Digitally Staving Off Boredom

The Hubris Goes Smashing On

2023-11-07T20:06:00.017-08:00

I was sorely tempted to shift my blog entry writing schedule to once a month after the last blog entry took the entire day to write. After all, if my Google hit counter is to be trusted, I have less than a dozen viewers, so it would seem I'm writing this to document my life. While self-reflection can be educational, I don't have that much free time to waste... contrary to this blog's impressions about how I've wasted my free time. Am I vain, or is the quest to preserve some sign of passing in my mortal coil in some way noble? It speaks more of vanity, I fear. Well, I suppose it'll be hard to waste too much free time on this if I start the entry later in the day.

It was a busy three-day-weekend. On my first day off, I came upon this old blog entry that reminded me that I had come up with a way to handle the brutality of creative endeavors when deep in the morass of the trough of disillusionment. That was to insist I relax as much as I strive. After all, progress was likely to be so abysmally slow-going that time wastage was inevitable. I might as well enjoy myself a bit along the way. Moreover, this plan released the pressure of holding progress too dear. Because doing made it too repellent to make any progress at all.

Two ice biomes and now a desert. I'm beginning to think you don't want me to play with the Botania mod, Minecraft.

I mostly played Minecraft and the Soulash 2 demo.

In Minecraft, I have a mod mix that includes the lastest compatible Botania and Minecolonies mods on Minecraft version 1.19.2. This, in addition to the usual quality of life features. The idea is that I'd like to have a Botania magician's powers to support the expansion of a Minecolony.

In practice, I found that starting the colony first was a mistake. Doing so sparks a time limit where your fledgling settlement is frequently attacked, starving, or coming down with the flu. (To say nothing for the wild goose chase of combating obscure supply shortages involved in basic building construction.)

I tried restarting without Minecolonies but missed how the stock villagers didn't do much work. Currently, my Minecraft game has started outside of a spruce forest with plans to get Botania off the ground first. In practice, I find establishing the vanilla necessities gives me enough to do already.

I have placed the initial Minecolonies supply camp and have a wheat farm, sugar cane farm, and cow farm outside of it. Establishing that involved shifting about 1,000 dirt blocks, most of which were used to bridge a ravine into the forest where I plan to eventually start the base.

Soulash 2 is basically a barebones fantasy version of UnReal World. I was not planning to play that much, but it kept me expertly strung along with skill level and crafting progression. But I soon ran up against the limits of a "small"-sized world, among them being that the various encounter maps were too repetitive. I came away with three major points I'd like to see improved:

Combat doesn't have very meaningful choices.
(It has a stamina bar and combat actions on cooldown, a good start, but I tend to just mash actions indescriminately and stamina comes back too easily. The level of depth I'm preferring is probably along the lines of a Slay The Spire type game, a tall order.)
Scope is swapped out regularly; not a complete world simulation.
NPCs don't have their own agency, they're just waiting around for the player to do something.

Not to put that burden on the Soulash 2 developer's shoulders. They have their vision, and I have mine. Since I feel these are important features, and implementation makes all the difference, it's my responsibility to see if I can make a game that does them to my satisfaction. But, as far as a foundational game mechanic structure goes, Soulash 2 is solid. No doubt it helps to have a released game under your belt already.

Nookrium's playthrough of Tiny Ramparts brought it to my attention.

I closed out the day with a play of Tiny Ramparts. It's neither Rampart nor Tetris, although it uses a clever parody of the latter's musical score. Tiny Ramparts is free, a small-scoped tower defense game with a unique twist.

The second day off was a triumph wrapped in multiple disasters.

The triumph was actually getting some game development done. I can spend months not writing a single line of code! But, having completed an extensive tutorial last week, I decided it's time to take off the training wheels and go for it.

I talked myself into embarking onto my first independent project in Godot. It was a benchmark to see if collider-based grid movement was more efficient than script-base grid movement. See, I have no problem doing the work when I set the scope in an easily-attainable place! (Shame I have a propensity to demand the impossible.)

In the end, I wanted to do the navigation instantly and colliders need more processing frames than that. However, after forcing a single Ray Cast check, it turns out to be about three times slower than a script checking a variable. That's still surprisingly fast, enough as to be kinda irrelevant.

More importantly, I learned Godot locks up upon instantiating a child scene with one Sprite when I already have a 100,000 tile Tilemap in the current scene. It suggests if huge virtual worlds are on the table I will need to limit the Tilemap to drawing little more than what the player can see. Fortunately, the overall speed of game logical processing in Godot is very encouraging. I could believe a project of this scope is possible in this engine.

However, it took me all day because two very unfortunate things happened.

First, I succumbed to the lure of Cunningham's Law. Some random punk did me dirty with his irreverence, and I chose to argue with him. It was a foolish gesture. The subject was overshadowed by Miss Universe's tits, and the hormone levels made reason inaccessible to many.

Why should I care if a bunch if thirsty teens agree it'd be academically interesting to know what a Miss Universe plays on Steam Deck? I'm in my late-fourties and I should now better than this. But the lure of Cunningham's Law is not a force of reason but rather something primordial that thinks failing this argument means being thrown out of the village or something. Some wastes of time are worse than others.

How it ended. It's nice to know I wasn't forced to abruptly change my favorite haunt because of misbehavior on my part this time. Perhaps I'm improving, after all.

Second, as I have been for the past couple years, I stopped by The Escapist stream to catch it live. Distracted as I was with my own drama, I was an hour late, and so I was surprised to discover it was not started yet. I found only lingering regrets and hope for a better tomorrow.

As it turns out, between the morning stream and the afternoon stream, the current corporate masters of The Escapist, Gamur's Group, decided to play hard ball with Nick Calandra, the editor in chief. For not giving into their demands, they fired him and most of the video team. In response, all of those personalities I was delighted by enjoying the content of for the past couple years chose to resign.

In an instant, The Escapist was gone. No more Zero Punctuation. No more episodes of Adventure is Nigh. Most importantly, these people I'd been adoring the content of for the past few years were now facing an uncertain future of being able to make and release content at all.

It was a weird feeling. Logically, I know that I have nothing to do with these people's personal lives. My role is as an appreciator of their content, a philanthropist who supports creating it more, even though I barely pull in a living myself. But I've hung out on so many of their streams that I couldn't help but form a human connection with them.

The Second Wind Group, coming soon.

Is that creepy? I don't think so. It's just human nature, the mirror neurons reacting. Undoubtedly it's one-sided, they haven't been watching videos with me in them. Our villages have evolved beyond our subconscious's understanding. It doesn't understand this whole "digital media" thing.

I know this, but this circumstance left me in a weird place: involved, yet not involved, both a long time acquaintance and a perfect stranger. And they're in trouble.

Well, maybe not. In truth, this isn't the first time these industry veterans got screwed over by office politics. Nick Calandra earned his share of enemies, and brought The Escapist back from the brink once. It's not proof he can do it again, but it establishes a precedent. Less than 24 hours later, they've already started a new brand, blissfully independent. My paycheck is thin, but I've done what I can. I've chosen to back this horse; I'm honorable enough to stick by commitments, barring being dishonored in return.

On the third day off, I embarked upon another project in Godot. This was another experiment focused to address a single point, "NPCs don't have their own agency, they're just waiting around for the player to do something."

I took my purchased Oryx Labs' "Wee Fantasy" tileset, and embarked upon adding a role for each NPC. None of them will wait around for the player; they'll all be engaged in game mechanics of their own. It's a small tileset, so my focus can be razor-sharp. It doesn't matter if it's not everything I wanted to be because this is just a prototype to test a concept.

I got as far as generating the map and making it identify while tile I've clicked

That's about as approachable as this craven armchair innovator can make the process of indie game development. However, I have yet to finish the basic roguelike framework and ran out of time before I had to go and pick up someone at the train station. I got bogged down with premature optimization, trying to make it easy to identify and reuse tiles for map generation. So that's as far as I'm getting this week.

Toxicity Vs Enlightenment

2023-10-31T10:32:00.145-07:00

My optimism that I lived the kind of life where I could afford a Meta Quest 3 two weeks ago has been ruthlessly dunked upon ever since. I mentioned the volatility of my free time in the last entry, but then I was asked to lend $500 to a struggling sibling. I relented, but I can't help but despair that the debt balance I've wanted to be $0 for almost a year has reached a hefty $2500.

Granted, that's peanuts compared to the debt of many of my fellow Americans. But peanuts are what I earn, and my student loan repayments are due to restart soon. Can the inflation crisis possibly get any worse? Of course it can, but I've little reason to enjoy being stuck with no traction against any debt. Plus, living without a nest egg means I'm just an emergency away from it getting much worse.

Hotdiggitydemon, sans context.

On top of that, an immediate family member bored of their own shittiness and decided to switch their medication. On paper, a good idea. In practice, you really don't know what someone will do when they've chosen to significantly change their brain chemistry in a short time. All the stress and pain of going through those past meltdowns provides my anxious nature with a palpable Sword of Damocles to dangle over all I hold dear. It'll take a while until I am relatively confident that sword is staying put.

So I didn't do any VR this week, and it's remorseful to leave a hardware purchase that I just starting repaying to gather dust for a week. I don't feel comfortable wearing a blindfold right now. But where would I be? Life is a risk, even when the odds of a fatal freak accident are astronomical. Perhaps safety could be found in a bunker. Or an orbiting space station, micro-meteor traffic permitting. But does it even matter when the fundamental flaws of human existence are everywhere we go?

Hence, the value of escapism.

On my first day off this week, I watched Hotdiggydemon's Brain Dump. All of it. Now that Mr. Gilardi has somewhat matured from his absolute edgelord days, it was preaching to the choir, as far as I'm concerned. Although he's a far more accomplished artist than I, professional and talented, with nearly two million subscribers of his YouTube channel. So it's pretty disingenuous to think myself as an artist in the same way he does. But then, the question of what makes an artist is often central to Brain Dump.

Blog entry's running a little long, I'm going to need to steal another screencap from Brain Dump. Oh hey, the main characters this time.

For me, the definition of an artist is simple: make art, whatever you think it is, and release it. When you create something, you're a creator, and that's a decent half-way point. Free what you created to the world, and you're an artist.

Granted, you're not a professional artist unless paid for it, nor a talented artist (made or born, it doesn't matter) if your art is lousy, nor a prolific artist if you only release something once a blue moon. But none of that matters. You did the deed, you sipped from the cup of creation, you suffered its backlash, its mark is upon you now: you're an artist.

But I'm no artist; I'm a lifelong computer game addict. I have seen them build from simple pixel pushing machines in the 1980s to increasingly more elaborate microcosms. Games were always microcosms, systems of rules that allow us to participate in an enjoyable vignette of life.

As video games sophistication increased, they evolved to more of a macrocosm, especially in the case of persistent state open worlds. MMORPGs, Minecraft, The Sims, and Animal Crossing have spoiled me. Once you've got hooked on one of those, it's hard to go back.


Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a rare example of a persistent state open world with integrated goals.

Yet, every time I get deep into one of those, all that grinding and work peter out into nothing. "There's no such thing as an ever-lasting Gobstopper," once said Raph Koster, lead designer of Ultima Online. Under that perspective, it's working as intended.

I don't like that answer, though. I theorize that the trouble with persistent state open world games is that they lack a long term purpose. Many modern sandboxes trust players to come up with their own purposes. But that's not their job. The purpose of a creation ought to be determined by the creator. Otherwise, how is the game supposed to be designed to support it?

When you ask the player to come up with a long term purpose, it's almost invariably going to be, "Whatever is fun for me right now," and you might not like what they come up with. For example, Ultima Online descended into anarchy. That was either a paradise or a nightmare depending on if you were a "griefer" or "carebear." New players were never warned their online adventures in the virtuous land of Britannia would be immediately derailed by schedenfruede-addicted griefers, and that was a problem.

At least in Kenshi, the NPCs were born to be foils.

But why blame the players? The developers didn't think things through to the point where the players were starting to bore of the core mechanics and needed more to do. The best the developers could think to do was release an expansion that cut the world into two facets, one where player killing was prohibited. It was a solution that pleased no one, even the cannon fodder likely found virtual life quite a bit blander. The problem was ultimately the lack of creator-driven player purpose.

But neither can I blame the developers. Ultima Online was the first game of its kind: a persistent state open world with AAA appeal and production values behind it. If you ever want to get to the limits of human knowledge quickly, try your hand at game design. Persistent state open world significance is not an easy problem to solve. Perhaps that's why Eve Online could do no better. The problem with an MMORPG is different than solving it in something like Minecraft. (The Ender Dragon is not enough.) However, something they often have in common is being modeled after life itself, and philosophers have yet to understand the purpose of life.

I don't think we need to be as open as modeling games after life. Games are more entertaining than life because they set the scope in a more comfortable place. However, the problem remains: how do you come up with a worthwhile purpose for a creative artifact like a game?

It turns out that there's already people working on inventing meanings for creative artifacts and considering how they may be interpetted. They're called artists. This vocation I once thought impractical ended up pivotal to any hope I had of creating my dream game. Being an artist chose me.

And lemme tell ya, it's been rough. Life fights back every step of the way like creating art is unforgivable hubris for a walking, talking colony of animal cells with aspirations towards higher causes. (The Greeks seemed to think that's what hubris meant.) So, if anything Mr. Gilardi said in Brain Dump truly spoke to me, it's that art is suffering. Boy, does he ever suffer.

Mistward, a double-meaning title, whose mechanics provided a double-meaning for this blog title.

Since innovation is difficult to define and build, I rarely release anything. Among other things, my own stillborn game designs experimented with the idea of growing an island of order in a sea of chaos. Light was used to hold the chaos in place, as it cannot shift and change while under observation, revealing land to build upon. I played Mistward this week. It starts on a procedural generated island covered by poisoned mist held back by light sources.

Mistward is closer to my game concept than anything I've seen before, but it's only an incomplete city builder. It's still in Early Access. The interface is cumbersome. It's awkward to coordinate the villagers because of vulnerability to misclicks and inability to undo. However, you can do things while it's paused, so the damage is mitigated.

I envy Sokpop's willingness to try a simple game concept and move on, as they have almost a hundred games on Steam, and they only get better with practice. However, Mistward isn't asking, "Given unlimited power and space, what would you make? Would it be a paradise or a nightmare?" It's asking you how to figure out how to escape a poison mist island via game mechanics. Despite its similarities, Mistward is not the game I've been trying to make. RimWorld or Kenshi came closer.

Look upon my RimWorld works, ye mighty.

I heard about a game called Heard Of The Story? I didn't buy it, but I watched it played by Nookrium. It's another fine attempt at a living, breathing world, but a little underwhelming in its current state. Occasionally, we run into a game developer who thinks all NPCs are missing is a memory of what transpired. Their games usually fizzle out at about the point where they realize the core gameplay loop was more important. But I'm rooting for them to overcome that hurdle.

On the second day off, I finally buckled down and finished that Ultimate Introduction to Godot 4. The last few hours talked about pathfinding, which I needed, and bone-based animation, which I probably didn't. Now, I need to figure out how to make my turn-based, grid-based game in Godot. The Shaggy Dev seems to have some good insights on that. But I really need to try making things in Godot. It's hard to do when smothered. (Or overly self-reflective, as I am when writing this.)

Considering how much time I wasted in YouTube this week, I considered quitting it. However, I keep getting pulled back in by this wealth of Godot tutorials and my favorite personalities on The Escapist. So, instead, the plan is to play modded Minecraft (Botania and/or Minecolonies) or Necesse or something whenever an Escapist stream is on to rest my neurons. Otherwise, commit to Godot development or VR exercise. That ought to be fairly self-edifying, smothering permitting.

Okay, I'll admit bones are kind of cool.

My last day off was spent writing this blog entry. I've probably edited it about 75 times. I could say those edits are because what was being discussed was important to me, that I was coming off as too whiny, or people were more likely to read if it was more succinct. That's true, but the real reason is because it was easier than game development. I bounced off the plan suggested in the previous paragraph.

Creative resistance won the battle this day. It was too much work before I got the ball rolling, I should have targeted a few minutes, not all day. Or maybe I was too fixated on the subject matter on the blog. Either way, it wasn't in the cards. If I had another shot at this day, I'd have played a game or watched Netflix instead. Or even work another day at the day job, were that an option. Or maybe that's just giving myself the easy way out.

More Than Necesse

2023-10-24T18:58:00.193-07:00

Though I have an unfortunate propensity to waste my free time, happenstance often forces me to live in a way not of my choosing. I'm not sure which is worse: to shoulder the guilt of a squandered opportunity or to feel in helpless freefall over having it ripped from my hands. But my sense of justice rankles when I feel like I'm paying for others' mistakes. They had the fun of misbehaving, I get the consequences.

Persephone: adorable, cuddly, walking flea colony who resents my meddling.

I had three major things occur this week that prevented me from getting the most of my days off:

The cat had to go to the vet. Fleas were getting out of control. Somewhat left holding the bag as it wasn't really my plan to get a cat, not since I had to put the last ones down for chronic illnesses I couldn't afford to treat.
The mother had to be picked up from the train. Somewhat left holding the bag as she's only coming and going to cover child care for another sibling. But we usually eat out on the way home, and I feel this is a fairly good trade.
The father needed rescuing from wandering a major city after he lost track of his car. I sympathize, it must be a humiliating experience in your penultimate years, and a difficult thing for anyone to face. But if we had coordinated better, this never would have happened.

Well, I'll take some of the blame for that last one. My family are not bad people, they're beleagered by life, same as the rest of us, and I'm generally the only one around and capable enough to help them. Perhaps he could sense how stressed out I was about it. I shouldn't have put him through that. I only hope he can recover from the ordeal, as an 80-something shouldn't be walking for miles.

And there we have an example of the worst part of life: when not only will you be left holding the bag, but you can rationalize it as being your fault in a "woulda, shoulda, coulda" sort of way. But I suspect life is more deterministic: if we could have made a better decision at the time, we likely would have. So what's the point of beating myself up about it?

I'm looking forward to another big disruption in the form of an immediate family member with a bipolar mood disorder somehow talking a psychiatrist into giving him antidepressants. Somewhat left holding the bag because, while I can't blame him for not wanting to be unhappy, I'm afraid he wants it too much to self-moderate. He's not as manic as he was last time, but I fear he may be getting there.

Woulda prevented it if I could have, shoulda been a better family member, coulda moved out. Yeah, yeah. Here's the other major cause of wasted free time for me: spending it worrying about a terrible thing that may never transpire.

Wait, that Endless Dungeon run took how long?

Now that the distractions had their time to get logged for future appreciation, I managed a few entertainment pursuits of my choice this week:

45 minutes of Half Life: Alyx. The sheer, ongoing quality of a Valve game at its best is staggering. I'd have played longer, but the cat was getting underfoot.
A three-hour-long game of Endless Dungeon. I enjoyed Dungeon of the Endless, this reboot swaps out a bit of depth for more action mechanics. I figured that was maybe an alright trade. Was it? Well, enough to burn through three hours unintentionally, I suppose.
Five hours of Necesse. If I didn't second-guess myself so much in my own game development endeavors, this is probably the game I would have made. An RPG where you build settlements from the perspective of an individual, check. In a grid-based world, with procedural generation, check. Simply 2D so as to not waste too much time on multimedia, check. But, as I do tend to overthink things, it's far too simple for anything I would make... but I only paid $5 for it, and it's certainly worth that.
Several episodes of My Little Pony: Make Your Mark. The influence of being a card-carrying Brony has not completely left my system. While this is not quite to the brilliance of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (particularly the earlier seasons with Lauren Faust and Rob Renzetti at the helm), it's not quite as pablum as the ones that came before that. It's more pony... I'm grateful for more pony.

My attempts to figure out what I need to beat best-game-in-the-world, Baldur's Gate 3, remain futile. I hate these stupid regressive classes, nerfed to borderline ineffectiveness. I hate these stupid companions with their ridiculous angsty closet skeletons. I hate the loot grind - at least the villagers in Necesse have the decency to sort my inventory for me. I don't hate isometric, turn-based, party-based RPGs. But I ruined this one for myself by overstaying my welcome in Act I. Maybe I should uninstall it until the first DLC is out... I'd like to reclaim that storage space.

Why do so few builder survival games understand the Necesse-ity of building for something bigger than yourself?

In terms of physical exercise, 45-minutes of VR all week is pathetic. But, as I've said, I've been occupied with things beyond my control. My usual plan is to do it first thing in the morning after breakfast, and the vet appointment fell in the middle of that. Aside from that, well, motivation hasn't been ideal.

In terms of mental edification, I managed to get through the "bug" and halfway through the "drone" section of the second part of the Ultimate Guide to Godot 4.0. I'm determined to see this tutorial through, even though I feel I've about reached the limits of what it has to teach me. However, this section is good for solidifying knowledge, as it seems to touch on everything from earlier in the tutorial.

When it comes to how to make my desired game concept in Godot, there is likely still more to learn. However, I am second guessing my usual approach to make this a turn-based game. Pausable realtime may suffice. If so, that would play to the strengths of a realtime engine like Godot more.

And that's it. Another week of my life. As troublesome as things were this week, I suspect that my grousing will only make things worse. I wouldn't be surprised if I look back fondly some day as these being the good ol' days.

Toiling In Entertainment

2023-10-17T17:46:00.019-07:00

Another mystifyingly-short weekend. I can blow through three days off with the reckless abandon of someone half my age. But I had come up with a rough day-off schedule that kept me very busy:

In the morning, some time after breakfast, do 2-4 hours of virtual reality on my fancy new Meta Quest 3. That's long enough that it would get some good use out of my "Elite Pro Strap" battery expansion. More importantly, it would get me some (exceptionally low intensity) exercise over a long period of time.
Mid-afternoon, before the 3pm slump hits, try to get some programming in. For the time being, this took the form of Clear Code's Ultimate Introduction to Godot 4 because I'm transitioning off my old platform of Unity.
From "mid-afternoon slump" onward, I would be too bushed to stand around, so normal "pancake gaming" would suffice.

Work, VR, pancake gaming, game development: it's like having four jobs! But then, I waste so much time watching YouTube streams and browsing Reddit that I must forfeit any claim of being good at worthwhile pursuits. Even so, the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.

This week, my immune system tuckered me out in another fight. It was probably something my mother tracked down from Port Orchard, as she, too, has been complaining of feeling very ill. I was sick for most of September, too. I blame overpopulation. I'm younger, and this bug affected me less. But it was enough that the mid-afternoon slump hit all day long.

But, by the second day off, the bug had relented enough to give it a try. I finally booted up my long-purchased copy of Into The Radius VR, and found it to be an excellent virtual reality adaptation of S.T.A.L.K.E.R (which itself is adapting the setting of a far older novel). My favorite genre of games are open world games with immersive ramifications, and the eerie happenings of Into The Radius VR are nothing if not incredibly immersive.

Peeking out a Window in Half-Life: Alyx. It's something better experienced in VR.

However, the gameplay is really about awkwardly trying to reload your realistically-modeled firearms with VR motion controls while some kind of extra-dimensional horror is bearing down on you. Night is pitch black, and you fumble your spent mags in compete blackness as they tear you to pieces. Into the Radius VR seesaws between Survival and Horror, delivering either experience with exquisite detail.

