirdness on some character screens, I am up to now quite happy with the result. It solves my problem that the companions you bring for story reasons aren't necessarily the classes and builds you would want them to be.

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.