But I don't have the nerves to handle too much horror. So, after enduring my first death to "black grass," I decided to relax my shattered nerves by continuing a nice game of Half-Life: Alyx. While that game also has its horrifying moments in the dark, it's a lovely walk in the park compared to Into the Radius VR.

For the first time, I encountered a level in a former zoo. It is very well done. At this stage of the game, Alyx's weapons are well-upgraded, and I can dismantle the enemies I encounter handily. "Dismantle" is the right word because giant insects needed to be taken out limb by limb, the greater bulk of their bodies covered in bulletproof chitin.

As for my progress in learning Godot, I've crossed the finish line of "Clear Code's Ultimate Introduction to Godot 4," only to find another three-hour-long video ahead of me. It looks more fun than the brass tacks covered in earlier sections.

Unfortunately, I ran out of weekend! As Steven Pressfield observes in The War Of Art, the more you try to apply yourself, the more adversity seems to rear its ugly head. As though Newton's Third Law of Motion applies to creative fruition. It sounds ridiculously superstitious, but I've encountered such soul-scarring interruptions over the years that it seems plausible.

So it was that real life reminded me of its relevance by introducing a last-minute warning of a tornado-capable storm passing overhead. Automated weather systems provided a crude trapezoid of death over my general whereabouts. In the end, the funnel cloud never formed, but I can't help but irrationally take this as another subtle sign. How dare I even try to apply myself? Well, now, that is irrational. It was a good excuse to anxiously waste another precious hour or two anyway.

What's on our No Man's Sky itinerary... encounter a rare drop that only occurs in the random places in the event of a storm, locate two kinds of critters scattered at random throughout the universe... hard pass.

When it came to mostly-pancake gaming, there was much ado about nothing. Having burned out from Starfield and forced myself to put down Cyberpunk 2077 for being too depressing, I haven't found a game nearly as easy to pick up and play. At least this dispossession has helped my motivation to do game development. A lot of well-received games have released lately. But a four-decade video gamer is nothing if not picky, even eccentric. I experimented somewhat this week:

I tried to finish the latest expedition to No Man's Sky in one day, and found it a disappointing impossibility because some of the legs of the trip involved randomly exploring planets to find certain kinds of fauna. I'd have spent more time in VR than on Pancake, but I was sick and I had to dial down my settings quite a bit to get it to work.

I was tempted to get Quasimorph now that it's out of beta, somewhat a traditional roguelike with a modern squad-based tactics veneer. But I was cautioned by many Steam reviewers that there were unavoidable run-ending kills delivered by the randomly-generated enemies. For an experience like that, I'd play $10, but not the $20 they were asking.

Throughout these three days off, I spent hours trying to decide on another character to play in Baldur's Gate 3, because I want to access that magnificent content but, every time I try to reach it, the gameplay bores me to tears. I end up starting a new character out of a vain hope that I might find something that resounds with me or just plain plays better.

My problem with Baldur's Gate 3's gameplay has a lot to do with the sense of sheer futility behind my characters' actions. I was able to solve this in Wrath of the Righteous by discovering a Witch's hexes could spread disadvantages on the rolls of their enemies with no use/day limitation. But that was Pathfinder, considerably looser with power creep than Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. Compare Pathfinder's Misfortune and Cackle with 5e's Vicious Mockery and it's clear how much more helpless PCs are in 5e.

My last character was a Wild Magic Sorcerer. I thought he'd be fun. He wasn't. But then, all the classes in 5e feel that way to me.

I eventually decided to focus on theme. Along those lines, I considered if I wanted a character concept with more of a progressive, practical mindset this week. Sadly, those are few and far between in Baldur's Gate 3. Fantasy adventures always skewed more regressive; adventures in a Good Ol' Days that never happened. But additions like the Warlock have tipped the scale moreso towards revering primacy or just being born magical. If you can sell your soul for powers in Dungeons & Dragons, I can't help but think things have taken a turn for the angsty.

I identified three that at least felt like they were trying: the Fighter, Rogue, and Wizard... each roles an existing companion has already claimed. For the sake of trying to promote a diverse party mix between main character and companions, I've been kept away from the only three classes that had a chance with me.

So I wasted a lot of time attempting the impossible. But I suppose, between "virtual" reality and attempting solo persistent state world game development, a futile pursuit of the impossible would seem to be the struggle I prefer. A shame I'm not paid for it.

My Quest 3: A Vision Of Desktop Computer Obsolescence

2023-10-10T18:41:00.022-07:00

Three days off went by in a flash. But then, when you have as much to do in your free time as I do, there's not enough time in the world.

For the most part, I was wiling away the time in anticipation for the release of the Meta Quest 3. On the first day off, I hung out on the relevant virtual reality subreddits getting involved in the anxious chatter.

One effective combination of traps: a line of turrets behind a bunch of slowing effects.

Another hour or two went to the demo of Sentry. It's basically a futuristic version of the Orc Must Die! series. Although the production values and all around quality aren't on par with that relative magnum opus, I do enjoy a forward-thinking Science Fiction setting. It also plays quite smoothly for an early production model, albeit only with two levels.

The looming sunk cost of my new VR headset motivated me to dust off the old Meta Quest 2. I booted up Pistol Whip for a couple sessions a day and... boy, am I ever out of shape! That game had me sweating inside of 20 minutes. But, I was grateful for the exercise, though less so for the need for more showers. There's no more reason for the Meta Quest 2 to gather dust than my unopened copy of Tears of the Kingdom: I just don't make the time.

On the second day off, the review embargo dropped, and I watched Meta Quest 3 reviews for hours while wasting more time on Reddit. These reviews were mostly glowing, but some put the hardware in perspective with the Meta Quest Pro, pointing out it's roughly equivalent in most ways. However, there have been significant improvements in some aspects of the hardware, most notably the price!

If getting exercise on a VR headset is a form of fighting for my physical health, then I see game development as a form of fighting for my mental health. Along those lines, I made significant strides in Clear Code's "Ultimate Introduction To Godot 4" tutorial. If I wasn't easily distracted this week, I'd have breezed through what remained from last week.

As it is, I'm down to an hour and a half left of that tutorial while writing this blog entry. I wanted to finish it before I ran out of days off, and perhaps I can pull that off after editing this blog entry. For someone with experience using Unity, this tutorial has provided a high-quality tour of how Godot does things differently, perhaps even set me on the path to better practice.

On the third day off, my preorder showed up at the store, and I finally got to play with my brand new Meta Quest 3 for a bit.

As it happens, my favorite stream was on, so I ended up trying to use the (thoroughly inferior) YouTube VR app. Now that I have had more time, I clearly should have used the default browser built into the Quest 3 interface instead because it supports passthru.

It's actually quite nice to browse the web with the virtual displays while in passthrough mode. I think I prefer it over the PC! (Well, except for the difficulty of typing. A compatible bluetooth keyboard would fix that readily enough.) You can stack them about your environment, take them with you, and more.

First Encounters footage source: UploadVR.

However, the highlight of my augmented reality experience was trying out the First Encounters tech demo. This takes the form of a matching game where the colors being matched are collected by shooting little fuzz-ball aliens invading a room! They'll hide behind real life furniture or bust in walls. It's a really gorgeous use of augmented reality. Watching it being played does not do your presence in games justice, like watching someone playing Skee-ball versus rolling those balls yourself.

With my last shred of free time, I decided to test streaming PC gaming. Thanks to my recent GPU splurge, I was able to use the 40x "AV1 video decoder" on the Virtual Desktop app. I turned on "Godlike" detail and, although this generated about 35ms response time, it did more to bring a sense of weight in the VR environment than detract me from it.

I tried a few apps with my glasses using the facial interface spacer, a calculated risk for fear of scratching the lenses:

No Man's Sky crashed after loading in the scene, unfortunately. Perhaps if I delete its VR settings? Well, I didn't have time to fuss with it tonight. [Later on I tried it with AV1 off and it worked, so suspect the decoder was using too much VRAM]
Space Pirate Trainer played as well as ever, but its polygons are rather rudimentary by today's standards.
Similarly, Carrier Command 2's deliberately-low-poly look wasn't much to look at with the added detail, but it was sharp as could be, and the sense of space was pretty impressive when spectated from active aircraft. It was too hard to figure out the VR control scheme on short notice.
Finally, I broke down and installed Half Life: Alyx, necessitating uninstalling a few precious apps I had not played in a year to make the space. The 30% added pixels on the Quest 3 were utilized well. It was a feast for the eyes!

The chips on the back of Alyx's gravity gloves seemed impossibly intricate.
Looking at the weapons up close, I cannot imagine how a 3D model could look more realistic.
The models of a few dead Combine soldiers left nothing to complain about, but they seemed a tad larger than life, lacking detail in indiscernible ways, like mascots.
The environments looked good, but clearly low poly compared to everything else. Half Life: Alyx complained of having low video RAM and this may have caused a few of the effects to malfunction.

I don't own any VR games with as much detail as Half Life: Alyx. It seems I may have to look into rectifying that, as the Quest 3 makes good use of it.

So far, the biggest downside of the Meta Quest 3 is that its batteries can drain inside 2 hours. That's not long enough to watch a movie (something Bigscreen would excel at) or a whole Escapist livestream (a favorite occupation of mine). I have a battery-endowed "Elite Pro Strap" in the mail that should roughly double the battery capacity. A little under four hours is adequate.

If it weren't for the battery life problem and the typing problem, I'd probably be able to spend the whole day in augmented reality. The passthru feature means I can get around comfortably and do things while wearing it. Sure, the view is a bit muddy, but I prefer computer graphics anyway. The Apple Vision Pro may be on to something: this is better than a computer desktop experience, at least so far.

Wait No More

2023-10-03T16:57:00.015-07:00

Although I still seem to have a few annoying hangers-on symptoms, I seem to be recovering, little by little, day by day. It was an odd week, in many ways. I had a day off of work to make up for a holiday, and my last day at work was spent feeling disassociated with fatigue while watching Van Helsing Abridged, a double-whammy of discombobulation. And then it was into my normal three days off, still a bit too sick to volunteer any of that time subbing.

In truth, I probably need the money from subbing, as I've opted to put down the credit to score a Meta Quest 3 at release day. It's both a reflection of my craven computer technophilia and a last ditch effort to get me to exercise more during my free time. However, when you factor in the accessories and getting the higher-end (512 GB storage) model, I'll be paying back about $800. On zero-interest-if-paid-back-in-a-year credit, not too intolerable, but still a dumb splurge on technology I may or may not use. It's extra-dumb considering the next paycheck is looking tight. All this home convalescence is proving expensive.

I won't get my hands on the Meta Quest 3 for another week, at the earliest. In the present, I found myself in an awkward juncture of free time entertainment. That's because, in the course of editing the last blog entry, I talked myself out of playing more Cyberpunk 2077. I realized that I was too exhausted to deal with that edginess. It's a perfectly good game, but I had a point, so I eschewed it. However, since the other games I've been playing lately were also at least partly guilty of this, that left me nothing to play.

Little Lord Fauntleroy climbs out of his evil squid pod

I made a half-hearted attempt towards getting back into Baldur's Gate 3. I played it to death, but not in the way its developers, Larian, intended. No, I restarted the first act a few dozen times with different character classes, trying to find one that could somehow render the game more enjoyable to me. This created a death spiral of enjoyment because most of it came from the content, not the character builds, and I wore it very thin with all this restarting.

Nevertheless, I've started a halfling noble Bard named Fauntleroy, played straight with a College of Lore. I wanted to be a pure caster with great flexibility for whatever I felt like casting. A Wizard is pretty much that, but that role in the party was already taken by Gale, so a Bard is the runner up. Besides, I also wanted to the face of the party, and a Jack Of All Trades suits an indecisive player like me, so that's two more points in favor of rolling a Bard.

Just talking about it causes those old "second guessing" reflexes to kick in. Now that I think about it, there's no way a Bard has enough known spells to be truly flexible. I would be better off specializing and playing a Sorcerer, whose high Charisma wouldn't hurt their "face of the party" qualifications any, even though they wouldn't be quite as good at picking a lock. Since damage spells, healing spells, and buffs bore me, it stands to reason that my Sorcerer could specialize in battlefield control. (Though, unfortunately, not summoning: the Sorcerer' spell list was nerfed in 5e for some reason.) Their metamagic could apply well to battlefield control spells, but it's debatably a weak class feature.

I could reroll again, sure. Or I could play something else whenever I feel bored or dissatisfied with my experience in Baldur's Gate 3. That's my been my tactic this week, and I find it quite liberating.

However, the burnout from my previous game development endeavors has subsided enough that I feel listless and dissatisfied with just pissing away my life playing games during my free time. Life's too short, darn it, so let's make time for some higher endeavors! Along those lines, it was time to get elbow-deep in a game engine again. Unfortunately, the game engine I had accustomed myself, Unity, has fallen on hard times. I was in very little danger of being charged for its use, but this straw that broke the camel's back. Unity was overkill for me. I was tired of the excessive bloat that fought back every time I did something. I just needed something to encourage me to try something else, and here it was.

It may be simpler, but it seems to have the chops I need

That "something else" turned out to be Godot. What I am looking for in a game engine is one that is flexible enough to support sophisticated game mechanics (like turn-based RPGs that utilize procedural generation) but still save me the effort that would go into creating my own engine from a handful of SDKs. To put it somewhat-but-not-entirely-inaccurately, Godot is a simpler version of Unity, but free and open source. It's a good thing Godot is that powerful. I was tempted to go back to GameMaker, which is more user friendly, but I don't think it's flexible enough for my concepts.

So far, I've gotten about 5 hours through Clear Code's ultimate introduction to Godot 4. I'd have gotten further, but I'm not accustomed to protracted study, and sometimes prone to borderline ADHD. I feel somewhat encouraged with what I have seen of Godot so far. For example:

There is less bloat in the interface, no features rudely protracting into my project manager that would require specialized training to understand. That said, new features are added to Godot at a rapid pace, and maybe one day it will be as over-engineered as Unity currently is. But, for now, I'm enjoying how smooth the workflow is without all that bloat.
While I enjoyed the power of C# in Unity, there was also this disconnect where only some things were serialized. This created a perpetual communication barrier between the Unity editor and pure C# classes. In Godot, the GDScript is fully integrated into the editor environment, with easy access to any "node" in the scene. (Although it's considered better practice to use the "@export" keyword to serialize variables when referring to "nodes." Also, to Call Down, Signal Up.)
Swallowing my pride at learning a "lesser" programming language, I've been learning GDScript (a slightly-modified version of Python for Godot), and it has been a simple-to-use, capable language, even sharing a large bulk of the syntax I am used to from C#. (Although the editor's autocomplete functionality is not quite as robust as Visual Studio.) Perhaps, for the time being, this level of programming power suits my skills better than the breadth of esoteric classes offered by C#.

I won't know if Godot has what I need until I finish this tutorial and spend time trying to make something of my own. I have my work cut out for me just trying to reimport my line of sight and pathfinding code.

But then, it might be wise to do things differently this time, giving Godot the chance I never gave Unity. By that, I mean start with the real-time, physics-enabled game it's designed to make. Use the built in functions as much as possible. Then work backwards from there to the traditional roguelike I want that neither Godot nor Unity are built for. The idea being to get to working prototype sooner by sticking to the engine's strengths.

So how do I get it from there to what I want? I'm thinking a control interface like Frozen Synapse, where commands are queued up and executed in short bursts. Once I get that working, a mode that allows players to rapidly add and execute single moves in a very short block of time might seem passably roguelike.

Now, a game very similar to a traditional roguelike is Moonring, which I began playing recently. To be more accurate, it's closer to a classic tile-based old school computer RPG, like Questron or Ultima I through Ultima V. Each are games I played during my childhood because, yes, I'm that old. I have aspired to create a game in this style. But I notice Moonring wasn't made in Unity or Godot; it was a custom engine using the LÖVE SDK. That's because Moonring was built by an industry veteran who knows what they're doing.

As it happens, despite looking similar to those old games and having sound effects obviously out of SFXR, Moonring is quite a bit more advanced than any 8-bit computer game. (It had better be: a 90.8 megabytes install size would fill a ludicrous number of floppy disks.) Some of these advanced features include:

A "poise" mechanic that gives your adventurer a shield of hitpoints that regenerate outside of melee range.
Five "gods" to perform feats of devotion for in order to earn super powers and other abilities, six for each, although only 10 can be assigned to your hotbar at once.
A dialogue system that lets you type keywords you want to talk about, like Ultima VI, but now with autocomplete and a note system that keeps track of them all.
Procedural-generated dungeons. (Once complete, the dungeon stays put.)
The ability to invest gold in towns, increasing their available wares and earning acclaim with the townspeople.
The equipment is visible on the characters, and you can tell at a glance what they're wearing. Attacking creates a swinging or stabbing animation that reveals the weapon somewhat. I'm often attracted to making modular gear systems like this, cool to see this developer pulled it off.
Lots of nifty particle effects. Instead of an Ultima style wind UI element, you see particles blowing across the map. The wind affects things such as the maddening "Amber" fog that rolls over the land.
Progression not based on killing endless numbers of things, but rather equipment and investing in devotion points with the powers of the land. (Something more RPGs should consider doing more often, rather than just aping grind-a-thons.)

So Moonring has both been a blast from the past and a class act in excellent game design. I don't think Lord British could have done a better job himself back in the 1980s. That's because computer game development theory was not as far along as it is now, and he had to wrestle with more primitive technology. However, had he not bigger aspirations, such as being an astronaut, he probably could have made a game as good as Moonring in the 2000s. Also, Moonring is free of charge, which is always a competitive edge.

As of my second day off, my modus operandi has shifted back to a mixture of productivity (learning Godot) and relaxing (when my tired mind and body required it) by playing Moonring in a window while watching a stream. It's been blissful; I wish I spent the first day doing that instead of desperately trying to enjoy Baldur's Gate 3. I would live like this if I could make a living doing it. It'll probably be another week or two before I complete this Godot tutorial. That's assuming no outstanding emergency happens first, but past hardships lead me to suspect we're overdue for one.

Docking To Visit Night City

2023-09-26T16:22:00.050-07:00

I've been running afoul of some minor but annoying Covid rebound, and that hardly seems fair considering I eschewed the Paxlovid. However, at least I've had the energy for some gaming. Although I figured out my Baldur's Gate 3 class indecision could be solved the most directly by playing a Bard, I opted to play more Starfield (New Game Plus) leading into Cyperpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion. That DLC released precisely in the middle of my three day weekend, although I had a few chores that made that the lesser-available half.

In Starfield, I was focused on getting a few more achievements. I picked up five, four of which were related to the UC Vanguard faction, and am now at 35/50 of the possible achievements for Starfield. This mostly involved "Terrormorphs," and was among the best story content I enjoyed from this game.

Aside from that, it was mostly the usual "kill, loot, sell, and repeat" loop of any Bethesda open world game. Whenever I needed some credits, I'd clear out a hole of baddies (occupied by ~~Gunner~~ Eclipse paramilitary, ~~Scavenger~~ Spacer bandits, and ~~Raider~~ Crimson Fleet space pirates). Though it was not quite as prevalent as I said in the previous entry, it nevertheless seems loot containers and the occasional boss enemy will scale to my level 60-something character. Thus, there was plenty of super-expensive loot around to exchange with merchants for their credits, even on low level solar systems.

Prying artifacts loose with a cutter feels strange the second time around, the esoteric defaced by commonplace routine.

I also focused on building a "Warehouse" outpost across the lake from the Lodge in New Atlantis. The advantage of building it there was that I can fast travel to the city to offload my loot on the various merchants in town. However, the point of a "Warehouse" is to build a chain of storage for each of the four resource types (solid, liquid, gas, and wares). Don't even bother to sort it, just dump it all. Then I can unclutter my inventory and ship's cargo hold and just do all my crafting at the outpost stations there.

I didn't think to try that last time, but it's obvious now. However, even though I'm building "Large" cargo containers, I find it challenging to construct the storage fast enough to keep up with the resource flow. Even the merchants' supply of building materials is not enough. My next step would probably be to set up a few mining outposts to assure the necessary amount of Iron, Aluminum, Titanium, Tungsten, Copper, and Nickel are available to keep building storage containers.

Then the "Phantom Liberty" DLC for Cyberpunk 2077 was released, and I had an excuse to break my Starfield habit cold turkey. (Although, despite what the Steam store page said, I was mislead by the title screen congratulating me for purchasing it; Steam didn't bother downloading the DLC until later that evening.) When I beat Cyberpunk 2077 almost three years ago, I was looking forward to a replay as soon as the first DLC came out, and it seems I made good with that promise. However, I didn't expect the first DLC to take so long!

The sun rises slowly over the horizon, 5am in Night City. The attention to detail in Cyberpunk 2077's is lavish, the average street full of life and sights to see. The people watching alone could be a game. Starfield went through the motions, but Bethesda didn't put in the necessary work to pull off that illusion as well.

Immediately before the DLC dropped, CD Projekt Red released version 2.0, representing a major overhaul of the core systems of Cyberpunk 2077. These include a revamped skill tree, cyberware, and even vehicular combat with integrated weaponry. I held out for the Phantom Liberty expansion's release before starting a brand new game.

So far, I have not noticed any difference with having the DLC installed, but that's probably because Steam installed it late, right after I completed Act 1. In any case, it's not until the end of Act 2 that the DLC truly unlocks: a whole new section and plot line worth 15-20 hours of play opens to visit.

Compared to Starfield, I'm inclined to believe that the overall gameplay and environments of Cyberpunk 2077 are better. However, Starfield has it beaten in longevity. While it's true that New Atlantis is nowhere as large as Night City, and the level of detail in Starfield is nowhere near Cyberpunk 2077, I could travel Starfield's galaxy for a very long time and then run New Game Plus and do it all over again. Cyberpunk 2077's content is completely static, quickly and permanently consumed. No wonder I beat it in about 70 hours back near release (although the DLC should add to that).

Despite being away for almost three years, perhaps Cyberpunk 2077 made too a solid of an impression on me. Even with the version 2.0 revamped systems under the hood, the main thing I've notice is the same experience as before, only smoothly playing this time. Even with the hottest NVIDIA tech integrated into the engine, Cyberpunk 2077 feels dated, but in such a way that reminds me that it was ahead of its time. Even though I know it has undergone significant changes, and I am running it on better hardware this time, I feel more nostalgia than freshness. Perhaps it's because playing the release-state game long enough allowed my mind to filter out the glitchiness and get to the core experience that is now being provided (without the need for mental filtering).

Oh hey, I had forgotten this Hideo Kojima cameo.

In the present, I'm surprised at how easy "Very Hard" difficulty has been. After getting 5 points in the core stats, I focused on the "Cool" stat, sinking my perk points into the "Focus" mode that slows time whenever I aim with a pistol or sniper/precision rifle with a full stamina bar. I also installed a "Kerenzikov" nervous system upgrade that slows time when aiming while taking evasive manuevers. Put them together, and I inadvertently turned Cyberpunk 2077 into a Max Payne game: access to "bullet time" abounds.

Even so, I am disappointed I can't simultaneously use the "Sandevistan" time-slowing implant while having the cyberdeck needed for quickhacks. I suppose it does introduce a distinct character build choice. However, I enjoy using the quickhacks, so it's a bummer to drop that deep gameplay mechanic if I wanted to run a true Street Samurai build.

Despite encountering these solid stumbling blocks, my impressions of Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 feel premature. It's good to be back in Night City and savoring its overwhelming sights and sounds. How many games can you describe as savory? Cyberpunk 2077 is a remarkably high quality experience that needed three years of additional development, version 2.0, to bring into fruition. What a miracle that it was allowed to happen! Once again, this is proving to be quite the year for excellent gaming experiences, even if we're bringing back a better version of three-year-old ones.

I wish it didn't feel so familiar, as it's creating a strong impression that I am wasting my time going in circles. I cannot say why Cyberpunk 2077 feels offputtingly repetitive here more than Baldur's Gate 3 or Starfield (where I have been repeating the same content, literally)...

Your reward for doing everything right in Act 1 of Cyberpunk 2077 is that V hits rock bottom.

...but it might have to do with how gritty and dark the story and setting are. This experience borders on traumatic, and it goes against the grain to subject myself to that twice.

Thinking back, all my games lately have been intense experiences, seducing players with the odd sexiness of dysfunction, perhaps in the name of poignancy or perhaps just to get attention:

Cyberpunk 2077 is a gritty and raw example of urban fiction rife with murder and tragedy.
Starfield has relaxing spacewalks, and yet plot twists that demand your persona sacrifices everything. It can be really dark at times, perhaps Bethesda couldn't pull themselves entirely from writing Fallout style.
Baldur's Gate 3 revels in edginess, each companion harboring a dark past, exploratory amateur surgery down one plot path, bestiality down another. At least they also have frequent humorous situations, but this clashes a bit.
Armored Core IV: Fires of Rubicon is full of balls-to-the-wall challenging boss fights in a post-apocalyptic, greed-fueled world.

Although Cyberpunk 2077 is probably twice as bad as the rest. The writers couldn't tell the difference between urban fantasy and noir, or perhaps they found the latter more fun to write. CD Projekt Red's depiction of Night City is a place of glitz and glamour hiding a dark underbelly that runs depth of human depravity. As an edgerunner, V's job is to plumb those depths, violently unclogging the pipes of society wherever it's blocking the aspirations of whoever hires them. The player comes along for the ride.

It wears on the soul. I can't begrudge any game developer for wanting to stand out while expressing some genuine sentiment. However, it's been a rough month for me, I've been sick with two significant viruses, one after the other. I'm tired of feeling ill. Maybe this hasn't been a good recipe to convalesce under, and maybe I need a break from all this edginess.

Consider These Stars Fielded

2023-09-20T21:48:00.076-07:00

Though I got to enjoy an extra five days off last week, I would have preferred to have worked those days than went through the bout of coronavirus that got me them. But I'm pretty much out the other end of it now and have been well enough to play games for the last few.

In fact, I finished a game! How rare it is for me to say that, as I'm far more likely to become bored of and/or get distracted from a game before finishing it. However, I finally wrapped up my first run on Starfield by completing the main campaign. I took the leisurely route and pulled it off this 20-hour task in about 135.

That said, it was almost a slog. Starfield ended the same way Bethesda open-world RPGs usually end: with the balance imploding in a wholly-unprepared endgame. However, Starfield is extra streamlined for a Bethesda game. As such, I fear the slog may have been evaded for a poor reason: there was too little substance to impede that inevitable, lackluster end.

As far as endings go, it was quite nebulous, and pillar boxed on my ultrawide display.

Bethesda open world games were never particularly well-balanced, especially towards end of game. However, in Starfield's case, the skill system was pretty stable. There are only four ranks of each skill, and they don't add up to much. For example, maxing out "Ballistics" will up your damage and range with any bullet-spewing weapon by 30%. But maximum "Pistols" skill adds 50% damage, which adds (not multiplies with) your 30% Ballistics bonus for a 80% damage boost.

Comparisons to Skyrim balance are fair because the speed of earning Skyrim's "perk points" is identical to Starfield's "skill points." Players get one point per character level. As they're expected to be able to beat the main campaign of either game anywhere from about character level 25 onward, the very top skill unlocks are available by then. This is a tried and true system for Bethesda, and is recycled in their Fallout series games, too.

However, there's a difference in how it's balanced in each game. Five Skyrim "perk points" in a weapon skill could double your damage, a 100% increase for a 5 character level investment, or 20% per character level. Starfield's 80% more damage for 8 skill points is 10% per character level. (It's even worse when you consider Skyrim skill scores also boosted damage up to 50% by itself without perks.) Thus, your rate of power progression is literally halved in Starfield.

(Granted, these numbers don't tell the whole story of Starfield's skill balance. For example, a big base damage weapon combined with the 4x damage multiplier from ranged stealth attacks with maxed "Concealment" is not too shabby. That's probably enough damage to one shot kill anything but a higher level boss. In Skyrim, the ranged sneak attack multiplier caps out at 3x, but crafting and skill potency would have rendered the damage already obscene before it was even multiplied.)

I took several screenshots of landscapes or malfunctioning NPCs, but none of the combat.

My point is that Starfield's skill system still reasonably balanced because the caps are firmly in place, and no amount of New Game Plus restarts will change that. I suppose the same could be said for Skyrim's skill balance: in a vacuum, it's finite. In general, the end-game imbalance at the end of most Bethesda open world games came down to a deliberate surrender: players allowed to power up until defeating most enemies in the game is trivial.

The trouble is that the balance in Bethesda open-world games usually capsizes in ways that render balance beyond trivial. For example, in Morrowind and Oblivion, it was possible to become permanently invisible. Skyrim's balance really tanked when it came in contact with the item crafting skills. That's partly because an exploit existed that relied on a recursive loop: alchemy could boost your enchanting effectiveness, enchantments could then enhance your alchemy effectiveness, and repeat. You could end up with such broken trade skills that you could enchant a commonplace table fork into a weapon that could unmake the world. However, even without exploiting in Skyrim, I find higher level trade skills to be "I win" buttons:

A full set of enchanted gear could double your damage again by pushing a weapon skill far past the normal maximum of 100.
For magic users, it was possible to create an enchantment set that rendered a chosen spell school or two free to cast.
Smithing could increase the base weapon damage number of any weapon to enough to down nearly any enemy in a single swipe. Taking the smithing perk related to a specific material type doubled that. (The weapon damage was considered the base damage, before all skills and other multipliers hit. Add the sneak attack multiplier, and even dragons were one shot kills.)

That Bethesda let that into the release version of Skyrim indicates they're either lousy at RPG balancing or design via Rule Of Cool.

At least they remembered the most important item in any Bethesda open world game.

So it's significant that Starfield's balance doesn't absolutely surrender at higher levels like Skyrim's does. Unfortunately, the item balance instead has the problem of being boring, particularly where loot is concerned.

Crafting in Starfield is similar to Fallout 4: you can build specific crafting recipes into slots specific to each piece of equipment to enhance it. However, they removed access to the Fallout 4 slot that determines equipment tier. Instead, tier is redetermined when dropped. This crafting restriction removes a sense of dynamic connection between the various tiers of loot, and things only go downhill from there.

There are four tiers in Starfield: untitled (some call it Common), Calibrated, Refined, and Advanced. For example, a "Refined Old Earth Pistol" would be an Old Earth Pistol of the third tier. In addition, some weapons are clearly superior to others. For example, an Eon light pistol is inferior to a Razorback heavy pistol of the same tier. Each tier grants enough of a bump in potency for inferior weapons to get another chance in the sun before their bigger brothers' higher tier versions show up.

That seems like a nice way to keep equipment churn moving and varied, but it doesn't quite work out that way. That's because the player is largely at the mercy of Starfield's loot table RNG. The actual order you get effective weapons will be random, even disjointed. This is further complicated by "weapon perks," 1-3 random qualities that may appear on a dropped weapon that can do anything from randomly set enemies aflame to increase the weapon clip size. While all this loot randomness is exciting, it can rebound in an unsatisfying way.

The only good Legendary Advanced weapon I found was a Kraken SMG, but it wouldn't have been my first choice (except to use up my glut of 6.5mm ammo).

For example, I found an Advanced Regulator (a heavy pistol) in my early levels that could instantly exterminate most enemies for me as long as I could afford the "ultramag" ammo for it. Getting it so early trivialized most combat encounters. It also made weapons of lesser tiers into merchant fodder, except perhaps as a means to expend cheaper ammunition. It's unfortunate that the developers put in the trouble to make all these weapons feel distinct with good tactile feedback, only to move control of optimal weapon to use from the player to the RNG.

Ideally, the balance should be set to keep encounters and equipment variety interesting, so I think we can call that a broken (or at least in-need-of-improvement) core game system. However, the loot system also is not balanced in a particularly enjoyable place. That's because, once you have decided on a weapon that you like, all you can do is grind and hope that the RNG will drop a better one. At "normal" difficulty, my piddling 135-hour play failed to drop anything better than a "refined" microgun with a malfunctioning perk missing from it.

Besides, even though Starfield is better balance capped than the Bethesda open-world games that came before, it still isn't particularly challenging. You still just secure a few high-damage weapons and can now put down every enemy you come across with a click or two. That's just the way Bethesda balances their open world games. The main difference that the capped power curve makes is, when you encounter the rare scaled high-level bandit, they'll take several more clicks and might actually require an ounce of caution to survive.

I paid respect to the developers by watching the credits, but they repaid that with a silent, long, and boring scroll that even included a foreign corporate office's Sous Chef and their assistants. Who thought a gamer end user wanted to see that?

New Game Plus could have fixed this by doing what most such modes in other games do: adjust all of the challenges to the game to the character you are bringing over. That could potentially make starting an NG+ as exciting and challenging as starting a new game while still allowing the player to access the features of the skills unlocked on their characters. Strangely, Bethesda chose not to: the lowest level system on an NG+ is still level 1 and the top star systems are still level 75. So NG+ is largely the same universe you left, only everything is reset so you can loot it again. (There's no tiers of loot above "Advanced," so I hope you enjoy an entire universe for that.)

Sure, you lost your old inventory when starting NG+, but so what? The enemies and their loot scale to your current character level. So you can just run out into any planet's wilderness, clear out a bandit hole, and get enough "Advanced"-tier equipment to fill your current ship's cargo hold and stew until you can sell them (the merchants are on a fixed credit limit to buy with). Each piece of high level gear can be worth over 100,000 credits, selling for a fraction of that depending on your mercantile skills. Given my character's inherited New Game Plus space ship building skills, and the best ship parts cost about 50k each, I have a place to funnel the first few hundred thousand credits I earn. But I should be able to pull that off with the loot from about a half-dozen good-sized bandit holes anyway. Then credits become meaningless and there's nothing left of the loot system for me but a thin hope that a good 3-perk "Legendary" of my favorite weapon drops.

I planned to continue playing Starfield, bumping up the difficulty each NG+, and doing a major faction's quests early into the run. That way, I can see if my new affiliation changes much. Each faction is also a major slew of content I missed. Complete all four factions, complete four more New Game Plus runs. But, other than the content, I don't feel like there's much to look forward to.

Check it out, astronomy buffs, a completely irrelevant reference to real life. Much like Fallout 4, Starfield suffers an identity crisis of pretending you're an adventurer who uncovered things untouched by mankind for hundreds of years while simultaneously showing people running around and doing things everywhere.

Starfield's New Game Plus puts it into an odd position where typical Bethesda story content becomes a repeatable quest that can be replayed by the same character as progression fodder. It feels like Destiny, Fallout 76, or other games-as-service models, but completely offline and without the loot structure to handle it. I didn't get an alternate universe my first try, just the same one again with new dialogue options for having been there during the first.

I suppose I could finish grinding research and try out a few more interesting skills. This time, I went for heavy weapons, dueling (melee weapons), security, persuasion, piloting, ship design, and more or less dumped the rest into research. I never even tried the ship component targeting nor the ground slides, so there's whole game mechanics that were locked away needlessly. Perhaps this indicates a deficiency in the player incentives built into the skill system.

Looking back, there were a number of missed opportunities to make Starfield a better game. For example, it might have made space exploration more significant if I had to replenish the He-3 in the Grav Drive. Or if meals were handled with more care than a magic potion to quaff. Your crew is also severely underutilized because you can only take one along at a time while the others sit around inside of the ship. If you could have ordered them into some kind of supporting action, then Starfield would have approached some of the ambition we saw in Fallout 4 with smoke grenades that summon support NPCs or Minuteman artillery.

The first warning sign that the current outpost implementation was a dud is that NPC-owned ones had to operate under completely different rules.

However, far and away the greatest missed opportunity was to add more emergent virtual world mechanics. I feel this is especially the case with the Starfield "outposts." The "settlements" in Fallout 4 were more ambitious, with mechanics that touch and tie into every part of the game. The Starfield outposts do nothing but generate resources which are used sparingly, mostly to build more outposts. There's no quests that require outposts, either. So outposts were just a throwaway, vestigial mechanic. What a waste of the only true dynamic world mechanic in Starfield.

No, I don't think I should bother playing more Starfield for now. While Bethesda open world games are my comfort zone, I played this one into the ground, for now. So it's time to take a breather from it. At the very least, I should wait until they put out the promised DLSS patch.

Am I mad at Bethesda? No. While I am somewhat disappointed that Starfield wasn't as great as the hype suggested it should be, coming off as a stable-but-surprisingly-lackluster Bethesda showing, I can't fault it for providing 140 hours of entertainment. At $1 per hour entertainment budget metric, I got my money's worth. I even finished the main campaign, something that usually proves elusive for me. You can call that an unusual success, as far as entertaining this four-decade gamer is concerned.

And yet, it could have been so much better. If they really wanted to save face with the gaming community, Bethesda would continue to improve Starfield for years to come, as they did for Fallout 76. Failing that, I'll be interested in seeing what DLCs are released and what the modding community has come up with a year from now. If nothing else, Starfield can be the foundation of something better.

Now for the difficult part: what comes next? Cyberpunk 2077's new DLC is a shoe-in, but still a week away. I'm sure Baldur's Gate 3 would welcome me back, but I haven't resolved my utter mental gridlock in regards to my main character build. I am somewhat convinced that the 5e ruleset just doesn't have the depth I crave, at least on any platform but the theater of the mind. Armored Core VI (and for that matter Elden Ring by the same developer) would be a worthy play, but the COVID isn't completely out of my system, and that level of sweaty difficulty seems exhausting. And then there's my stalled game development endeavors, made worse by that idiot former-EA CEO turning my IDE of choice, Unity, into a toxic hotbed.

Honestly, it's given me enough to think about that more Starfield might prevail just because it's easier to stay the course... perhaps rack up the final 10 achievements and move on to modding?

Maintaining Space

2023-09-14T07:45:00.005-07:00

I don't have much more to say about the Starfield I've been playing lately. Honestly, it only took me about a week for the initial excitement to wear off. While I can still play it, I have fallen into a routine of completing missions, surveying planets, building outposts, taking out prefab outposts full of bad guys, and... well, if this is all there is to space, things are looking pretty good in my living room.

But then, as of a few days ago, I caught coronavirus. I suspect my dad tracked it home from the casino he likes to visit, but who can say? In any case, I haven't been able to play anything for a while. I've been too busy recovering. It's quite the bug; I can see why people were concerned about it. Fortunately, I got my shots, and I'm pretty sure I'm on the road to recovery.

Home Star

2023-09-04T17:36:00.071-07:00

The start of Starfield's "Advanced Access" worked out well for my schedule, and Steam has me logged for over 45 hours of Bethesda's, "Skyrim in space." An apt moniker indeed as, the more I play, the more it feels like the Dova-kiin has reached the space age. But it doesn't hurt that I've played thousands of hours of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and the like. This is my comfort zone.

Since Garfield rhimes with Starfield, I modeled my hero loosely on that fat orange cat. However, Garfield isn't a name that the robot companion knows, so I chose Hasenbuhler instead.

It would be fair to say that Starfield leans more into No Man's Sky this time. There are vast planets to explore with animals, vegetables, and minerals to catalog (though thankfully, we're not asked to name them).

However, No Man's Sky was made by European developers, so their take on science fiction tends to have a bit more Eurojank in it. To my American eyes, Starfield plays the concept straight and is better for it.

In particular, I find space flight much better (it even borrows a hint of FTL: Faster Than Light in its power, crew, and repair systems), although it's far from as good as FreeSpace 2.

The Well's run-down looking appearance is an analogy for the rot festering beneath a shiny veneer.

There are some things Skyrim or Fallout 4 or their mods did better:

There's an important collectable you discover soon into the main story. To get it, Skyrim would have given you a hand-crafted dungeon. In Starfield, it's typically just a quick trip in your space ship, a short hike, and a little zero-G acrobatics ritual. That's not as interesting, but it's made up for to some extent because there good procedural dungeons everywhere else.
While Fallout 4 allows you to automatically scrap junk to produce things, it suits a post-apocalyptic theme more than a Sci-fi theme, so Starfield has no such mechanic. Instead, you forage natural resources. However, removing the practical use of junk only added to the inventory clutter.
Since we now have an excess of "Misc"-category junk to decorate with, the only other use is to sell them. However, while some Skyrim or Fallout 4 mods have tried to optimize the UI or provide mechanics to make handling your junk this easier, Starfield acts like Bethesda doesn't recognize the necessity. The inventory UI is no SkyUI; there's no handy value/weight setting to easily see the best loot to haul. Nor did Bethesda learn from Legacy of the Dragonborn, providing no loot chest to toss junk to sell into or museum to populate, not even a way to tag items as wares for easy selling later.
Not only that, but the "digipicks" used for Sci-fi lockpicking are lumped in with the junk under the "Misc" category, so it takes diligence to avoid hawking them accidentally. Another casualty of the "Misc" lumping was my London Snowglobe disappearing after a space ship redesign. I suppose the in-engine answer is to decorate an environment with them and hope they don't fall through the floor. I don't know any mods that fixed this for the previous games. But I have played offshoot games that kept their lockpicks, keys, collectables, and quest items better-contained.
There's some reviewers that rated Starfield a 7/10 for the lack of depth, and they have a point. This is Bethesda's most streamlined open world RPG game since Redguard. Forget the SPECIAL attribute scores of Fallout 4 and kiss the elaborate perk trees of Skyrim goodbye: Starfield has neither. Instead, there's no attributes, and only loose skill tiers. (It might have helped if many game mechanics were not hidden behind skill unlocks.)
When is Bethesda going to learn to create a better food system? It breaks my heart to see all these cool-looking foods in Starfield reduced to short-term buffs or an insulting amount of health restoration. It sprains my brain that no one at Bethesda objected to how illogical it is to heal, mid-combat, by eating a hundred blocks of cheese. (Well, I did base my character off Garfield, that's probably how he would win a fight.) At least the injury mechanics add a little depth, but it was presented better in 2004's Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

Considering how long Starfield spent in the oven, issues like these should have been solved. It rankles of an insular development culture that depends on (or perhaps utilitizes neccessity to incentivize) the modding community to put things right.

While Starfield doesn't make me reach for the screenshot button as often as Cyberpunk 2077 did, it still wowed me enough to do it.

Although it's telling Bethesda could not take the initiative to use the community's past modding endeavors to inform a better design, I would nevertheless be willing to agree Starfield is still Bethesda's finest work yet:

While not the best I have seen anywhere in modern gaming, the environmental quality in Starfield has raised the bar for Bethesda, a company that is no slouch at it. As suits a game of this size, the content is mixed bag, but the average skews higher than most games I have seen, and the best bits are jaw-dropping.
While your fellow members of Constellation fall into predictable tropes, I find them more likable and easier to get along with than almost any Bethesda-made NPC in any of their games that I have played. Your mileage may vary, but my reasoning is:

Fallout 4's top three would be hardboiled detective android Nick Valentine, followed by adorkable French gynoid Curie, and Codsworth the diligent robot manservant. Not necessarily because I am into robots so much as the more human alternatives skewed into irrationality to portay their humanity.
The best Skyrim could muster was Lydia, a surly but agreeable yes-woman. Serana was probably better but I don't buy into the Anne Rice/Stephanie Meyer mindset that vampires, as ravenous fantasy monsters that drink people, would be good company.
Starfield's NPCs are a cut above the usual Bethesda model, and I would put almost any member of Constellation only second to Nick Valentine, a remarkable outlier.

While the game mechanics could be deeper in Starfield, they're still deeper than No Man's Sky. Especially in space combat.
While there is still a bit of Bethesda jank here, this is their best take to the Creation Engine yet. It runs smooth as silk and rock solid even with dozens of NPCs on screen. Whoever did their engine coding really knew what they were doing.

In other words, the saving grace of Starfield is that the sum of the parts comes out at a higher place than we've Bethesda has made before. Coming in with Bethesda-level expectations, I'm getting exactly what I expected and a little more, and can't complain.

Borderline uncanny valley aside, Constellation's members are some of the most believable computer NPC portrayals that I have experienced outside of visual novels.

More importantly, Starfield is big. In my 45-hour time investment, I see a great deal of space on the starmap that I have yet to explore. I am only about halfway down the list of main quest steps, have maxed out the affinity of two NPC companions, but have not embarked far on any major faction quests. (Though I accidentally joined a sleazy corporation without realizing it was one of the factions.)

There are many facets of character generation that I have yet to unlock. My character is level 23, but the skill list has enough slots and ranks for over 200 levels. Given that I unlock the capability to get better at those skills by doing certain tasks, I felt encouraged to take more ranks after accomplishing this. However, they also require investing my previous skill points (1/level) to get the next rank. Consequently, my level 23 Pilgrim only knows 11 skills. Similar to Fallout 4 and Skyrim before it, I can probably expect about 50-60 levels before I feel like my player character has a complete skill set. When I finally beat the campaign, the New Game+ mode encourage exploring and unlocking everything.

There is so much freedom to explore Starfield's universe that I can't watch other people play without risking spoilers. Even within the first hour of them passing the introductory sequence, they seem to be finding and doing things that I have not in 45 hours. Although there is a recommended character level on each star system, there is a great deal of breadth to where you can go in each. Planet surfaces are covered with procedural content, unexpected encounters await in orbit, and faction quest lines will appeal to different players and character concepts.

I also have yet to build my first outpost, though I plan to do that next because I need somewhere to store all my clutter besides my ship. From what I have seen so far, this is another version of the settlement building mechanics of Fallout 4, but the exact capabilities of it seem streamlined. On a related note, the modular starship building is also somewhat like building a settlement, as placement of the modules will dictate the ship interior.

That said, if I am in it for the long haul, there's a bumpy ride ahead. Starfield is a little less kludgy than past Bethesda projects, but despite the reduction of incident frequency, I'm still encountering some of the same issues:

Weird-acting NPCs standing on tables, standing in awkward places, photo-bombing conversations, or jittering around in physics altercations.
On "normal," the balance is trivial. Skyrim's borked balance was problematic, I can think of a half-dozen ways to break it, but Starfield has straight up "I win" buttons.
Speaking of balance, I think the "Advanced" Regulator heavy pistol dropped sooner than it was supposed to. Either there's still bugs left in their loot lists, or some developer wanted us to enjoy it earlier.
At one point, I had a quest that involved a key card to unlock an apartment. I went into the apartment for a little privacy with the NPC that I was wrapping up the quest with. When the quest completed, the apartment door was locked and I couldn't leave. Fortunately, it didn't stop me from fast traveling out, but it's concerning to see a potential hard lock like that.

And so on. I'd be bothered about it... but it feels like home. I'm used to it. This is just like mama Bethesda used to make.

A slack-jawed NPC photo-bombs a conversation with our space cowboy. A random guard joins her by streaking, their armor vanishing inexplicably. As is typical for Bethesda conversation, our cowboy is too busy staring at us to care.

Years of gaming have rendered me odd. I stop playing better games for no good reason, playing worse games because they feel right to me in ways I can't explain. So, I cannot predict how long I'll keep playing Starfield. In fact, I'm finding game flow struggling at about 40 hours in as the backbone quest lines falter and open-ended procedural "radiant quests" take up the slack. But, in many other ways, it gets better the longer I play, so I could see myself playing for a while longer.

Baldur's Hubris

2023-08-28T14:41:00.062-07:00

After 145 hours of replaying Act 1 of Baldur's Gate III over approximately 30 different characters, it would be understandable that I would be getting sick of it. And yet, even having Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon at my disposal, I found myself drawn to try again. Between that game and having the likes of Elden Ring, Death Stranding, and Final Fantasy VIII Remake rotting on my backlog, it seems I have an aversion to playing better games. What my brain gets out of this is beyond me. It's like a cheese connoisseur who has been savoring cheese for so long that it's no longer about the taste or smell but rather an appreciation to certain forms of dairy bacteria, one that they can't put into words.

One good thing came out of this: I was forced to confront how problematic my overthinking could be. I would imagine my very first choice of character for Baldur's Gate III would have been a Monk because this campaign already has a Wizard and, when I think what I'd like to be in a party such as the first season of Critical Role, it'd be the voice of reason. I've read enough bootleg American Zen in college to say this kind of enlightenment is unusually reasonable. I may be a Wizard by inclination (an infinite dabbler with the arcane who would die old and grey trying to achieve the impossible). But I'm a Monk by aspiration (to have that kind of presence of mind to find the joy in what we already have). And yet, I repeatedly rejected the Monk because I didn't think they would be fun to play.

Since the last blog entry, I made a couple abortive attempts by rerolling Quixdon (a deluded Paladin/Warlock gnome who only thinks he's a knight in shining armor because his fairy godmother told him so) and Blitz (lightning themed; a Storm Sorcadin or possibly Tempest Cleric).

Blitz's head is hurting. Is it the tadpole, or because he's being played by me?

However, my old high school buddy likes watching me play with Steam's broadcast feature. I think he was getting sick of seeing so much of Act 1 because he was getting downright mansplainy about why I started new characters. I can't help it, so he just soured my fun by shaming me. So here's what I meant when I said I was being forced to confront my overthinking: either blow off Baldur's Gate III entirely, ignore my high school buddy, or address the problem.

I chose to address the problem. I had an inkling where it was. I've already mentioned I knew builds were just costumes, but that wasn't enough. My real problem was within: it was a mixture of fears, boredom, and perfectionism. My restarted Baldur's Gate III campaign progress felt like my stalled creative endeavors. It was a familiar feeling, nothing new. It's a deep-seated, heavily ingrained habit.

With over three and a half weeks of concentrated effort, I have learned everything about the Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition implementation in Baldur's Gate III and theorycrafted to such an incredible degree that I came out the other side and realized it was irrelevant. Build didn't matter; I would never be happy based on character build alone.

At the heart of the matter is the perfectionism, or a desire to make a perfect character. One who did everything I wanted to all the time. Who was always fun to play, even for the standards of a four-decade gamer. Someone who an imaginative player could never imagine fault with. In other words, an impossibility. Perfection incarnate.

What if I deliberately choose to play an imperfect character? That's the only technique I know for dealing with perfectionism: deliberately eschew flawlessness until you're inner ape stops being so obsessive-compulsive about it. (Insofar as you can. Baby steps.)

Argent, trailing the usual suspects, halfway through Act 1.

As my previous characters were contaminated with seeking perfection, I started one more character, a Silver Dragonborn Monk with no class dips. The Monk is a symbol representing Zen-like enlightenment, a cessation of desire. If a Monk can't do everything, is boring, or sub-optimal, that's the point. Each of these things introduce a potential for an unquenchable desire, and the only way out of this suffering is to let them go. Also, a Monk was my first choice before I started to doubt myself. Had I gone with my Monkish first inclination, I could have completed the campaign by now.

So far, I am enjoying the adventures of Argent. Since I've revisited Act 1 many times, there have been no roadblocks. Even if a Monk is not the most potent melee combatant out there, he's effective, and progress is smooth. At first, I did Way Of The Four Elements, but switched to Way Of The Open Hand because its abilities are better, there are less choices to worry over, and it gives me the occasional excuse to utilize an inventory item to make up for his lack of ranged attacks. Could I do better? Probably. But, as I just said, that's the point.

It's been a rough final week of Baldur's Gate III, partly because I've been fighting a flu. And it may have been my last chance because Starfield's early access is scheduled to begin at the end of the work week. Unfortunately, it seems I'll end up playing something else because of the relentless march of time. If I could be said to have learned a valuable lesson about my perfectionism this month, that would be a good thing. However, it involves breaking a deeply-ingrained habit, so I cannot count that victory yet.

But Enough Baldur's Gate III, Let's Blow Something Up

2023-08-26T09:35:00.081-07:00

I caught the flu and ended up taking three extra days off. However, after nearly four weeks of struggling to enjoy Baldur's Gate III, I'm ready for a change. So, despite the fact that it's wholly-unnecessary purchase in the shadow of Starfield's release, I bought Armored Core VI and have enjoyed it until the constant effort and motion caused my flu's nausea to flare up.

My latest character, an Arcane Trickster with a level in Fighter, had a coincidental tendency to roll critical failures. I kind of loved it. Even being good at failure makes a character stand out more than most.

My time and money in Baldur's Gate III have not been wasted. At over 120 recorded hours in Steam, I call that getting my money's worth; it kept me mentally-well-occupied, as a game should. And I sure learned a lot about Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition... mostly that I hate it. Don't get me wrong, I like what they were trying to accomplish with the "bounded accuracy" principle, but they overreached, to the point where my character felt inconsequential, the tactical choices just as boring. It's just a choice of costume.

It doesn't help that Larian mostly used the subclasses out of the 2014 Player Handbook and the few they added from elsewhere are surprisingly hit or miss. I found myself missing the rare Pathfinder subclass that completely transforms the way a class works, like the Kensai. For the most part, the subclasses offered by Baldur's Gate III have only minor variations, about three minor features over 12 levels. That bores me; such a wasted potential to introduce more variety. But I have to admit that some of the subclasses, like the Battle Master and the Gloom Stalker, almost get there.

It's overbalanced; it frustrates me that I can't find a build that satisfies my need to feel effective. Granted, there's also a few balance glitches rocking the boat, with things like AI unable to cope with using Devil's Sight with Darkness, the Strength modifier stacking with Tavern Brawler, and the change that Thieves' Fast Hands are now a straight up extra bonus action. However, these are too effective, they feel like cheating, what's the point of playing if I have to cheat? But, when played straight, I'm left with the reality that all classes are roughly equally as boring for me to play in Baldur's Gate III, all that's left is the theme.

My Arcane Trickster/Fighter may have been the best chance I had to enjoy this game, but still isn't quite able to swing it. He was designed around the idea I would use the inventory to support the lackluster choice set in this game, but his sneak attacks generally overpower the need in most rounds.

Honestly, Baldur's Gate III's theme may be incompatible with my mindset. It's too sexually charged, and often seeks to be edgy and deviant. So the story supports elements like pacts with fiends, impromptu surgery with an ice pick, many potential sexual relationships with half (or full) monsters, and even an origin where you're a serial killer. I can't fault Larian for being supportive to some people's dark fantasies, and I enjoy being a weirdo. But I'm not that dysfunctional, not even Dungeons and Dragons hardcore fandom dysfunctional, and so some of these choices are off-putting.

So, for various reasons, Baldur's Gate III has proven difficult for me to enjoy. However, I don't think I'm finished trying. Rather, I need to pace myself more. If I end up distracted by Starfield and Armored Core VI before I reach the end of the campaign, maybe that will give Larian a chance to patch it some more, improve the poorly-wrought Act 3. Perhaps some time away from Baldur's Gate III will give me the presence of mind to embrace the core fantasy behind each class instead of quibble over the impossible task of making the combat interesting to me. I've been an XCOM 2-level player trying to find gameplay satisfaction in the choices offered by Dungeons and Dragons played without the theater of the mind, and it's been running me ragged. Perhaps diversifying my entertainment more will grant me the slack I need to relax and enjoy the ride.

Armored Core VI, in fine FromSoftware tradition, takes my hubris of being an experienced gamer and crucifies me on it. Their infamy in inventing the Soulslike genre, notorious for its difficulty, has transformed the series. There's frequent boss battles that may require dozens of attempts to learn their patterns and overcome. This isn't Dark Souls in mecha, it's Sekiro in mecha, and that says something for how ridiculously frenetic and over-the-top it gets. You have to learn to navigate these fights with the focus of a surgeon. I find it difficult to pay attention because my nerves have rust over from dozens of "persistence yield rewards" style, less skill-intensive games. It feels damn good when I finally prevail.

It's good to be back in an Armored Core game. I think the last one I played was probably Armored Core 3 on the PS2, but I have fond memories of playing the first one on a PlayStation demo unit at the mall Gamestop. FromSoftware hasn't sat on their laurels; the series has undergone considerable refinement. It runs at up to 120 FPS on my PC (though it was necessary to run it windowed for my brother), and there's this amazing medium they found between being feeling like an agile ninja and a klunky walking tank that somehow preserves the qualities of both. Somehow, it still feels like an Armored Core game despite the boss battles dictating the flow of the campaign, and it's good to enjoy a product of the master of their craft.

I think the only other game I'll need to purchase before the end of the year is the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion, "Phantom Liberty." (Looks like I was right when I said it'd take a major DLC to bring me back.) It's not quite September, but between that, Starfield, Armored Core VI, and Baldur's Gate III, I'll have plenty of keep me occupied. If not, well, I have a backlog in serious need of addressing.

Baldur's Gate III Weeks of Overthinking

2023-08-21T20:49:00.033-07:00

I've now a recorded 110 hours in Baldur's Gate III. That would be great if my longest played character had more than 20 hours on them. Instead, I've restarted about twenty times, most of my characters got less than 2 hours of play, all of them incredibly unsatisfying.

Quixdon, halfling Paladin of Devotion, is also a 2nd level Warlock because he's a fay lord's plaything. I know the feeling.

At the heart of the matter is that Baldur's Gate III's tactical turn-based combat is a far cry from XCOM 2.

XCOM 2 is a game designed by Sid Meiers' own Firaxis, deliberately balancing the combat around providing the player with a series of interesting decisions. Despite having comparably less actions, each of these actions have a high degree of significance to them. It works extremely well, to the point where I can get up from session of play with nerves run raw from the icy adrenaline that had been running through my veins.

XCOM 2 proves that rolling Wizard wouldn't make a lot of difference. I don't need many choices, I need good ones.

Baldur's Gate III is based on the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, a tabletop roleplaying game that puts more emphasis on roleplay and collaborative storytelling than tactical combat. Consequently, unlike the squaddies in XCOM 2, each member of my party in Baldur's Gate III is saturated with a slew of mostly-inconsequential actions. These actions have unlimited utility in the theater of the mind of the original tabletop platform, but might as well stay off your hotbar 80% of the time in a video game.

In other words, Baldur's Gate III has many choices, but most of them are bad. If we define "unbalanced, highly situational, but a grab bag of narrative potential" as such.

Perhaps, with this much flexibility, if you look hard and carefully design your party, you can mimic a shadow of the kind of tactical combat significance that XCOM 2 provides. But I have played better. Even Marvel Midnight Suns has more meaningful decisions than Baldur's Gate III. Despite selling six times worse, Divinity: Original Sin II had much better combat, as it kept Sid Meiers' advice is mind.

Pairing water and lightning is one of the few interesting combat synergies to be found.

Alright, fine, but Baldur's Gate III is good, so maybe it's not about the gameplay. Maybe it's about the story and the theme.

Fair enough, but it means my attempts to find good gameplay were doomed. Every time I try is a mistake. This week's mistakes include:

Quixdon

Wearing a Paladin's platemail, using a Rogue's skills, and a Warlock's Eldritch Blasts.
Inspired by Don Quixote, he's a halfling plaything for a Fay Lord, and only thinks he's a knight in shining armor. His backstory would be reused for Mallo, mentioned below.
But it turns to be a bad idea to drop three levels of a core class like the Paladin for a smattering of skills and a powerful cantrip. He plays fine, but it's too much for my lingering doubts to handle. (A critical thinker is nothing if not a prolific doubter.)

Michael (1 hour played)

Just the Paladin and Rogue this time, we'll keep rogue level investment to 1.
Theme-wise, there's few simpler. He's a mostly pure Oath of Vengeance Paladin who won't be stopped from getting that vengeance by locked doors or traps.
He's so direct and to the point that I find he plays the game more than I. Sure, I could sympathize with newborn intellect devourer in the tutorial map, but what would Michael do? Vengeance!

Dorado (1.5 hours played)

Okay, so let's try someone who's good but not to the point of becoming a zealous murder hobo. A Cleric of Bahamut would work.
Instead of the Paladin, our armor comes from a Cleric of the Light domain. We once again take a level of Rogue for those pesky locked doors, because there's not enough room in the party for a dedicated Rogue.
Being a Cleric of Bahamut means I get to be a dragonborn. I like Light because using their Flare feature to force rerolls on successful attacks seems neat. Baldur's Gate III even removes the uses per day.
On second thought, the Folk Hero background doesn't suit him, or notably my sticky fingers picking everything up, hence he's abandoned.

Yes, even Background got involved, because you earn inspiration for doing certain things, and so you're pressured to "roleplay" them if you want those juicy inspiration points. My chronic character indecision just got another weapon.

Mallo (2 hours played)

Eschews the armor, because it's not like there's much difference between Mage Armor (13 AC), +3 from Dexterity, and +2 from Bracers (18) and Platemail (also 18).
One of my more coherent backstories, he starts off an urchin (1 Rogue), and is adopted by a Fey Lord (2 Warlock), to unlock his true magical potential (Wild Magic Sorcerer the rest of the way).
Like most of my characters, his known spells have been unbearably watered down by multi-classing, hence he's abandoned.

Paz (almost 4 hours played)

1 Rogue/1 Monk/then pure Cleric of Light again. I felt wielding a staff suited the character concept better than Dorado (whose name I disliked).
Both Paz and Dorado are golden Dragonborn followers of Bahamut. But Paz comes from an Urchin background, which explains his sticky fingers.
You know, the more classes you add to a character, the harder it is to have a coherent vision what they're about. Paz's mental image for me disintegrated, and that lag in gaining Cleric spells didn't help. I now started to look at concepts like Mallo and Quixdon the same way.

Twist (almost 5 hours played)

Alright, then, how about I just play a pure Wild Magic Sorcerer? No deviation to Warlock, Rogue, or otherwise. One class, no doubts.
Halfling, too, which is funny because he's Lucky even though Wild Magic can happen.
Bored, bored, bored. Wild Magic hardly ever goes off. Sorcerers' limited spell selection makes them one-trick ponies. Maybe getting level 5, 7, or 9 would solve that. But my doubts can't wait that long.
The fact he plays perfectly fine, if boring, sort of proves that most aspects of 5e character builds are irrelevant. What a generic mishmash they all are. A pure Sorcerer is as armored as a platemail wearing knight and tossing a firebolt isn't that far removed from swinging a sword in terms of getting the same result. He even picks locks fine without expertise. Everyone does everything. It really is just a choice of costume.

My characters are a never-ending cavalcade of failure, it seems. With the exception of Twist, I kept trying to make ones that do everything, and it blew up in my face. Since the problem isn't the gameplay, which is not what Baldur's Gate III is good at anyway, it's a problem of theming. My character concepts are lacking theme coherence.

Of course, some are bound to do better than others. Something like Michael is pretty strong: he's an Oath of Vengeance Paladin, he drives the story forward in his pursuit of evil-doers. Twist did relatively well because, even if a Wild Magic Sorcerer is a magical walking mistake, he was dedicated in that pursuit. Most of these characters, though... I tried mixing them with Rogue so I could do that, and they ended up struggling for a sense of identity. I'm bad at establishing that sense of identity

At least Twist cuts a fine portrait, as charisma-based characters like Sorcerers should.

That might be why my most played character (at just shy of 20 hours) is a Bard: the absolute Jack Of All Trades, versatile to a fault. Why do I keep bouncing off him? He could finish Act 1 any time he likes, but I refuse to go in for the kill.

Baldur's Gate III's campaign is too edgy. Sex and violence at every turn, Larian wanted something R-rated, and delivered. When we're not being seduced by our party members, we're confronting gritty, serious fantasy. There is the occasional comedy relief moment, but it feels off-putting against the dark backdrop.

The Bard is a poor fit for me. It's hard to buy that the hero has the audacity to bring musical instruments can be the driving force behind the fight against mind flayer machinations. If I'm really so non-committal as to play a jack of all trades, have I earned moving this story forward?

Mechanically, it's easy for doubts to find purchase against going Bard as well. They're too dilute to do much but cheer on and support the other members of the party that do the real work. While XP to 3's videos on playing each class are somewhat pessimistic (except for Monks who only depressed the DM), the Bard one gave Jacob plenty to work with. Other than for their variety, I don't like playing a Bard.

I theorize an ideal character concept for me would have these features:

We're starting with being the quartermaster in mind. That's because, in terms of gameplay mechanics, if spell slots are too limited, my only respite might be my inventory. Flasks, arrowheads, spell scrolls, and so on. That should spice things up.
Physically, I need at least 14 strength on a human (who receives 25% bonus carrying capacity in Baldur's Gate III) to carry it all around. However, he need not be a flip wizard, nor a jock, just a practical guy who knows he's going to be dealing with some monsters today. So I envision him wearing effective, practical breastplate.
Mentally, I like the idea of an adventurer with some Intelligence, a think-on-his-feet sort.

Unfortunately, Intelligence is the black sheep of Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, only really good for knowledge-based skills or a few Arcane that use it for their spell DCs and preparation slots, like the Wizard, Mystic, and Artificer.

Doubly unfortunately, of those, only the Wizard is in Baldur's Gate III, there's already a companion who is one, and dependency on spell slots bores me anyway.
Maybe I'll give him 12-14 intelligence and make him a gish then. The Arcane Trickster and Eldritch Knight are the only other options that also use some intelligence.

I've been coping by thinking of Wisdom and Charisma as different kinds of intelligence. But they're obviously not the kind of reckless overthinking that I favor.

Since he's a smarty in breastplate, he'll eschew hitting things with melee weapons because it's too unseemly for his refined tastes. He prefers to take them down with trick arrowheads and (pinnacle of technology, the ones used in the game weren't around until about the 14th century in Europe) a crossbow. It's not an Artificer, but it's a start.
Since he's mechanically inclined, it stands to reason he can still be the party's trap handler. That seems to be the one consistent trait behind nearly every one of my characters. And being the Face is easy enough if you have expertise in Persuasion. A level of Rogue solves both problems nicely, but that can probably wait until Act 2 if I can just get proficiency in Sleight of Hand and Persuasion.

Okay, that seems like a reasonably coherent character concept. The 14 strength on a human is the only mandatory part, I can dabble a bit with the mental stats, and there's more than one way to deal with locked doors and traps. The tricky bit is making a build I'm comfortable with to realize this idea.

There are options in the pencil and paper Dungeons and Dragons 5e which might help here. Options like the Artificer class, Mastermind/Inquisitive Rogue, and so on. Unfortunately, Baldur's Gate III doesn't have those, and no mod has yet delivered. I'm left with few means to realize this character concept, but some reasonable facsimile may be found.

One refreshing new option to consider is the Ranger. I've often avoided playing a Ranger because my old High School Buddy played it, but looks like I won't need to worry about that since I ended up playing solo. Also, I don't particularly find myself aligned with nature, I'm not romantic enough for its beauty to blind me to the fact most of nature wants to eat me.

However, Ranger turns out to suit my character concept nicely:

Breastplate access? Check. There's many paths to medium armor, Ranger is one of them.
Ranged combat effectiveness?

Archery fighting style, check. It's either that or take levels of Fighter.
Oh my, look at all these fancy Ranger-exclusive ranged attack "spells" they get which might as well be Artificer gadgets.

Are Rangers smartypants? Well, he doesn't really make use of intelligence, but needs 14 wisdom. I could take 12 points for a pittance and feel moderately accomplished in the brain when I do those investigation checks and see that +1.

If I take level 1 of Rogue right out the gate, I also get saving throw proficiency in intelligence.

Speaking of investigation checks, the Bounty Hunter Ranger favored enemy gets me that proficiency for free.
Speaking of being able to be the party's trap handler, the Urban Natural Explorer gives me Sleight of Hand proficiency fresh out the gate, too.

Although if I take level 1 of Rogue first, I can't get both expertise in Sleight of Hand and this as a free skill proficiency. Shame, because that's virtually all Urban does for me.

Honestly, the jury's still out if Ranger is what I need. Perhaps I'd be happier with 1 Rogue/11 Fighter than Ranger. Although Eldritch Knight is a lousy spellcaster. And Arcane Trickster is just as bad if I do it the other way around (11 Rogue/1 Fighter). The Ranger and Paladins are 1/2 casters while subclass gish are 1/3, which makes the Ranger more attractive despite not being an intelligence-based class.

The hireling screen shows the custom main character origins Larian didn't have time to add, each with more coherent concepts than I seem to be capable of doing in most of mine.

One thing is certain though: Starfield will be out before I finish the Baldur's Gate III campaign. Honestly, maybe that's fine; maybe I need to come back after Larian has patched it up a bit, perhaps added a DLC with more subclasses or something. Not that it'll help much. It'll never have the satisfying depth of choice that XCOM 2 does.

Baldur's Gate III: Shattering Records and Boring Me

2023-08-14T21:30:00.060-07:00

That last blog entry about Baldur's Gate III ran a little long, it was all about my attempts to find the perfect character. I had a breakthrough when I realized I needed to retire my min/maxing tendencies and just look at it as a choice of a costume to wear to a Faerûn adventurer themed party. Unfortunately, I'm still not having fun, because this party isn't that great.

I think this one was an Arcane Trickster. Wish I had stuck with him.

Why not? Well, look at what you're literally doing in Baldur's Gate III:

Engaging in tactical combat that is a lot like Divinity Original Sin II.

Except restricted to an amazingly authentic reproduction of the Dungeons and Dragons 5e ruleset.

A ruleset so overbalanced and casual-friendly that even celebrities can play it.

Every skill from the pencil and paper game can be found in this computer game. Wow!

I wish I could say the same of the subclasses. Baldur's Gate III didn't get some of the more exciting or niche ones, like Hexblades and Celestial Warlocks, Way of Mercy Monks, or Inquisitive Rogues.
For that matter, being a cerebral-focused fellow who finds the party's Wizard role already filled, I might have identified with an Artificer or Mystic, but I can see why those would be difficult to implement.

Speaking to NPCs.

Possibly the best part of the game, with excellent voice acting and emotes to respond to branched dialogue.

Except when it glitches out and is skipped for no reason, which happens just often enough to make me wonder if I missed something.

Picking up all the worthless crap laying around the map, one item at a time. (Optional)

With a weight limit, so you'll want to send things back to your camp chest often.

One might ask why there's a weight limit at all if you can just teleport your items to the camp chest. Well, it gives the strength attribute a reason to exist.

Retrieving those items from your camp chest so you sell what you found to merchants.

Be thwarted from selling by arbitrary gold limits on each merchant.

It refreshes every long rest and level-up, so why limit it in the first place? Probably because you have the freedom to rob them.

If you thought sorting your inventory in your characters was hard, try this tiny bag window that pops up behind your character's main inventory window and is limited to 5 columns.

The good news is that's sortable. The bad news is that it's not searchable.

If you want to make the most money, you have to route the items to the merchants through your high-Charisma characters.

I would have thought they knew this was a quality of life issue when they offered a "Bag of Tricks" update to their previous game that fixed that?

For some reason, the nearest teleport to the merchants in Act 1 requires a several-minute-long run. Including having to go through a glitchy, slow-opening door.

Oh, just give me a trader in my campsite so we can sell there.

Upgrading your equipment!

By painstakingly comparing the enchantments of the equipment you found with each of your party members to see if it helps.

99% of the time, it won't, because 5e is very stingy with the power curve.

Clicking through your quest log to trigger the "read" flag on everything, because your log is perpetually too little, too late.

Oh, it says here I already found the infernal ore. Guess I'll have to look through everyone's inventory to figure out where it went.

Oh, that's right, I gave it to the gith when I was looting the village 5 hours ago. Sadly, magic pockets don't work while she's cooling her heels in camp.

The best part of Baldur's Gate III is most assuredly the story. But, egads, is it ever a slog to access.

Look, I like Larian, I want them to do well. And I got my wish. Baldur's Gate III is breaking all time concurrent online player records. At the time of this writing, it's at #2, between Counter-Strike and DOTA 2, and that's amazing. But I'm still kicking myself that I spent 65 hours trying to pick a character when the gameplay waiting for me on the other side is a bit of a chore.

No wonder I spend so much time generating characters: it's more enjoyable for me than playing the campaign. I felt the same way about Divinity: Original Sin II. I had to force myself to keep playing until it was beaten. It's not necessarily a fault of it being an isometric RPG, because half of my complaints could have been solved by more attention to quality of life features.

I'm not enjoying this. I should have stuck to trying to play Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Final Fantasy VII: Remake, or even Remnant: From the Ashes. They may not be as epic as Baldur's Gate III, but their entertainment potential isn't mired down in overbalancing, inventory management, or glitches.

Hopefully Larian will continue to refine this game after release like they did for Divinity: Original Sin II.

Ah, here's the one I decided to stick with in the end...

What character did I finally settle on? Well, I suppose it's only natural that a person as indecisive as me wants to play a Jack of All Trades. I've decided on a Bard/Sorcerer.

Ironically, that was my first character, a whole week spent agonizing just to end up back where I started. However, there have been some changes. First, I got rid of The Dark Urge background, it's really more suitable to subsequent playthroughs. Second, I've chosen the College of Valor to up his durability. I'm planning on getting 4 levels of Bard before switching permanently to Sorcerer.

I went multiclass with Sorcerer for two reasons. First, I want more power than a Bard. My hope was that Twinned Spell metamagic (accessed at 4 Bard/2 Sorcerer, character level 6) could do that. Since I am mixing pure casters, I keep my casts per day. Second, adding some Sorcerer could provide a little more uniqueness than a bog-standard Bard.

15 hours later, I'm at the end of the first map (at least the overland portions), nowhere to go but Goblin Central from here. I'm regretting this character build:

Everybody else in my party seems to be doing better:

The party Rogue's sneak attacks are the highest single target DPS in the party.
The other martial classes in the party aren't far behind in DPS.
The party Warlock's Eldritch Blasts certainly feel powerful, as they hit hard and knock back opponents. My Bard's power cantrip, Vicious Mockery, falls on deaf ears about 65% of the time.
The party Wizard and Cleric have more potent spells than me. Partly because they didn't waste levels multiclassing. Mostly because they're not Bards. I think the Bard was supposed to be somewhere between a Wizard and a Cleric, but swap power for versatility. Granted, a Bard gets the same spells at the same level, so that's hard to qualify.

The spells learned progression is looking grimmer than I thought it would. I thought taking some Bard and Sorcerer levels would diversify their spells known a bit, but it seems to be having the opposite effect. I need to reach for those third circle spells earlier.

Around level 8 or so, when he has 4 levels in Sorcerer and Bard, he'll have full spell slots but only level 2 spell progression. At character level 9, he'll finally have third circle spells. Then it's just three more levels until the campaign is over. If it went on for another 8 levels, maybe things would have been different.
I want to be a controller. However, Vicious Mockery gives me unlimited opportunity to see how tough it is to lean on "save or suck" spells. I could upcast my host of lower-level spells, but I still wouldn't have enough metamagic to do Twinned Spell more than once or twice. I might as well have gone pure Bard.

It turns out the Bard is a bit less glamorous than I was hoping. You might think instrument-slinging flamboyant adventurer who lightens the party's mood. Instead you're a support caster.

Bards are like a Cleric, but Arcane:

Just like a Cleric, you have full spell progression, but you blow most of those slots on healing and buffs.
Bardic Inspiration is just like Cleric's Divine Channeling.
Just like a Cleric, you can technically attack with your weapon, but it'll be inferior use of your actions compared to virtually anything else.

College of Valor adds a second attack at level 6, but I'm not going that high in Bard. Besides, without additional class features (like Divine Smite, Superiority Dice, or Rage) or a magical weapon (like a flaming sword) backing it up, even a second attack isn't much.
I could have went College of Swords, and probably should have, for all the good I am getting out of my Bardic Inspiration right now. However, the problem remains that blowing my spell slots or using an inventory item is generally a better use for an action in combat, so my buckle remains firmly un-swashed.

Clerics seem better armored, but most Bard subclasses features catch them up.
Oh, but Bards get blasting spells! Oh wait, so do Clerics now.

A pure caster class is a pure caster class, no matter how many you mix in. Like any pure caster, you cast your load and then you're ready for retirement for the day. Maybe it's the fact they don't bloom until mid-levels, but I am starting to dislike spell slots.

Actually, there's an important difference between Bard and Cleric spells: Bards have more control spells. That could be very powerful, but it seems like the balance is eager not to kill the DMs fun by removing their monsters turns from the fight. So throwing "save or suck" spells tends to settle on the latter end of the spectrum. Controllers are gamblers, you might be better off manipulating hitpoints directly or summoning.

Thus, Bards excel only in that they don't excel at anything in particular. Instead, they can fill whatever role the party needs. They have enough skill proficiency picks to handle locks and traps, the Charisma to act as Faces, the spells to do some control work, other spells to nuke, and can even feign belonging in melee if you kit them out right.

Bards: when you must try every dish in the All You Can Eat buffet.

(But my sleight of hand expertise isn't working, and I don't know why. Did I not notice I needed to pick it alongside the College choice? There's a lot going wrong with this guy.)

But what could I possibly play instead? With the Bard, I can flexibly swap out my tuckered companions and cover for whatever the party is lacking at the moment. That's invaluable.

Yet, to some extent, party role is a myth because Dungeons and Dragons 5e is watered down enough that even a bog-standard Fighter could pull off every role:

A lock or trap is in your way? Take the Urchin background, maybe back it up with some dexterity, and you're fairly adequate at it.
You need someone to act as a face? Take a racial feature that gets you persuasion, and you'll do alright in conversations as long as you haven't completely dump-statted your Charisma.
You need to heal? Throw a potion, it's an equally bad use of your action in combat as casting a healing spell. (Dungeons and Dragons 5e is balanced so damage comes faster than anyone can heal it.). Granted, some classes have acknowledged this and provide a "healing word" bonus action that leaves your main actions in tact. Funny enough, Fighters can get this too via the "rally" superiority die on a specific subclass.
You need to nuke? Chuck a barrel full of "smokepowder" or "fire wine" at them, follow it with a flame bolt, and you have a fireball. There's also copious access to trick arrowheads in Baldur's Gate III that do an additional 2d6 AOE damage where they strike. Setting up a battlefield in advance with traps is sometimes an easy way to cheese fights.
You need battlefield control? A lot of fighter abilities are just as good at stopping enemies in their tracks as spells. (And putting an enemy down with multiple attacks assures they won't be coming at you ever again.)
You want to feign belonging in melee? Oh, right, a Fighter doesn't have to fake it.

This is a more extreme example, but proof that a generalized build can do at least half the time what a specialized build would do fairly reliably.

If you need more reliability than that, you can also multiclass. A level of Rogue gets you expertise in two skills, better than any ability score increase, enough to do those two skills perfectly.

Granted, multiclassing has a downside. My Bard/Sorcerer's devastated known spell progression is one such example. An important change in 5e is that multiclassed spellcasters keep their casts per day, but not their spells learned, so you end up with higher slots that you can only use by upcasting lower-level spells you know. Another downside is lack of access to important class features such as "extra attacks."

However, the "ability score increases" are the hardest hit. You only get one such "AIB" every four class levels. They're important, granting either permanent attribute points (each two garnering a 5% improvement in some of your favorite things to do), special make or break features for your build, and sometimes both.

If you keep your various class levels a factor of 4, you can keep your AIBs. However, the class feature levels are perfectly, deliberately, placed to almost always make multiclassing a sacrifice of your AIBs or an important class feature.

Why do I want to be able to do everything, anyway? Simple vanity. Vanity is probably my greatest weakness, and I've learned an important lesson in the past that it's inexorably tied to a desire to do the "right" thing:

This is my adventure, so I'll be the face. Guess I'll need Charisma.
I'll be in the lead, so let me disarm those traps! Guess I'll need Dexterity.
The party needs a strong pillar to survive combat, that's me, the Bard who stacks armor class with shield and medium armor! Guess I'll need Constitution.
I'll also be the quartermaster that holds all the goodies, like exploding arrowheads, and distributes them as I see fit! Guess I'll need some Strength.
Stand back, I'm also a Sorcerer so my clever use of metamagic will be what sees us through this, and every encounter! (Seems odd I'm doing it without much Wisdom or Intelligence. Doesn't the point buy system understand my greatness?!)

I'm not without a grain of truth behind my vanity: this is the role of the player in a single player campaign. We're the diplomats deciding what is said, the quartermaster sorting the inventory, the clever tacticians of combat, the one in the lead.

However, that doesn't mean you need to build your character around it. In Baldur's Gate III you're almost always in a four-person party.

Being vain, I can't get behind how little my Bard seems to contribute in every fight, despite doing everything else. But it's also wrong to blame the build. The truth of the matter is that the game wouldn't improve all that much if I changed to something else. A few broken accidents (like Tavern Brawler exploitation) aside, everybody sucks roughly as much. It's deliberately designed that way so nobody sitting around the table rolling dice feels too inferior.

As such, I honestly could not go wrong with any build. I could pick my least favorite race and multiclass one level in every class in the game (there's an achievement for that) and Baldur's Gate III would play perfectly fine.

Granted, the story is the thing, and I'm pretty sure Baldur's Gate III has at least a "goodie" and "baddie" path to the narrative:

A righteous Cleric or Paladin is prone to choose the lawful or selfless choices.
A self-serving Necromancer or Assassin might opt to lie, cheat, and steal his way through the game.
My Bard is more neutral, skewing lighthearted and good, but a little greedy.

Each map has sides you can pick between, and they're not particularly shades of grey. Whether you go good, bad, or cherry pick your favorite sides as you go along is your business.

Aside from that difference, a choice of character build goes back to what I figured out at the bottom of the last blog entry: it's only really a choice of which costume you want to wear to the costume party.

But the reason I'm not having fun isn't the costume, it's the party. The fun and games offered by the hosts throwing the fling aren't resounding with me. Isometric RPGs in general are an inventory-sorting, quickload-foisting slog. I can either chill out and cut loose and enjoy this party or acknowledge Baldur's Gate III just isn't my scene.

How Baldur's Gate III taught me to stop Min/Maxing

2023-08-07T17:57:00.099-07:00

I was good: I went to work despite wanting to play Baldur's Gate III. When it launched on Wednesday, I came home after work and played it every evening. Finally, I had two days off... and wasted them.

What would be my character for the campaign? Well, I knew from Early Access that I enjoyed the Vicious Mockery cantrip because it reminded me of my favorite move from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous: the Misfortune Hex that essentially put disadvantage on every ability check, attack roll, saving throw, or skill check. That was effective enough that I felt powerful and needed in a game that was overbalanced to the point where everyone was impotent.

However, Pathfinder's level of overbalancing doesn't hold a candle to Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. The Vicious Mockery cantrip is not nearly as effective as the Misfortune Hex, it only works on one attack (if doing a pittance of damage in the process). When Silvery Barbs was released, even though it cost a first level spell slot and only foiled one roll, it created an uproar and was immediately banned from most campaigns.

Well, when in Faerûn, do at the Faerûnians do. Considering this balance, maybe Vicious Mockery would be enough. Besides, I knew a way to double its effectiveness!

Lokshir, Human Bard/Sorcerer.

The plan was to mix Bard with Sorcerer and use the Sorcerer Points on the Twinned Spell metamagic to double the number of enemies affected by Vicious Mockery. The build went something like this:

I took the Draconic Sorcerer subclass so he could enjoy additional fire resistance, health, and armor class. A red dragon lineage would explain his dark urges, right? (Well, no, the way Larian tells it, character build has nothing to do with it.)
The Bard levels would get me expertise on my favorite skills for a doubled proficiency bonus. I would probably take a third level so I could choose a subclass, enjoying the College of Lore, so my cutting words could make me even better at insulting enemies to ruin their turns.
I chose a Human, mostly so I could get proficiency in the perception skill but also for the carrying capacity boost.
I chose the "Dark Urge" background because it would have additional content without locking me into any of the other premade characters.
Thematically, he was to be a detective, with expertise in perception and insight. Not Sherlock, but Lokshir.

Thus, Lokshir was born.

I played him for two evenings after work before realizing that I had some serious problems on my hands:

I didn't enjoy his tone, the spoony Bard was a little too frivolous for my liking. Also, The Dark Urge origin went far harder on the "dark" than I expected, and it was off-putting. It's tiring to hear the Dungeon Master prattle on about how much you want to kill when you don't.
I could not enjoy using Vicious Mockery much because he kept getting downed at the start of the fight. Perhaps my lack of experience in Baldur's Gate III lead to playing him poorly, but his survivability may have been better if I gave him more Constitution and Dexterity.

I had doubts about Lokshir, and those doubts overflowed to the decision to abandon him. 8 hours of progress down the tubes, I wasn't even character level 4 yet, and saw little I didn't already see in Early Access.

What would I play instead?

Thanks to some knowledge of Zen Buddhism, I like the concept of Monks. Unfortunately, in terms of Dungeons and Dragons 5e mechanics, they're kind of flimsy and ineffective, some would say the worst class. However, I had a theory on how I could multiclass them back from the brink!

Attempt #2: The Dark Urge. With flaming eyes, he was the best looking character I saw all week.

Also, thanks to Lokshir's adventure, I now knew where I could score some Bracers that granted +2 AC, and so the time to try a Monk was now.

So I took another shot at The Dark Urge origin with a more thematically appropriate character concept:

The Red Dragon lineage of Lokshir became a Red Dragonborn instead. Still a potential for murderous genes there. (Again, it's not that The Dark Urge campaign Larian set up respects character build at all.)
I noticed that Baldur's Gate III rebalanced the Thieves' Fast Hands to grant an additional bonus action instead of limited to specific things. I wanted to try to exploit that, so our little axe murderer would have three levels Rogue supporting his background of skullduggery.
As for the rest of the levels, a Way Of The Shadows Monk. This Monk subclass could make good use of that 2d6 sneak damage while having lower ki consumption than other choices.

If nothing else, it would be a relatively novel build. I went ahead and kept the default name of The Dark Urge because that seemed pretty appropriate to me.

However, I was immediately disillusioned when I discovered that Dragonborn didn't have natural armor like Draconic Sorcerers did. I tried using Mage Armor and discovered it didn't count as "unarmored." Judging by what an elixir of natural armor did, Draconic Sorcerers wouldn't do any better, as extending the floor with those kinds of effects did nothing to raise the ceiling with Monk features.

Don't bother multiclassing Monk to get some Wisdom bonuses on your armor class, as they'll just get eaten by easily-accessible buffs in Baldur's Gate III.

So, with Mage Armor or Natural Armor, instead of 13 + Dexerity mod + Wisdom mod, it was just 13 + Dexterity, something accessible by any dexmonkey. Heck, a Wizard or Sorcerer with Mage Armor could pull that off, throwing a Blur instead of Patient Defense, possibly coming out better for the exchange.

A pure Monk would try to stack more Dexterity and Wisdom to eventually get that AC to 20, equal to plate armor-wearers with a shield. However, by the time you have enough feats to have that many attribute points, they will likely have +2 or +3 enhancements on both, beating the Monk by a 4-6 point spread. (Considering all the weight the plate armor wearers have to lug around, and utility they lost dumping Dexterity, they probably deserve it.)

In the end, there was still nothing special about using Baldur's Gate III's implementation of Fast Hands except the potential to fire off an occasional Patient Defense disadvantage on incoming attacks. But I kept playing this version of The Dark Urge anyway. I got to level 2 Rogue, Level 1 Monk and equipped the bracers. Then I lost all interest in continuing to play him, lasting about 2 hours after character creation.

I didn't even bother seeing how The Dark Urge did in combat with the bracers. Why was that? Was I that bored? No more than any other character at level 3. It's true that I had inadequate armor class on my mind. But there were more substantial reasons why this character concept wasn't working out for me mechanically, I wouldn't know it until later.

I tried going back to my previous character, Lokshir, but he seemed flimsier than ever. He would have fared better if I either maximized Dexterity at a +3 during character generation or gave him more strength so he could comfortably carry medium armor and shield. Either option would have got him a respectable 17-19 AC when you factor in the bracers and mage armor on the former. But Lokshir just sat there, shieldless for a lack of proficiency, at 15 AC.

Also, there was a tone problem. Lokshir had proven too spoony. Baldur's Gate III is too well-written and too well-acted to bring anything less than my A-game to the roleplay table.

I realized that the tone of the character was the most important thing to me. It was clear from the get go that character concept in Dungeons and Dragons 5e is more about tone and message than sheer power. But build choices made just enough of a difference that I couldn't stop min/maxing...

As would become the habit over the weekend, I hit the wikis, studied my options, and slept on it. After sleeping on it the first time, I had a few good ideas:

The choice of character class is a reflection of hope.
More accurately, it's a reflection of the hopes of the character you're playing. What methods do they feel are most appropriate to change the world for the better?
However, the Dark Urge is about repressed desires. (Sort of.)

So I considered maybe a level of Rogue with expertise in medicine. The background of this character would be that they were a masterful surgeon, a dedicated Cleric of Ilmater whose "clergy is sworn to alleviate suffering even if that means taking on that pain personally." The compassion fatigue transformed them, creating a real Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde situation. They did so much good that it rebounded as unbearable darkness in their heart.

A good story can work wonders for my willingness to play a character. But I decided against playing this one because Clerics are too bland for me. Sadly, Baldur's Gate III doesn't have very many fun 5e healing subclass options, just the Life Domain, which I just rejected as bland, Circle of the Moon, but I am not a big fan of nature, and the College of Lore Bard, which I already rejected for excessive spooniness.

After another 2 hours of racking my brains, I decided enough was enough. I read a walkthrough that spoiled me on The Dark Urge's plot because I was sick of trying to balance character concepts around it without knowing what it was. Unsatisfied with what I found, I decided I didn't need this origin after all.

Screw The Dark Urge. Let's just do a Custom origin. Make him a Gold Dragonborn while we're at it. Conceptually, a Gold Dragonborn Monk reflected my hopes somewhat. Well, one facet of that hope, anyway.

Sounds good, this should do it, this time for sure!

Attempt #3: Aurelin. Oh no, another Dragonborn Monk with identical build plan, what was I thinking?

Aurelin earned about 4 hours of play, getting as far as The Dark Urge, but taking twice as long to get there. Maybe I really enjoyed playing him, so took my time. A simple choice to leave evil companions out of the party whenever benevolent dialogue choices were happening, and invite them for the malevolent ones, resulted in both the resident ponce and green Klingon declaring their carnal intentions for Aurelin. I guess gold dragonborn beefcakes are naturally sexy.

However, when I got around to picking up the bracers, I immediately lost interest again. As only a Level 2 Rogue/1 Monk, I never got a chance to see if a Fast Hands ninja would be as cool as I thought it would! Why? No good reason. I just wasn't enjoying myself.

Or so I thought.

Well, if removing The Dark Urge origin made a Fast Hands Monk more tolerable, what about a Bard?

While I was at it, I might as well enjoy a more interesting race than Human. I went with Halfling for the Lucky racial trait. Halflings have an advantage on everything they do, as long as you roll a 1 first.

Oh, he'll get lucky alright. While we're at it, let's make him a stereotypical Bard gigolo named Jigg. It'll be funny!

Sounds good, this should do it, this time for sure!

Attempt #4: Jigg, crawling out of his evil squid pod and into your beds.

Learning from Lokshir's example, he was built to go College of Valour so he wasn't as flimsy as the last one, and Lucky was nice to have, too.

An hour and a half later, I concluded that Jigg was fine. Sure, he's spoony, but after my experiences with The Dark Urge, I was ready to lean into that spooniness a bit.

But could I do better? Fine was boring! I want great. I wanted a tone that so resounded with me that I would be riveted by the campaign from start to finish!

I slept on it again. This night, the final one of my weekend, I came to the understanding that I should have a character that I'd feel relatively proud showing up in a Critical Role campaign playing. I'm not showing up for Matt Mercer's Minsc as a spoony bard, am I?! (He's already had one of those!) Some of these spoony concepts I wouldn't feel right showing up at Jack Packard's table, and Adventure Is Nigh is down to clown! There's something to be said for the importance of identity, even when roleplaying.

But this is Baldur's Gate III. Who would I feel right walking around the Baldur's Gate in the title, traipsing the Underdark in the title screen, or even the starting area wilderness as?! Well, surely I would feel proud showing up as an unusually enlightened dude capable of amazing feats, right?! This one is the one! Alright!

I woke up at 5am in the morning and I couldn't get back to sleep. So I rolled out of bed about 2 hours earlier than I normally would and booted up Baldur's Gate III. This was my chance to make up for lost progress and finally see something past what I saw in Early Access.

Sounds good, this should do it, this time for sure!

Attempt #5: Gild, a halfling version of my fast hands Monk concept.

I liked the look of Gild, yet another attempt at the Fast Hands Monk. This halfling was a hard dude. Bald, scarred face, deep voice. He was coming to Monk life from a rough life. A reformed cat burglar who took his hard knocks and embarked upon the path of enlightenment.

Gild got three hours of play from me. My interest in him wained at the exact same point as it did with The Dark Urge and Aurelain! Level 2 Rogue/Level 1 Monk. As soon as I slapped the bracers on him, I was done.

Thinking about it now, I now know why I couldn't stick with this build, even after three attempts:

He was boring in terms of providing limited choices for me. Someone who has been gaming as long as me needs more depth than a 3 Rogue Thief / Level 9 Monk Way Of The Shadow gets. Once I slapped on those bracers, the interesting portion of my character progression was over!

So much of what a Monk does is a passive bonus that you would be hard pressed to find many simpler classes to play. (Although the Monk may nevertheless be hard on novice players who have difficulty handling basic encounter map navigation.)

In terms of variety of choice in combat, there are many better options for sophisticated actions to take:

The spells available to many classes are essentially this: powerful trump cards you can throw, albeit only so many times per rest.
Even a Battle Master with their superiority dice blows a Monk's paltry number of battle options clear out of the water.

Fast Hands was not a solution. I thought that having another extra action would make a difference because you could throw things, but turns out that requires an action. At most, there was the potential to quaff an extra potion or use an extra ki power. Otherwise, nothing changes here: an action, extra action, and reaction offers almost as much flexibility as adding an additional bonus action.

Conceptually, I was enraptured with the idea of being an enlightened martial warrior capable of miracles. However, the Monk subclasses offered by Baldur's Gate III couldn't hold a candle to what I imagined. Multiclassing might have saved them, but it diminished overmuch from their all-too-precious ki pool.

Also, when you really get down to it, the Monk didn't add anything worthwhile to a muticlass build: their +Wis AC bonus was neutralized by a simple cast of Mage Armor, Flurry of Blows was weak, and about all they have left is the ability to wield any non-heavy weapon they're proficient in with Dexterity attribute bonuses instead of Strength. No wonder so many people considered them the worst 5e class: get out of my build, Monk! About my only temptation to play one now is to root for the underdog.

You know what I hadn't tried yet? A heavily-armored character. Usually, they have the more boring choices but, in the case of the subclasses in Baldur's Gate III, I would say 5/6 options were more interesting than Fast Hands Monks!

A Paladin sprung to mind. One of my fantasy concepts to play in an RPG is someone who relentlessly pursues evil and ignorance and purges it. Just flat out annihilates the shades of grey we're inundated with in day-to-day life because, after all, this is a fantasy setting.

Sounds good, this should do it, this time for su-!

Attempt #6, Fallon, a Human Vengeance Paladin, didn't leave the first room of the tutorial map. Paladins look like they may have a number of interesting tricks with their various hand laying, divinity channeling, sacred oath charges, and Paladin spells. However, they usually have pretty bland payoffs: they move around numbers, healing or doing more damage. Consequently, his bag of tricks were not as interesting as I hoped.

How could I have made such an obvious mistake? Well, the tone of this character resonates emotionally with me. However, this backfired a little, as I found that roleplaying my oath dictated my actions more than with other character concepts. For example, when running across Us, I couldn't really ignore this abomination, I took it down then and there. One more evildoer obliterated from existence!

So not only where my combat options kneecapped, so also were my plot options. Yet, I could also look at it this way: if I feel that strongly about a character concept, maybe that's all the more proof I need to play it.

I took a few hours off and evaluated what my previous characters did and their priorities. I identified four trends of fun I was intrested in:

"Utility Fun" involves being a skill monkey. But it's pointless to build with that in mind because no one does everything well (though Bards being Jacks of All Trades come close). It's better to leverage the talents of the whole party. For example, lock picking on my main character is irrelevant because I can just bring along a hireling if I hate the companion that does it.
"Face Fun" is a kind of utility that involves being able to conquer social events. However, having a Face on your main character isn't really that hard, as there's several avenues to achieve a respectable +4 to Persuasion, and you can use the Friends cantrip on medium difficulty of Baldur's Gate III with little consequence unless you spam it. If I dumpstatted my Charisma, I have no problem with making Wyll be our trader. Although, conceptually, the leader of the party being a people person made a lot of sense.
For "Battle Fun," or fun in combat encounters, I seem to be mostly interested in having a variety of options available to me. Along those lines, consider that main character is just 1/4th of the abilities in a four-character party. Unlike my adventures with the Misfortune Hex, I couldn't be a one-character fulcrum of victory or success. (It probably helped that Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous also gave the main character superpowers.) So the overall influence on the choices available to a solo player is minor. (And the party I was looking forward to in online group play ended up forsaking me for better options, so I would be embracing solo play.)
"Concept Fun" remains the most important consideration of a character.

However, when you really get down to it, every class in a fantasy game represents their own hopes, even if that hope is a lack thereof. All beings deal with shades of grey, and (as the old song goes) everyone wants to rule the world. However, a Knowledge-domain Cleric or College of Lore Bard has no more a monopoly on the fight against ignorance than an Oathbreaker or Wild Mage, all that changes is their methods.

At best, I could try to find a concept that excites me. Ideally, one with some neat options that only get better as they level up. For example:

I dwelled on making a death-centric character because what could pop humankind's hubris more than the great equalizer?
But maybe poking fun at our follies is better than condemning them. Perhaps an Archfay Warlock does it better: oh, what fools these mortals be!

There is no best character. The developers made sure of that. If anything, my problem was I was trying to do everything on one character instead of spreading responsibility around the party more. But that carried its own set of complications.

Damn it, I'm so bored, let's just have some fun! Well, what could be more fun than a florescent green Gnome, a Wild Magic Sorcerer?!

Sounds good, this should do it, this time for sure!

That's far enough, Attempt #7, Myxomite!

Gotta admit, I was drawn to return to attempt #7, Myxomite, named after a slime mold. I like how Gnomes have advantage versus mind control, thinking of a certain fight near the first town you visit. And, even as much as I like to be in control, the possibility of Wild Magic popping off at random might have been worth the inconvenience, in the same way a sadistic adult may come to enjoy jack in the boxes. Thanks to those bracers, you can get easily get 18 AC on an Arcane caster with +3 dexterity, although they'll likely fall behind once enchanted top tier armor and shields make more of a showing.

But, once again, doubts won the war. First off, Arcane casters are really quite limited at lower levels due to spell slot limitations. I'd blow my wad and be dead weight soon into any encounter. However, I knew that going in.

The larger problem was that I doubted the worth of Sorcerers. Metamagic doesn't liven things up much beyond Twinned Spell or Quickened spell. The other options Baldur's Gate III offered (Careful, Distant, Extended, Heightened, Subtle) are pretty straightforward and boring!

Their other big class mechanic, Sorcery Points, is similarly lukewarm. Converting spells to Sorcery Points may help, as Twinned Spell could squeeze off an extra 5th level cast as a free action by trading a 2nd and 3rd spell slot for it. However, the other way around is for chumps. It might seem generous to allow a level 10 Sorcerer to restore 5 level 1st-level spell slots, but then you realize they have to blow their entire allowance to restore a single 5th level-spell slot, and it's clear they have very stingy parents who didn't want Sorcerers showing up their Wizard siblings in any way.

With the improved casting I formerly enjoyed on Pathfinder's Arcanist available to everyone now, even Wizards have roughly as many interesting options than Sorcerers. However, you get a Wizard companion fresh out the gate in the Baldur's Gate III campaign! I like hanging out with Gale, so unfortunately that meant having two Wizards in a four-character party. I might try to differentiate myself from Gale by multiclassing or taking a magical subclass of Rogue or Fighter, but honestly, Bard magic overshadows either too much for my liking.

Well, how about Warlocks?

I don't necessarily need as many spells as a Wizard can know because a lot of those spells are going to be situational duds I hardly ever touch. To my surprise, I discovered that the Warlock had about as many known spells as the Sorcerers, a couple less cantrips but something more than made up for if I went with the tome pact. Those slots come back on a short rest... granted, you'd still have less casts per day than a straight Sorcerer or Wizard.

Not that you needed as many casts a day. One of the main draws of a Warlock is Eldritch Bolt, a powerful cantrip. It's no Misfortune Hex, but it's probably the closest thing in terms of potency! You can specialize it to push foes around, a pretty important thing in Baldur's Gate III.

Wait, what do you mean I get Vicious Mockery if I take Pact of the Tome? I get Eldritch Bolt and Vicious Mockery, two awesome choices I can cast at will as a cantrip?! Oh, that's right, I remember now, that's how I settled my Wrath of the Righteous indecision: I just needed something influential a cloth caster can do every round! (Although I will say that the Misfortune Hex was a little too good in that I wasted my entire action economy hexing and cackling. Maybe this balance is better.)

How does it gel with the companion choices in the campaign? Not bad. I could make my main character distinct from Wyll by being a ranged-focused controller Warlock because Wyll is and up-close fighter.

Up until now, I'd been avoiding Warlocks. I'm not comfortable bending my knee to fiends or horrors, thematically or otherwise. While I would love certain Celestial patrons, the only less-than-obviously-evil Warlock patron option Baldur's Gate III gives me is an Archfay.

However, those Archfay spell selections are great for me! I love being subtle instead of just throwing out damage numbers, that's why I rejected the Paladin after all. Also, throw in an obligatory, "What fools these mortals be," and we have our thematic hook.

Sounds good, this should do i-!

Attempt #8, a florescent gnome named Trix, didn't leave the tutorial map. Why? Because I realized I should probably take this game a little more seriously. How can I get more serious from here? By making my florescent Archfay-serving gnome have The Dark Urge origin, perhaps? I'd get to see all the extra content related to this origin.

Attempt #9, Treet. Because Trix or Treets, right?

What if the whole thing was a joke played on him by his patron? This premise simultaneously grounded this character concept in a dark premise, added a little much-needed depth to it, and deflected some of the edge of The Dark Urge origin because he's obviously loony. That Gnomish Cunning should be handy for those Wisdom saving throws, too.

Treet, of The Dark Urge origin, has made it out of one Hell and into the one he's forgotten. He's gone through the ruins in the starting area and into The Hollow, about a 2 hour play. I gave him a level of Rogue first to explain his dark slashy past, differentiate him from Wyll further, as well as grant some juicy expertise and lock-picking skills that might come in handy for hiding bodies. Other than that, I plan to go pure Archfay Warlock.

Aaannd I'm about out of time for this weekend.

Let's face it, I'm addicted to theory crafting. I wasn't having fun anymore. All builds are terrible. Dungeons and Dragons 5e sucks...

...because, like all tabletop RPGs, Dungeons and Dragons 5e is a vehicle for consuming and producing dynamic narratives. If I kept moving the story forward, played the campaign from start to finish, allowing myself to forget some of this earlier content and savor it later, that would be fine. But, instead, I've been exhausting all the novelty of the first 2 hours of the game, and it's been excruciating.

Other than playing some other game, there's only one way out of this, and that's to stop rolling new characters. It doesn't matter how many resources I read. It doesn't matter how I customize my character builds. It's not Baldur's Gate III's fault, it's mine.

As I moved forward into the work week after this blog entry was first completed, I ended up rejecting the Warlock after all because I realized their overall casts per day could not compare to a Wizard or Sorcerer. At that point, originally, my first choice (a Bard/Sorcerer) looked the best because it would fully preserve all casts per day while letting me use Twinned Spell (and not just on Vicious Mockery).

But I had more concepts I wanted to experiment with.

Such as the idea of an Arcane Trickster/Divinition Wizard (see the above) I ended up modeling after Columbo, a Halfling named Colmbo. But, even with a little Rogue mixed in, it's hard to commit to a Wizard knowing that Gale, the companion, is available.

I'm thinking of shaping the party around being a guardian of Gale as a permanent Wizard companion. I want to have a Wizard around all the time to choose from that variety of abilities. I want to see Gale's dialogue, and I don't think I will get that by choosing to play as him. Besides, an intelligence-based character isn't the best face of the party, and I could always swap out Gale when his spell slots are spent.

A Wizard needs a guardian. To those ends, I gave Paladins another chance with a High Elf, equipped with a shield and the Protection fighting style. (Hilariously, three times in a row when using his reaction to impose disadvantage on someone attacking Gale, they hit anyway.) I found the Paladins' haughty morality flattering. It's neat how I can show up to a scene and declare myself an arbiter through dialogue options, and they agree: why, of course you are, Paladin.

Yet, relying on Astarion or a hireling to be my lockpicker doesn't quite suit my preferences. For that matter, Shadowheart strikes me as a flaky long-term option for a party support caster. It's possible I can bring them around, Baldur's Gate style, but they're likely going to flake out on having a Paladin for a boss. Damn me, it's a four member party, stop trying to be the hero that does everything himself! (Oh, but bases would be so much easier to cover if it were five or six...)

In an interesting revelation, I learned lightning damage is doubled if a foe is wet. There's many ways to get them wet in Baldur's Gate III. Larian even added Storm Sorcerers and Tempest Clerics, subclasses with copious access to lightning damage. There's even a feat that prevents enemies resistance from applying.

The idea of a 3 Paladin/Draconic Sorcerer has a nice ring to it, lightning justice in platemail. I'd be proud enough showing up to a reknowned party looking like that, though I would prefer to be more of an ideas guy. Oh, but I don't really want to embrace the theme of a rechargable battery on legs. Oh, but in a game where almost everyone is limited by resources which get depleted on a per-rest basis, aren't they all?

I had better make up my mind soon if I want to have Baldur's Gate III finished before Starfield comes out.

Even later in the week, I had tried more options. A new character concept almost every time I came back from work. But finally I had a decent ultimatum, an idea to drive forth the final decision:

"If you were to go to a Faerûn adventuring themed party appearing as anything you wanted, all expenses covered, who would you go as?"

It's a novice approach to character selection, but sometimes beginners have the right of things. The trouble was not my lack of experience, but an excess of it. I was trying too hard to min/max, those neurons were too easy to trigger from decades of Internet discussions, gnashing of teeth over class balance. But here in Baldur's Gate III, with a Dungeons and Dragons 5e attention to balance, there's relatively few right or wrong answers. 80% of the time, character build is a choice of costume, and the other 20% were a design oversight.

But what if my choice made my choices in combat boring? It won't. The main character was just one out of four I got to play at a time, so their impact on gameplay depth was negligible. I get to swap party members quite freely. As only 25% of the party, even the most "boring" main character was not that much more so than the most "exciting," so I might as well have played those fast hands Monks!

More likely, I could rain on my own parade by showing up at the adventuring table wearing a costume that I had no interest in wearing. But, even thematically, I didn't have to make the perfect choice, as this is not the last costume party. You can always look forward to playing something else to the next one. Just as the voice leads in Critical Role did across each campaign. This was just my first run through Baldur's Gate III.

Which costume to wear? I worked an extra day job day because look how badly I waste my free time. By the next entry, I hope to have an answer to the question.

DnD 5e, and the Last Days of Baldur's Gate III Early Access

2023-07-31T11:53:00.074-07:00

A few days later, the injuries from getting pushed down the stairs have healed enough to become manageable. But my ability to waste my time is endless.

My old high school buddy reminded me that Baldur's Gate III will be released soon. I had been holding off on buying it because I did not want to sour my experiences in Early Access. However, after completing Larian's previous game, Divinity: Original Sin II, I knew it was for me. Though completing it took effort, it took an exceptional one for me to accomplish that goal! With the full version just days away, the time to wait is over; I pulled the trigger on buying Baldur's Gate III, and a full-price AAA game sledgehammered my already-faltering finances.

But the first thing I did was launch the Early Access version, taking a couple days to familiarize myself with the Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition ruleset. However, this soon-to-be-discontinued version of Baldur's Gate III is as much a temperamental teacher as it is temporal art:

It is limited to the 5th level of character progression, where release is expected to take us as far as level 12.
Some classes, subclasses, and races are missing, snuffing my hopes to see how a Dragonborn Monk would play.
The fights are tough as nails. Going through the included chapter is expected to take as long as 30 hours, and I suspect most of it is reloading failed fights until the rolls go your way. (It seems Larian has preserved the Baldur's Gate series' greatest design mistake.)
Several improvements are missing from this Early Access version, potentially changing how the release version will play.

However, I did pick up core fundamentals about Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition.

I enjoyed my first pick the most, a Deep Gnome Bard named Shale, because he helped the party win fights through viscous mockery of the enemy alone.

5th Edition is not a ruleset for power gamers; it's a ruleset for roleplayers.

This is due to a design philosophy they call "Bounded Accuracy" that is intended to:

Make sure progression is meaningful. That's because the encounters and skill checks don't simply catch up to your character level.
Allow for non-specialized characters to contribute. The specialization ceiling is lower.
Expand the Dungeon Master's monster roster. Lower-level threats can be utilized longer for higher-level encounters.
Facilitate easier encounter balancing. The reduced range of effectiveness between any two characters makes it easier to avoid an unpredictable result.
Open up new narrative possibilities. Formerly impossible threats could be potentially overcome by lower-level characters.
Improve communication between the Dungeon Master and the players. The consistency of plot elements, like enemies in specific kinds of armor, will help players to understand what they're up against.
Promote immersion. It helps when the respective potency of happenings in the game fall within realistic expectations.

These are noble goals, but they have a consequence. We can no longer treat this as a game to min/max because checks and balances are in place to slow or even halt power escalation. These limits are likely to run counter to power gamer expectations of what roleplaying games are.

This greatly-streamlined UI takes some getting used to, but the information you need is usually there if you hunt for it.

This manifests in many ways in Baldur's Gate III due to the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition ruleset it is based upon. For example:

There's no longer a "base attack bonus," only a "proficiency bonus" added to everything a character knows how to do. That bonus is shown next to the level progression table everyone shares, starting at +2 and ending at +6.

In the 3.5th-edition-cribbing Pathfinder experience, a top-level Fighter would enjoy four attacks at +20, +15, +10, and +5 to hit, respectively. But, in Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, they would only have four +6 attacks at level 20. In terms of odds to hit, that is a significant reduction: the first three attacks hit 70%, 45%, and 20% less often, with the fourth attack hitting 5% more often.
Since the "proficiency bonus" is something everyone has in common, anyone proficient with a weapon will enjoy attacking with a +6 modifier at level 20. So not only is the attack bonus significantly reduced between a 3.5e Fighter versus a 5e Fighter, it's been eliminated between a traditional Dungeons and Dragons Wizard versus a Fighter.
Other forms of attack bonuses are also quite limited. The equipment enchantments are even capped at +3, not +5. However, some builds may garner advantages from feats (you only get 4 feats per character now) that may add minor bonuses. Some class features may instill a minor (typically +2) attack roll bonus. Also, it stands to reason a martial character would attempt to get more Dexterity or Strength than a non-martial character. But this is nothing compared to the cheesiness I could get up to in Pathfinder.

Since we're not hitting as accurately, it follows the Armor Class of our targets need not be as high.

In Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, Armor Class is 10 + armor bonus + shield bonus + Dexterity modifier + other modifiers. Each "other" would stack as long as it is referred to by a distinctive word. However, Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition put a kibosh on those "others," even saying goodbye to staples like "natural armor," "deflection," and "dodge."
Natural armor spells (like Barkskin), equipment (like Amulets of Natural Armor), or race features (like Tortle shells) now just set a floor of armor class instead of extending the ceiling.
Boosting AC directly with spells is rare and difficult. Spells like Shield lasts only a single round, while Shield of Faith requires concentration.
All shields, from a buckler to a tower shield, are only a +2 AC adjustment on top of your armor. (However, magical enhancement still applies.)
Like with the weapons, magical enhancement for armor and shields is capped at +3. Some popular magical items, like Amulets of Natural Protection, no longer have power tiers. A Ring of Protection might add a +1 to AC and saving throws, at most.
Monsters will show a similar reduction in armor class. A super-strong endgame monster may have 25 AC instead of 35.

There's no longer an increase in attacks per level unless it is a class feature.

Fighters are unusual cases, earning their fourth attack at level 20. Most martial classes, like Monks and Barbarians, only get two attacks per action.
However, characters may supplement their attack count in other ways. For example:

A character wielding a light weapon may use their bonus action to attack with another light weapon in their other hand. There's no hit penalty, but this attack requires specific martial class passives to get bonus damage from attributes.
Similarly, Monks can use their bonus action to throw an extra punch whenever they attack (with full bonuses). They can also spend a ki point on "Flurry of Blows" to make it two punches for their bonus action.
A "Pact of the Blade" Warlock with a "Thirsting Blade" may attack twice with their bonded weapon.
Someone with the Polearm Master feat might use their "reaction" on an additional attack of opportunity and use their "bonus action" to hit with the blunt end of their weapon.

Martials are not the only ones feeling the pinch, as magic users enjoy fewer "spells per day" with level progression, especially at higher levels. (This is particularly important because spells can be cast at a higher spell rank, leading to exhausting those slots faster. )

In 3.5th-edition-cribbing Pathfinder, a 20th-level Wizard enjoys 4 casts per day of each of their nine circles of spells. A Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition 20th-level Wizard can memorize and cast 4/3/3/3/3/2/2/1/1 casts per day (listed from left to right in escalating spell circles). That's a difference of 36 versus 22 casts per day!

But Wizards can restore half their level's worth of casts on a short rest once a day. A level 20 wizard could restore 4 rank-2 spells (4 times 2 equals 10, half the Wizard's level).
Note that all magic users now have the flexibility of not needing to memorize several copies of the same spell because casting it consumes a cast per day of that rank, but not the memorized spell, similar to how Sorcerers used to work. Yet, Wizards memorize as many spells as their casts per day, and can even swap memorized spells outside of combat, granting considerable flexibility!

A 20th-level Sorcerer in Pathfinder gets a generous 6 casts per day for each of their nine circles spells because it came at the cost of earning those spells a little later. In Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, Sorcerers no longer suffer that lapse, but are limited to the same casts per day as Wizards. So a 20th level Sorcerer would have 4/3/3/3/3/2/2/1/1 casts, despite only memorizing up to 15 spells at a time! That's 54 versus 22 casts!

However, Sorcerers may restore (5th rank or less) spells using "Sorcery points," effectively restoring twice as many cast spell levels as Wizards can between long rests.
Sorcery points may also be spent on their now-exclusive access to metamagic. Sometimes, that can make up for it. For example, the "Twinned Spell" metamagic would let a Sorcerer double a single-target spell onto a second target, which is great for the action economy, and a potential way to get two 9th-circle spells per day. Or an "extended" spell may allow them to enjoy the benefits of a spell for twice as long.

Rather than focus on pumping up your roll modifiers, there's an increased emphasis on making a situation "advantageous" and preventing it from being "disadvantageous." When you have an "advantage," you get to roll twice and take the higher roll. When you have a "disadvantage," you must roll twice and take the lower roll.

For example, if you blind an enemy, you will have advantage when attacking them. If you try to attack anyone while you are blinded, you will have disadvantage.
For the most part, granting advantage/disadvantage is done at the DM's discretion to reward players for clever decisions ("Good idea, roll with advantage!") or give them realistic ramifications for bad ones ("You can certainly try, but roll with disadvantage!").

As the vertical progression has been cut to about a third of what I saw in Pathfinder, the "Bounded Accuracy" design approach will require power gamers to reconsider their approach. Instead, progression is more horizontal, encouraging players to grow their character concepts, thereby increasing the options available to creatively tip the advantage/disadvantage balance in their favor.

Aside from the fragility of their limited number of hit dice, a carefully-built 1st level character will remain a viable vehicle for quite some time. That's good because very few will last long enough to see those level 20 capstone features (especially in Baldur's Gate III, which is capped at level 12). Don't expect to become a demigod; even a maximum-level character can still be taken down by enough of the weakest foe in the monster manual.

One of the easier encounters in the campaign involves taking down these two cultists, but they're still a threat, Bounded Accuracy at work.

Maybe this rule set is ideal for Larian, whose Divinity: Original Sin II was too character-level-centric. Every time you gained a level in that game, your best skills increased in potency by about 10%. Meanwhile, a level adjustment mechanic granted a 10% offensive and defense buff for each difference in character level. The problem was further compounded by equipment following a similar level curve. As the level gap increased, these differences may have been multiplicative instead of additive.

So Divinity: Original Sin II was a game where a single-level difference was challenging, two levels very difficult, and three levels nigh insurmountable. A level 10 adventurer's attacks would barely graze a level 14 commoner who could one-shot-kill them through plate armor with a butter knife. This forced players to pursue a fixed path of encounters to level up. It did not help that many of the encounters were hidden in hard-to-find places.

Larian's next game, Baldur's Gate III, is based on Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. That's a ruleset where up to four character levels will have the same proficiency bonus, so the same chance to hit. The difference between level 9 and 12 characters may amount to as little as a smattering of situational abilities (and four hit dice of durability). Larian can't botch that balance; I expect a very even balance curve from start to finish.

Or maybe not.

As I said, those Baldur's Gate III Early Access fights were tough as nails. A large part of that is low-level enemies throwing heavy area-of-effect damage. For example, an encounter with Phase Spiders and Ettercaps gave the former a ranged spitball with a small area-of-effect and the latter an "infested" quality that may affect anyone around them on death. These are Larian homebrews; I have yet to find a Dungeons and Dragons 5e resource that says those monsters have either ability.

But not all their alterations are stacked against players: a salami is a 1d4 damage blunt weapon now. As a game built on a later iteration of the same engine used for Divinity: Original Sin II, we're expected to fight cheese with cheese. Destroy an oil barrel, throw a lit candle into the oil, and then use a bonus action to shove an enemy into a conflagration. Teleport enemies to the top of cliffs, then shove them off the edge. (Their AI can do the same to your party.) Though it's a struggle for computerized mediums to accomplish, it almost sounds like tabletop roleplay creative flexibility.

The dialogue handling is far better than anything I've seen in Divinity: Original Sin II.

I look forward to seeing it in action when Baldur's Gate III leaves Early Access in a few days, on the third of August.

Remnants of a 4am Pudding

2023-07-27T14:01:00.031-07:00

It seems blogging about the creative struggle was enough for life to give me something to cry over. I made a poor decision to move a long, 70lb box up some filthy, carpeted stairs barefoot at 5am. As I neared the top, the fulcrum tipped in my direction, and the box won. I lost a big toenail, sprained an ankle, and got other bumps and bruises. It could have been much worse. But it tuckered me out, and I took a couple days off to recover.

I managed a few pomodoros of game development, reassessing why I wanted to make a game and then reaffirming the feature set of what I was making. I have made some missteps, and not just on the stairs. It's been needlessly over-complicated; I could do something less sophisticated and still meet my development goals. But I have yet to complete the core gameplay loop. I still don't know what I am making.

2019 wasn't that long ago, and Remnant: From the Ashes still looks fine.

I could have played more of Final Fantasy VII: Remake, but the problem is that it's too good. It deserves my full attention, played at full screen. However, I had some streams I wanted to watch. Some of them involved the new release of Remnant 2.

With my recent memories of Final Fantasy VII: Remake, Remnant 2 looked like an inferior game, with less meaningful decisions and depth. Both have a combat mechanic involving third-person action, dodge rolling, and depleting enemy hitpoints. Why play one customizable gunslinger when you can play a cast of diverse characters with distinct playstyles? Why settle for a few hotkeys when you could have an elaborate ability and magic system?

Nevertheless, everybody seemed to think Remnant 2 had great gameplay, and I remained fixated. Was there something greater here? There was a nuance I could not quite settle from watching footage alone. Should I get this game?

Fortunately, I could inform my cognitive dissonance with a free copy of the 2019 prequel to Remnant 2, Remnant: From the Ashes. I spent $9 for the DLC, booted it up, and it has proven admittedly hard to put down. I now have a pretty solid grasp of what the Remnant series is about.

Where I can trace the evolution of Final Fantasy VII: Remake from earlier games in the series, Remnant: From the Ashes is an adroitly-borrowed sum of many games:

The core gameplay is designed similarly to Tom Clancy's The Division, featuring similar equipment slots, gear scores, WASD movement, dodging, aiming, jumping, a 4-button hotbar, two ranged weapons, and one melee weapon.
The outer gameplay loop and difficulty borrow from Soulslikes. You encounter bonfire-like checkpoints to rest and replenish ammunition but respawn all enemies. Likewise, the "dragon heart" is just an estus flask by another name. When you encounter a clouded wall, you know that a tough boss battle with elaborate patterns to learn waits on the other side, likely with epic choral music. If it were any more Soulslike, you'd have to do corpse runs.
The post-apocalyptic story is not too far removed from the Stargate Universe. It's a fun third-person shooter romp whose parallel-world premise takes you through many imaginative backdrops. You can uncover weird artifact powers that are fun to use in battle, albeit only two at a time.
There's also a bit of roguelike representation here, as the clever procedural generation helps to make every run through Remnant's worlds distinct.

Another chimera of the tried-and-true, about the only thing Remnant: From the Ashes had to worry about was its execution (which, to their credit, Gunfire Games nailed). Still, there's something to be said for winning combinations. Alone, peanut butter and jam are fine, but how amazing was it to bring them together for the first time? Although its merit comes from the skill it was assembled and the distinctive kick that makes it worth going out of your way for mostly comes from the parallel worlds spice.

Despite similarities in the combat gameplay, Remnant: From the Ashes does not belong in the same category as Final Fantasy VII Remake; it belongs in the category of Diablo IV. That might sound like a downside, but it's an overall more accessible experience, even if that experience is not quite as poignant. Considering I am willing to play Remnant: From the Ashes while I am watching a stream on the side, I'm likely to finish it first.

But I'll never finish games like Final Fantasy VII Remake, Death Stranding, or Disco Elysium spending my time like this. Starfield is only a little over a month away, and I have one and a half Zelda games I'd like to get through before then. Life is unpredictable, and I could be one stairway-related mishap away from never getting the chance.

All Art Is Stolen

2023-07-24T11:52:00.067-07:00

The highlight of this week was messing with a better version (Automatic 1111's) of Stable Diffusion that leveraged the power of my ridiculously-expensive video card. It seems my dreams of producing products of deep learning AI applications on a computer that runs at around four times the power of a 60-Watt lightbulb have come true. Give it a few years, and you'll be able to do it on your watch.

In particular, I enjoy seeing what I can do with an unfiltered data set trained from an imaginative medium like cartoons rather than boring old everyday reality. Usually, mentioning a favorite character I want does not work because it's not in the training data. But, if I describe what that character looks like in sufficient detail, the AI art algorithms will produce a distinct facsimile.

Once you've gone that far, you can make them do almost anything. Want nearly-infinite different variations of that character rolling a giant pineapple on the moon while wearing a flamenco dress? You can do that.

Some of the time, it may even draw what you ask it to.

That's where the power of AI art has a genuine application. You can request surreal scenes that no one would have thought to draw, or at least not often. Yet, you can get thousands of variations of that scene, even millions. It hardly matters if the drawings are flawed, with missing or extra limbs, distorted faces, or mutant hands. Once you have the prompt of your dreams producing relatively consistent results, you're bound to get a few good results of something that would have been next to impossible to get before this technology was available.

But sometimes, getting what you want is how you learn you don't really want it. Fantasy is better than reality; raw concepts have more potential than finished artifacts. I would probably enjoy an unfiltered text generator over an unfiltered image generator because my imagination would have to fill in the blanks. Even if this technology could provide a complete sensory augmented reality experience, I bet I would be disillusioned if I got what I asked for.

Regardless of the medium of output, what we're getting out of today's AI models reminds me of the saying, "Talent imitates, genius steals." The burden of aspiring artists looking to market their work isn't simply imitating what is asked of them. Instead, it's identifying the underlying need behind the request and answering the real problem that lies underneath. That requires a kind of genius today's AI does not yet have.

That's good news for artists because no AI litigation can put the genie back in the bottle; applications like this are simply the inevitable result of technological progress. Computers are much more advanced than the first abacus, and what we call "Artificial Intelligence" is just proving a sufficiently advanced abacus could solve any problem.

No stranger to the struggle.

I'm trying to get back into game development, making time for pomodoros. But progress at the moment is hard. The ideas slip out of my mind's hands like eels. I don't know if it's a lack of engagement from perpetually stymied progress or undiagnosed attention deficit disorder. Either way, it's a noble struggle, albeit sometimes akin to self-flagellation.

At the height of my creative futility, I am in a vulnerable state. Instant messages arrive. The family blares the television, content full of anxious attention-getters. The mother urgently informs me that she found a place where the pet wet the floor at night. It's like being forced to stop exercising abruptly, except it's not the body that feels that stress of a pounding heart with nowhere to send all that blood but the mind. Interruptions are like sharp fingernails across the blackboard of my soul.

I need an image to break up the wall of text. Alright Static Diffusion, let's do another favorite character, this time dealing with creative block.

I express my torment over these interruptions when I feel the most vulnerable, and the guilt over my outburst becomes an excuse to derail my creative endeavors further. Since people can't stop doing that to me, I wish I had a secluded retreat, like a mountaintop or a space station. And yet, letting this get to me proves that the real problem was never them at all: the worst interruptions have always come from within.

There are unlimited avenues of escape for a mind trapped against creative frustration. Even the very fear of interruption is often enough. Even now, I'm talking about it, which seems cathartic, but it's wasting precious time. I could complain all day, but that's taking the easy way out compared to doing creative work.

So what else am I up to?

While my Xbox Pass for Windows is still going, I tried Farworld Pioneers. It's somewhat rough around the edges, more of an Early Access state. However, I like where it's going. Another 2D Minecraft, a Sci-Fi Terraria, but with better production values than that. As a fan of Minecraft mods that add village management, I was immediately attracted to how Farworld Pioneers is focused on growing a colony. Giving the player characters something bigger than themselves is a step in the right direction.

I've recovered from my post-AI: Somnium Files dysphoria enough to remember that the point was to spend my fleeting mortality playing good games I am interested in. So I've started playing the PC version of Final Fantasy VII Remake. It's so good that I regret I didn't finish it already. I don't know why I get distracted from marvelous experiences like this. But the fact I spent so much time editing and re-editing this blog entry is a hint.

Final Fantasy VII: Remake looks better at lower resolutions, but this scene is a rare exception is an amazing-looking game.

Since I had been watching Aavak and Etalyx play Carrier Command 2, I started playing it again too. On the one hand, I'm soloing a game that would play better with other people. Also, there's a lot of downtime and no time acceleration. On the other hand, these carrier operations are marvelously simulated. Since Final Fantasy VIII is best enjoyed full screen, Carrier Command 2 is a good choice for a video-stream-playing-on-the-side game. (Although a pausable or turn-based game would work better.)

My 2019 purchase of a Roccat Aimo 120 has run its course. I whacked it one too many times and decided I had enough of its occasional fickleness in registering keystrokes. Its replacement is a 2021 Razer Huntsman V2 Tenkeyless, a brand that hypes itself excessively yet manages to partly deliver on those promises. I might regret dropping the keypad, especially when playing traditional roguelikes... but it's telling I have to go back to a several-decades-old genre to notice the lack of it.

I might even lay down a bit with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The Nintendo Switch, along with watching YouTube on my iPad, is a half-decent means to multitask rest with entertainment. (Albeit, many would say terrible sleep hygiene.)

I still have an afternoon and an evening before it's back to the day job, but I have enough on my plate that I'll probably not have time for anything new.

Insomniac's Dysphoria

2023-07-17T12:16:00.032-07:00

I have now played and finished both AI: The Somnium Files visual novels back to back. The riveting story and likable characters meant I could not put them down until the end. I would compare this series favorably to Danganronpa or Ace Attorney, but better written, less choices, and higher production values. But what The Somnium Files series does uniquely puts it in a class of its own.

The first game left me with a better impression than AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative. To facilitate the mystery, this sequel's story was deliberately less coherent than the first game. Though they put in the effort of continuing the narrative from the first game, the characters and scenes reused lacked the same impact that I enjoyed before, even if I was happy to see them. I was not driven to manly tears quite as often as the first game, but your mileage may vary.

Ryuki expresses what we were all thinking upon first seeing his AI-Ball partner, Tama.

However, the features introduced by nirvanA Initiative are where the sequel comes into its own. Numerous technical improvements, more challenging logic puzzles, and a nicely-extended cast of characters. What the sequel lacks in impact, it makes up for in breadth enough to be a worthy successor in the series. I feel gifted to have had the opportunity to play something this good. If I see a third game come out, I'll buy it right away at full price. I'm a big fan of this series now.

After an exhilarating 60 hours spent in the AI: Somnium Files, I'm at a loss about how to spend the rest of my weekend. By chance, I noticed I had written 14 years ago that the only games I can truly enjoy are sufficiently deep masterpieces, even if disappointingly few games would seem to deliver. I was wrong; I have to admit there are times when a shallow experience suits my needs. Nevertheless, I find myself craving the engagement I enjoyed while playing AI: Somnium Files.

Here's some possibilities I have considered:

It's serendipitous that Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is now on PC, but hard to justify dropping $30 on a 12-hour experience, and dialogue written to fit on a Nintendo DS screen is at a disadvantage.
Nor am I particularly interested in Notary Games, by the same developers as AI: Somnium Files, as I'm not a big fan of escape rooms or psychological horror.
I could finish Disco Elysium, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, or Persona 4. But each game has stalled out for me in its own way.
I was trying to finish Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (and probably should out of sheer sunk cost, fallacy or not). But most things on Nintendo Switch feel like kindergarten-level after playing something as deep and riveting as AI: Somnium Files. (But Danganronpa is on there, so surely not everything.)

Perhaps I should resubscribe to Crunchyroll and watch some anime. Honestly, most segments of AI: Somnium Files were not particularly interactive, those might as well have been non-interactive media.

The AI: The Somnium Files series does not have as many pervy moments as my screenshots would suggest, but that's often where humor tickled me enough to reach for the screenshot key.

Instead, I decided to resubscribe to the XBox Game Pass for Windows to give Exoprimal a spin because it's primarily multiplayer and I suspect there'll be hardly anyone playing it a month from now. That's not exactly FOMO, it's more to do with art appreciation.

More importantly, I have fallen off the wagon of doing my own game development. I blame lack of creative fruition; I can only endure so much hitting my head against a futile endeavor before it becomes hard to commit. Regardless, the lack of creative expression has made my life feel that much less meaningful. So I need to figure out how to get that rolling again too.

To prevent myself from wasting an entire day failing to make that commitment, I stop trying at around the "mid-afternoon slump," a point around 3pm when I feel my energy crash. Lately, even earlier than that, when I can find no traction at all. For the rest of the day, I consciously choose to take a break from my creative endeavors and play a game instead.

This portion of my Windows desktop is but the tip of the unresolved gaming backlog iceberg.

That might sound like a noncommittal approach, but I have learned that, by consciously choosing to play a game during this time without guilt, I avoid the consequences of forcing productivity and direct myself to engage in more directed catharsis than just browsing the net or worse idle pursuits. Some flexibility is required; some days creative flow comes easily, others it does not.

It's still easier said than done. I was so riveted by Ostranauts three weeks ago and AI: Somnium Files over the last couple weeks that I have fallen out of the habit of doing any pomodoros of creative endeavors at all! As little as four pomodoros a day would reassure me that I'm not completely wasting my free time.

I tried doing that today, and ended up only doing minor conceptual musing before derailing into installing a free AI art generator and seeing what I could do with it for three hours. See? Idle hands take over when I can't get the ball rolling.

In the last hour and a half, I managed to pry myself off that and play some Exoprimal, but the competitive focus was a turnoff. I was already bummed about my lack of productivity, I didn't need to watch my avatar get eaten alive by dinosaurs for the crime of not playing better than the strangers I was up against. Uninstalled; get back to me if you add a real PvE mode, not this competitive malarkey.

I was out of time, the weekend collapsing like a fallen souffle. Though AI: The Somnium Files had me riveted at the start, I was largely in freefall since I finished it yesterday afternoon. If this is how I end up spending my free time, it's just as well that it's time to go back to the day job.

Somnambulist's Euphoria

2023-07-10T18:33:00.011-07:00

Like the protagonist of AI: The Somnium Files, I seem to be suffering from amnesia about what transpired some time ago. Granted, in Date's case, he has forgotten his entire life from before six years ago. In my case, I can't remember doing much this week except that I launched AI: The Somnium Files on Thursday evening and couldn't put it down until I finished it Saturday afternoon. Well, it was a busy work week; there was not much time for leisure.

27 hours well-spent

However, this puts me at somewhat of a disadvantage to come up with blog content. Because, like many good visual novels, AI: The Somnium Files is a story, and stories are easily ruined by spoiling. I suppose that I could stick to the basics:

This game is made by the Zero Escape team of Spike Chunsoft, known for creating excellent visual novels.
You play Special Agent Kaname Date, a detective in an alternate future who uses technology and an AI assistant to solve mysteries. Though a stoic, dependable fellow in most ways, he is a bit of an immature lecher, played for laughs.
His AI assistant lives in his prosthetic eyeball, an AI-Ball, and calls herself Aiba. This grants Dante special vision out of that eye and an AI-powered supercomputer everywhere he goes. Aiba is supportive of Dante, though scathing when he is being immature, and enjoys being silly herself sometimes. She has a VR appearance of a young woman but can also pop out and walk around as a tiny eyeball robot with a transparent membrane body.
Dante also uses a futuristic machine to share dreams with people, going through trippy sequences and trying to fathom their dream logic to get to what they know.
Date's after a serial killer whose victims are prominently displayed with their right eye removed.

From this promising start, it is plot twists all the way down.

Although there are some gory scenes, the story suits older teens and up. Consequently, you'll see a lot of anime tropes and a focus on the young adult cast despite most of the story being about adults.

It's a good thing that the story is so interesting. The structure of AI: The Somnium Files is relatively linear; players will spend more time following the story than directing it. For the most part, you're forced to burn through every dialogue option in each scene before being allowed to the next. Although there are sequences with quick time events (Shenmue-style) and where you match clues to prove a point (Ace Attorney-style), these are few and far between. The dream sequences are where the most player agency can be found, and perhaps it's no coincidence they are also where the story branches are.

To reach the ultimate end, seeing each branch of the story is mandatory, whether or not they are happy endings. At the end of a couple branches, you will encounter a locked segment that require other choices to unlock. I feel somewhat proud I hit those roadblocks straight away, as they seem to correspond to the most sensible choices. More likely, this is a testament to the brilliance of the writers: they played me like a fiddle! Still, when the last animated sequence played, and I wiped away my manly tears, I wanted to stand and applaud.

Although I don't have enough time to finish it this week, I'm excited to immediately play the sequel, AI: The Somnium Files Nirvana Initiative. Released three years later and reviewing better, I think I'm in for a treat.

Defunctlife, Routine Uncertainty

2023-07-04T23:06:00.031-07:00

As the neighbors start off the annual World War that we call the night of the Fourth of July, I feel like I have surprisingly little to talk about this week. I had to take a day off to attend a speeding ticket hearing and to drive a parent down to the train station, and another day off is happening now because of the holiday. However, I only really took three days for myself, and they went as fast as an interstellar body whipping through space.

Work is progressing well enough, but I have to say that it's remarkably resistant to routine. An assistant to a senior tech can expect all sorts of odd jobs to come their way. I've been trying to stay optimistic. You only live once! However, all this uncertainty breeds anxiety.

I've disregarded that, but the inner ape thinks I'm nuts. There were nights after work when I flopped down on my bed and stared at the ceiling, the proportions of my house seeming alien to me. Was I sick, or was my subconscious lost, asking, "What am I doing with my life?"

It's probably not the job. It's that I've decided to change careers in my mid-40s. It takes time to acclimate to something like that.

Most of my time spent playing Ostranauts is in the interface dedicated to managing my character's inventory and needs, as well as making changes to the environment.

But it is my free time that felt truly aimless. I watched seasons 1 and 2 of Defunctland and several Escapist Magazine streams. Seeing time flying without accomplishing anything, I signed up for more substitute work. That's good, I need the money, and it's nice to see my old coworkers, but all this change left me exhausted. I debated if it would have been wiser to rest.

Then my substitute options dried up, and I had to face three days off. After losing the first day to more of the same on YouTube, I put my foot down: I would play Zelda: Breath of the Wild until my Switch's battery was low, do game development, and go back to playing more of it once it recharged! It was a plan to finally get that game off my backlog.

That morning went as planned, but then I picked up Ostranauts (version 0.12.0.5) on sale. Yes, there was a moment when I stopped and thought, "buying another game only adds to my backlog, don't buy another game." The counterpoint was that the Steam Summer sale won't going to last and I am nerdy enough to appreciate a game like Ostranauts even more than Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

The counterpoint wasn't wrong: I liked Ostranauts so much that it took up the latter half of my second day off and the entire third. Although I feel this is one of those games that provide a poor return for the time investment required, I was riveted by the depth of the simulation. This is the kind of game I have been wanting enough to try to make myself. The trouble with adding games to the backlog is when I don't play them, not when I do.

But how to describe Ostranauts? In truth, it seems like I have played a lot of games like it. And yet, it offers a relatively unique experience.

These elaborate control panels are one of the more ambitious features of Ostranauts. Their learning curve may intimidate new players but, under closer examination, everything is still simpler and more streamlined than it would be in real life.

It's the map structure that is so reminiscent. With a grid-based map structure, where every cell can have a floor, wall, fixtures, and items, Ostranauts is built on the bones of traditional roguelikes. However, the pausable real-time game flow with attention to character inventories and attitudes puts it in the vein of RimWorld or Oxygen Not Included. Especially the latter, which simulates atmospherics and fluidics on a greater level of detail than Ostranauts attempts. Other than that, the map and its elements are the same, one top-down and the other played from the side like an ant farm. What would you call this kind of map structure? Perhaps grid-based immersive sims because, if you drop the grid, you still have the environmental flexibility and power of choice that players expect from an immersive sim.

However, describing the map structure does not fully explain the gameplay. There's a significant difference between Ostranauts and games like RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included. Rather than a colony management simulation, Ostranauts is a roleplaying game played from the perspective of a single character. As such, the focus changes to navigating environments, conversing with other characters, and surviving. However, the resemblance of disassembling and assembling technology to improve your environment remains. For some reason, developers aspiring to make Dwarf Fortress-level environmental detail in a roleplaying game tend to get derailed, as in the case of Minecraft. Ostranauts seems to be staying the course, albeit in the guise of a space survival game with shipbreaking that was done better in Hardspace: Shipbreaker.

Although they don't always behave as I would prefer, shipbreaking goes faster with a friend.

Every game developer has their unique vision and priorities, and I wouldn't have it any other way. My interest is to provide higher narrative ramifications for what happens in a computer RPG. Ostranauts is focused more on being an elaborate systems sandbox for survival and environment building, but it's still an RPG. So far, my time in Ostranauts has demonstrated why I feel systems this advanced need a higher purpose. Sure, I can build a fully-functioning starship and explore the universe, but why? As a work in progress, perhaps the answer will come in time. Art can be a quest for meaning, and what they have may already be more coherent than what I have.

Regardless, I burned through what was left of my weekend very quickly. Thanks to the holiday, it's only a three-day workweek, but this does little to reinforce my sense of routine. These fireworks probably won't settle down until sometime after midnight, so it's good my work schedule starts late enough to allow some sleeping in tomorrow morning. Much like life itself, my festive neighbors couldn't care less that my change-wracked brain needs all the rest it can get.

Gliding Through Change: Dork Descent

2023-06-26T19:45:00.012-07:00

With my first week at the new day job going on, I had plenty to think about. Add Steam's "Next Fest" to that, an online-only event involving some 500 or so indies showing off their games, and my brain had enough stimulation to blow through a week like it was nothing. Time flies when you're having fun.

The Nintendo Direct that aired on June 21st was also more diamond than rough. I was particularly interested in Persona 5 Tactica, Detective Pikachu Returns, the Super Mario RPG remake, the teaser for a yet-to-be-titled Princess Peach game, and WarioWare: Move It.

During the working days of the week, I fostered a habit of getting up a little earlier and committing a few pomodoros worth of game development. Although I couldn't quite do the four needed for a complete set, I managed a few commits from my Unity project.

This is an encouraging sign that I was right to change my schedule: I needed to turn up the pressure to work on my passion project. My previous positions' four days off every week were working against me. Sometimes, having too much time makes motivation difficult.

Then I worked an extra day at the old job, five hours, before picking up the parent at the train station. Consequently, what would have been three days off became two. But then, it was good to see my old coworkers, even if it was a little strange to return and lend a hand after throwing a goodbye party just a week earlier. Still, everyone seemed to take it well, and my help was needed. In a way, it normalized the experience, as this new position is not truly a "goodbye" but rather a relocation down the street to a different department.

However, that extra day spent working and helping with familial transportation from the train station may have started me off on the wrong foot. As my weekend went fast, I didn't do any pomodoros. What happened? Did I need time to mentally incubate that a third day off would have provided? Well, good thing I take notes. Let's see if we can figure that out.

On the first day off, I needed to complete six significant chores. Knowing that Sword of Damocles hanging over my head would ruin the rest of the day, I managed to get them all wrapped up by 1pm. However, I think this killed my willpower, as I only sat and watched YouTube for the rest of the day. I mostly watched GameSack, a cleverly-produced series revisiting video game platforms of the past. However, I also caught a live stream from Escapist Magazine that covered some demos from Steam Next Fest.

In terms of lost time, the second day off was more baffling than the first. On an impulse, I lost the first few hours to idle hands, browsing Steam's underbelly for a few hours before shedding myself of that burden. At that time, I noted, "I think I'm just bored." Then I turned on YouTube and watched a couple of my favorite Escapist Streams, playing Diablo IV during one of them. Then I bought and played the newly-released-into-Early-Access One Lonely Outpost until it was time for my mid-afternoon doctor's appointment. (As I said in the previous blog entry, it's a farming sim that I hope has more innovative mechanics than most, despite not being particularly technically competent.) I returned in time for dinner, and now I'm blogging what I did in a futile attempt to pick up the pieces.

So, have I figured out what happened to my weekend? Only that there were plenty of activities that kept me well-occupied the whole time. I suppose I could have chosen to isolate myself from those if I wanted to invest that time more productively. We only get a few opportunities to choose how to decide our time, and I chose the path of least resistance.

Of those two days off, the only long-term goal I managed to finagle enough gumption to progress was a few hours of Zelda: Breath of the Wild play. (A few screenshots of which are scattered throughout this blog entry.) At the risk of impacting my sleep, I made the most progress playing the Switch in bed.

Oddly, it takes effort to finish games, even ones I enjoy. I want to finish Zelda: Breath of the Wild before playing the sequel, which I have already purchased and ready to play. I end every session feeling satisfied with the experience. However, at the rate I'm going, I will be halfway to Starfield's release by then.

Why do I keep procrastinating away from a source of enjoyment? I can only speculate. But perhaps it's because I'm such an experienced gamer that I need more variety than playing one game at a time. Although it slows the progress of completion, an epic-length experience is much more palatable when you are allowed frequent diversions.

Well, if this week was any proof, it seems I am more capable of directing my time during work days than my days off, so it's just as well that this weekend is over.

Guarantee Of Missing Out

2023-06-19T18:54:00.017-07:00

As I knew it would be, the last day at my previous position was bittersweet. But many of my old co-workers banded together to give me a good sendoff, and it would be disrespectful to mope. I have a lot to learn in my new position!

This locker decor, a plethora of savory snacks, and a card. This might be the sweetest thing anyone outside of my immediate family has ever done for me.

This should be a pretty mellow schedule, 24 hours spread out over four (and later five) days. I plan to get up early, eat breakfast, get ready for work, and do 4 pomodoros of game development before leaving. After work, it'll be late enough that I might as well advance my gaming backlog for the rest of the day.

But it seems entire days off are wasted on me. I just had two in which I intended to make a lot of progress in Zelda: Breath of the Wild (since I'm making myself finish it before transitioning to Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom). Two games that review aggregates seem to suggest are almost the best ever. (Although scores are meaningless, and this may be sullied by the literal death threats against reviewers from the more rabid Zelda fans.)

I've noticed that the source of wasted days off comes down to a cascade of unfortunate decisions. I feel bad if playing games is all I do with my free time, so I try to do some creative work first. Because I'm currently suffering from developers' block, my scheduled pomodoros can be lost to idle hands because I'm too unfocused. Feeling like I ought to do that, I force myself to do more, but this only results in more idle hands follow along with physical exhaustion. Before I know it, the day is over, lost to failing to focus.

The entire first day off was wasted that way. (Although my idle hands may go somewhere productive accidentally. I found watching the Defunctland Jim Henson series incredibly inspiring to an aspiring creative.) So I thought I'd stop trying on days when I can't focus on my pomodoros. (Although, in practice, I find shutting down all distractions and forcing myself to confront the boredom usually will produce results. This was a failure to shut down the distractions.)

My second day off proves that anything can form a cascade of unfortunate decisions, and not just futile spinning wheels in the direction of game development:

I started with four semi-productive pomodoros, attempting to find traction, instead finding the blame turned inward on why I was so drained. In a way, that's progress, as I'm directly attacking whatever it is that seems to be impeding my work. However, far better to ignore such distractions and do something, no matter how little. But, following my decisions to stop trying on days when I can't focus on my pomodoros, it was time to progress my gaming backlog instead.
Then I watched an Escapist Magazine live stream from 10am to noon. A fairly podcast-like stream, I should have played Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the side, but I was distracted with Steam chat, web browsing, cleaning my desk, laundry, and so on. It crossed my mind that I was making excuses.
The clothes drier broke, so I needed to go to the laundromat until 2pm. I brought along the Nintendo Switch, but (since I'm still paying for it) I was too apprehensive about it (or my laundry) being stolen to play it much.
I decided to play the Jumplight Odyssey demo. This is a remarkably good single starship simulation, less well-encapsulated or snappy than FTL: Faster Than Light, but it makes up for that in breadth and charm. It lasted until 3pm. It was delightful but short and didn't play well on an ultrawide monitor.
I played the One Lonely Outpost demo. That lasted until 4:30pm. With seemingly around a dozen new ones announced during the summer games festivals, including this one, farming simulators are turning out to be an over-saturated market in 2023. It seems you can overturn any rock and find competition for the old guard of Story of Seasons, Harvest Moon, and Stardew Valley. One Lonely Outpost is not very technically competent, either. However, it seems to have an unusually sympathetic story with interesting twists, and some of the game mechanics (such as being able to water a field while moving) are encouraging. I wish more farming simulators were daring enough to iterate the mechanics. Compared to Jumplight Odyssey, I found this demo to be about as delightful, but it was paced slower and would not play in a window.
Then I decided to write the weekly blog entry. It's almost 7pm now.
Knowing me, I'll be tempted to edit this entry for the rest of the day.

It's remarkable how deeply-ingrained my time-wasting potential is. Look at all that time I could have spent playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild instead! Why do I even have free time if I'm going to waste it like this?!

The only thing that bothered me about the Jumplight Odyssey demo is that the crew were too precious to lose at random in away missions.

It's as if I don't want to play an epic-length game, even one as good as Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, I don't think that's the case, as I never stopped playing it feeling disappointed. Perhaps I feel like life is too short. Or maybe the lethargy I felt for game development is also related to enjoying games. It might be physical; I could be sick or tired, and videos are easier because they're passive activities.

Well, I can play the Nintendo Switch lying down. It sounds to me like I need the rest. I have a busy week ahead.

The Last Bizarro Weekend

2023-06-14T10:19:00.089-07:00

Even though I could only catch them retroactively because I had to work, the summer game festivals went on all weekend. Working and being inundated with over-the-top media brought about ennui. It made it hard to pay attention. However, there's a few standouts that pierced my flagging consciousness, such as:

Avowed - a first-person action RPG Pillars of Eternity game that plays like The Outer Worlds and not (the developers stress) like a Bethesda open world game. Considering The Outer Worlds was a 13-40 hour game that did not do anything better than what came before, it's not a very ambitious comparison. However, I could see the potential for Obsidian to bring the strengths of its best two games (Pillars of Eternity and Fallout: New Vegas) together in Avowed, and that makes it worth watching.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty - CD Projekt Red stuck to its strengths, but a setting based on a tabletop RPG deserves a wider aperture than just one character. To make matters worse, I hate V's story because they're doomed no matter what. However, I am looking for an excuse to replay Cyberpunk 2077 now that I have a 40 series GPU, and this DLC might be that. On the other hand, it's releasing after a certain other game that will likely have all my time in September...
Dragon's Dogma II - This unusually-innovative open world CRPG is getting a sequel, and I was reminded how much I enjoy the "pawn" mechanic as an introvert. All the benefits of online play without the other players? I'm looking forward to it.
Exoprimal seemed to attract negativity from the peanut gallery, but I don't know why. It looks like a genuinely interesting ARPG with novel mechanics and a quality presentation. It might be like Monster Hunter, except you fight hordes of dinosaurs instead of individual monsters. Besides, I'd much rather fight in a cybernetic mech suit than an antique. My progressive mindset gives me a clear bias for science fiction over fantasy.
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective looks stylish and fun for a puzzle game. Again, the peanut gallery was not impressed, but we didn't all manage to catch the DS release. So seeing this brought to all major platforms is a reasonably big deal.
Jumplight Odyssey is showing itself to have better production values the more I see it. It's Evil Genius with the Voltron team aesthetic and a starship with all the depth of something out of Star Trek. I look forward to trying the demo next week.
Lightyear Fronters' open world farming and settlement-building game with mechs strikes me as worthy of a spin. I don't see much in the way of novel game mechanics, though.

And then there's Starfield.

Starfield Direct from Bethesda's YouTube Channel.

I planned to preorder Starfield before the Starfield Direct stream told us more about it. Though Bethesda is reputed to have buggy releases (especially after Fallout 76's disastrous release), I'm not the kind of prima donna gamer who would hold it against them. If Starfield crashed every 5 minutes, I'd make regular quick saves and shoulder on. A Bethesda open world game in space? Sold!

After the Starfield Direct stream effectively over-hyped Starfield, I preordered it anyway. The trailer showed:

RPG mechanics barely iterating atop their open world games of the past. (The need to earn achievements to level up skills is a bold design choice.)
An adequate combat implementation, both on the ground and in space, only about a generation behind the best of the best. (Although the space combat genre is dong poorly. FreeSpace 2 and I-War are probably better.)
Way more customizable guns and other weapons than the combat will likely necessitate. (The AI didn't look any smarter than Redfall's.)
Lots of chatty talking heads spouting dialogue not far from mainstream tropes for fear it'll alienate the Madden-heads of the Xbox platform. (I imagine the puzzles will be set at about a third-grade elementary school level, too, if they stay the course of Skyrim's design.)
The base building mechanic from every one of their recent games, and another for spaceships. (No sign of settlement building, I guess they were spooked by the inventory bloat of Fallout 4.)
Oh, and there are cutting-edge graphics. (But such a thing comes at a cost, and I hear some people are upset that their three-year-old console may be locked at 30 FPS.)

Sure enough, that's a Bethesda open world game. They're delivering what I expected. I (unnecessarily considering it's on Game Pass) preordered it at the premium level with no discounts because a game on my wish list for a half-decade deserves nothing less.

A shame they had to go and hype it. Less discerning gamers than I will likely suffer disillusionment when they finally get the game in their hot little hands in September. Far better to set their expectations low so the opposite occurs. But that wouldn't make the stakeholders happy, would it?

I look forward to playing Starfield in September. But why do my thoughts turn to whether or not my parents will be alive and my living conditions stable by September? These upcoming three months feel very volatile to me. How is it that I'm still gaming and over the hill? Perhaps my love of games is not unlike an opiate that I use to facilitate the passage of time as my life inevitably ticks to resolution. Such is the role of entertainment.

Yep, I've definitely overdone it on the games media consumed over the last week.

I surprised myself by purchasing and playing the early access of Space Reign for a solid seven and a half hours. I didn't plan to play that long, but it has a pretty good meta loop where you leave the sector, buy new ships or change their configuration, and then launch to see how your changes play out.

I like how missiles feel powerful and how there are no shields on your ships so all the damage you take sticks until you leave the sector. These features help set it apart from the alternatives.

That said, Space Reign's balance needs work. You will lose ships through no particular fault of your own, be compensated for half of their value, but this expense is still so high that you might as well just quit back to main menu to undo the loss.

Hopefully the developers can muster the willpower to see this game through to release, as this is a very promising foundation of an Early Access project.

I already have plenty to play. Diablo IV has all the grinding my lizard brain could ever want. For my higher thinking, we have The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to play with a wrapped-and-ready copy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom waiting. Between that and my stalled efforts at game development, I've possibly enough to occupy me all the way up until Starfield's release. (What am I saying? I have a gaming backlog stretching halfway to eternity.)

I'll flatter myself by suggesting I might have more "higher thinking" than "lizard brain" because I've gotta say I don't know if I want to play Diablo IV anymore, despite excelling at what it does. Turning my brain off long enough to get to the 70 hours needed to vindicate the price seems like a chore. But then, I suppose it beats browsing the web or writing a blog entry... I'm considering doing the latest No Man's Sky expedition, "Singularity," instead.

Regardless, my "Bizarro Weekends" of working the weekend and having four weekdays off ends this week. Maybe I needed the change, as my game development endeavors have been stalled. It's hard to start when I'm at the stage of a project where I'm ramming my head into a wall of developer's block.

On top of that, between all these gaming conventions demonstrating an overabundance of games and having plenty of play, the necessity to make a game has largely dried up. In fact, I had a chance to play the Wizard With A Gun demo and was staggered by some of the common themes between it and my oh-so-special game concept.

It's a grid-based game where you play some kind of magic user fighting back literal chaos monsters that are trying to reclaim the world while building your own place. But enough about my game, Wizard With A Gun is doing that too.

But if I'm blowing all my free time without a passion project, life loses a lot of meaning. Lately, I've considered that my quest to bring a higher purpose to RPGs could be informed by the importance of ideals in life. Without idealism, humankind is just an animal trying to get by, and isn't that precisely what bothers me about the endgames of survival sandbox games?

Much of my last Bizarro Weekend went to futile wheel-spinning on the indie development front. If I can't muster the motivation to work on my days off, I suppose I'm at least contributing to the day job. What could be more idealistic than public service?

Some exciting developments are going on there. The next time I go to work, it will be in the new position. The following day, I can bid everyone at the old one a fond farewell and clean out my locker. As is the case with new jobs, it's going to be weird and probably take me a long time to acclimate. The people down there seem pretty laid back, so I'm hoping it's nothing to worry about.

Penultimate Bizarro Weekend Distractions

2023-06-08T17:10:00.030-07:00

The latter few days of this Penultimate Bizarro Weekend were not quite as exciting as the first one. My creative endeavors were largely stymied by being unable to tear myself away from huge summer game streams. But then, progress has been agonizingly slow anyway, I've been confronting some hard questions about my design.

Wednesday was the Guerrilla Collective, for the third year, highlighting some of the best new games from the indie games sector. For three hours straight, it was one after another, and it was inevitable that a few would end up on my wish list:

Arc Seed - This looks to be a bit like if Into The Breach had a persistent city you had to defend while upgrading your mech. As such, I expect rich, turn-based combat although that is a tough act to follow.
The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales - This adventure game mixes a number of genres to present a noir fantasy story. An underwhelming description for a game which looks like no slouch to me.
Crashlands 2 - Followup and all-around iteration to the excellent Crashlands, a goofy sci-fi survival crafter.
Critter Crops - Although not a particularly deep farming life sim, this game features a very endearing presentation and a lot of heart.
Death Trick: Double Blind - A detective mystery visual novel with an interesting presentation and gameplay style that looks to be reasonable indy homage to classic Ace Attorney games.
Dwarf Delve - A voxel-based first person mining game that may play a bit like Minecraft but probably has a secondary gameplay loop more like SteamWorld Dig.
Good Heavens! - Seems to match Don't Starve adventure survival with settlement building. That is absolutely my jam, to the point where my own designs often resemble that feature set.
Leximan - Looks like a worthy unofficial spinoff of Undertale but with more of a funny word combination mechanic.
Lil' Guardsman - A medieval comedy point-and-click adventure that plays somewhat like Papers, Please by way of I Hate Fairyland.
Noun Town Language Learning - An isometric sandbox that gamifies learning the nouns of foreign languages.
Toads of the Bayou - More turn-based tactics in the vein of Into The Breach but this time with a Wind In The Willows style (if it took place on the Ozarks) and featuring settlement building mechanics.
Yomi 2 - Turns the fighting game genre into a card battler. That suits my aging reflexes just fine.

This is not a comprehensive list of everything to tickle my fantasy. Many of them were already wish listed from before, so they weren't conveniently found on the bottom of my Steam wishlist now. Some of those lovelies include:

Jumplight Odyssey, more of a bog-standard management simulation in the vein of Evil Genius or Two Point Hospital than I was hoping, but still pretty great in that you control a starship this time.
One Lonely Outpost, which looks to be iterating the farming simulation formula meaningfully. Out June 26th, just weeks away!
Quasimorph, formerly a turn-based tactics game, it's currently more like Jupiter Hell but with a bit more detail to its graphics and injury system.

Looks like I have a bit of a sci-fi theme going on the games I enjoy. Speaking of which, here's two that should have been mentioned and weren't:

The Last Starship - From the makers of Prison Architect, I struggle to say what this does that Cosmoteer: Starship Architect Commander doesn't do better, but it looks to be a smoother overall experience.
Space Reign - A great space dogfighting game with a mercenary company sector conquest metagame. Early access is out very soon!

Both are already in Early Access and look quite good! As I said in the last entry, Summer Games 2023 is coming at us hard!

When Guerrilla Collective finally wrapped up, I had to pick up my mom at the train station, and we did some shopping and ate out. I was too wiped out to do anything when we returned late into the afternoon.

This year's Devolver presentation was probably my favorite ever.

The last day off, Summer Games Fest was set to start around noon, and I was too distracted to get much done.

Although the big-budget games we ended up seeing were certainly more spectacular, they're also more confused and desperate for attention. This explains where Mortal Kombat 1's over-the-top gore and Palworld's baffling imitation come from. A place of "we got huge budgets to recoup, for the love of God, pay attention to meeee!"

Hype trains don't get along well with experienced gamers, and I have been around long enough to have atypical tastes. But a few caught my eye:

Baby Steps - Normally I wouldn't be that into goofy physics games, but this one seems like it could be really funny. Clever writing makes a difference!
Baldur's Gate III - Sometimes, it seems like Larian is getting along on a wing and a prayer, as with Divinity: Falling Heroes being on a semi-permanent haitus and Baldur's Gate III being released into Early Access playing more like a Divinity: Original Sin spinoff with very limited content. But that was two and a half years ago, and they have been hard at work to bring us a worthy Baldur's Gate sequel.
Beastieball - I'm not sure why I want a Pokemon where the monsters play Volleyball and have better designs, but I do.
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth - Part 2 of 3 of the remake, simply one of the best gaming experiences that there ever was. However, it's coming to Playstation 5 first, so I guess I won't be seeing it until 2024, at the earliest.
Eternights - Looks like it could be the hack and slash high school dating game weebs always dreamed of. But can the gameplay match up?
Lies of P - One of the few standouts of last year, it's shaping up to be an exceptional Soulslike. But Soulslikes are a dime a dozen, previous trailers looked to take more of a hint from Dishonored, and I am not sure they managed to do so.
Mars First Logistics - Although I doubt my credentials when it comes to building physics-based vehicles to complete tasks, this one looks so cleanly-executed I might be tempted to give it a try anyway.
Saltsea Chronicles - A branching narrative adventure game with a novel setting taking place in a post-apocalyptic world that has been flooded.
Wizard with a Gun - An action RPG with a map that looks somewhat out of Don't Starve where you play... a Wizard with a gun.

Plenty to play. Not that I know when I'll have the time to play any of these while I've still got the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Diablo IV to play. But it did remind me that I should probably finish Final Fantasy VII: Remake after I finish those. So far, my Diablo IV rogue is up to level 24 in Act 1 (I've been doing every side dungeon I see), and I beat one of four divine beasts in Breath of the Wild.

As if I haven't had enough yet, I skimmed the February Nintendo Direct and found more to add to my Switch's wish list:

DecaPolice - Great looking junior detective-themed JRPG from the infamous Level-5, including some of the talent behind the Professor Layton series.
Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time - Also from Level-5. Though I found the original Fantasy Life to have fairly simplistic gameplay, I was nevertheless enchanted by the cute presentation and player freedom. A sequel sounds great!
Master Detective Archives: Rain Code - Hey, I can never have enough detective games, this one from Spike Chunsoft and specifically some of the original creators behind Danganronpa, one of my all time favorite series.

I don't need more games to play right now, but none of the games mentioned here today are out yet. Although a few are in Early Access, most aren't out until later this year or the next, if that.

As far as streamed gaming conventions go, these have just been the start of what we're getting instead of E3 this year. They will last through the weekend. I've been looking forward to the Starfield Direct presentation since it was first announced months ago, and Starfield has been on the top of my Steam wishlist for years. However, I still work the weekend, so I'll catch that and other weekend presentations on the flip side.