Real Real Gone

I rather enjoyed the start of The Outer Worlds, but two or three planets in I felt myself getting a bit bogged down. Occasional glitches and my seemingly unusual approach to the order of missions were a little irritating, but not particularly off-putting. The main story seemed to be meandering along without much impetus, but in these more open worlds the 'main' story often takes a back seat to wandering around interesting-looking places and my crew seemed like interesting folk, it was good to delve into their pasts as we pottered around the place. Like Dragon Age: The Veilguard before it there was nothing terrible that made me fling it aside in disgust, I've just drifted away and found myself firing up other games instead.

I've been trying to work out why those RPGs haven't managed to stick in the same way that Baldur's Gate 3 did. The writing and voice performances of BG3 are superb, that has to be a part of it, but I don't think they would have been sufficient on their own if the rest of the game didn't do such a good job of implementing D&D on the PC. Casting back to the last RPG I finished, Midnight Suns, it didn't have a great story and I cared very little for the characters; about halfway through it also became a bit of a slog, but I did push on and finish it. It might be oversimplifying, but I wonder if the crucial difference is that BG3 and Midnight Suns have turn-based combat rather than the real-time of Veilguard and The Outer Worlds. Veilguard emphasises blocking and dodging, which tend to be my least favourite bits of combat; The Outer Worlds is fairly conventional, sneaking around one-shotting enemies with a silenced weapon is most satisfying but once you're spotted it's the usual "hit 'em with a bucket, ruffle their hair up, RUN CHARLIE RUN" sort of affair.

It's not like I've always avoided real-time combat, not least in previous Dragon Age and Fallout games, perhaps as my aged reflexes atrophy over time I'm enjoying it less. What I've really been sinking my time into has been Balatro, which is as brilliant as everyone says, a fantastic take on a deck builder. Off the back of that I've also gone back to Slay The Spire and Monster Train here and there and just picked up Fights In Tight Spaces, which looks very promising. It's not all cards - I'll pop back to Vampire Survivors now and again to check out updates, and on similar lines Melmoth suggested Death Must Die. Perhaps there's real-time hope yet.

I won't repeat that mistake

In the quest for a pleasant little time-wasting feed of jokes, trivia, and just enough news to feel informed without curling up into a sobbing ball of existential dread, Bluesky has won out (for me, at least). It's gained the critical mass of people, dogs, and agricultural museums that allows you to encounter things you never knew you were interested in, such as commentary on a Marine Accident Investigation. In that case the unusual circumstances that led to a paddle steamer crashing into a pier were understood, but proved impossible to replicate.

In unrelated news, I've started playing The Outer Worlds. (Keen students of Obsidian games may already have twigged that this is actually Quite Related news...) Melmoth mentioned that Avowed, a new Obsidian fantasy RPG, was coming out; I had a look at a few reviews and it sounded pretty good if not immediately-buy-at-full-price good. A couple of the reviews mentioned The Outer Worlds, a previous Obsidian sci-fi RPG, and that rang a vague bell - back at release in 2019 I'd thought it sounded pretty good if not immediately-buy-at-full-price good, then promptly forgotten all about it, so I picked it up at a discount.

The Outer Worlds has grabbed me in a way Dragon Age: The Veilguard somehow hasn't with very Fallout-esque gameplay and a corporate dystopia setting that raises a few wry smile between depressingly plausible vignettes. I have hit a small snag, though.

Obsidian games developed a bit of a reputation for not being in a perfectly polished state at release and needing a patch or three to iron out the worst glitches, not least from Fallout: New Vegas. You would have thought that five years might be enough to squash pretty much all the bugs, but after travelling to the planet of Monarch I wandered into a room to find an NPC delivering half of a conversation to empty space. Slightly confused I tried to chat to him only to be told "Not now", so I wandered off and did some other missions.

After several other quests the chap was still terribly busy and wouldn't talk, and he turned out to be a vital part of the main story quest. Searching around to see if others had hit the same issue it seems a second NPC hadn't spawned and was nowhere to be found. A couple of people reported the same missing NPC, others had problems on the same mission with different NPCs, and it seemed there was no solution except to go back to previous save games. I didn't fancy re-doing a bunch of missions, though, so in frustration killed the bloke, then his guards, his other followers, and a fair chunk of the the rest of the town who took a dim view of my murderous rampage and turned hostile. Can't really blame them. On the plus side it did mark that stage of the mission as complete and allowed me to progress so I was lucky in that respect, some of the other missing NPCs would have halted things completely by the sounds of it. I'd normally try to at least make an attempt at diplomatic solution but as the old saying goes: when life gives you lemons, slaughter anything that moves and hope that counts as a successful mission.

Despite the bugs many Obsidian releases received plaudits for their ambition, and The Outer Worlds certainly seems to allow you to take a variety of approaches (though a short way through my first play-through I'm not sure how firmly I'm being shepherded down certain paths). In these sort of games I generally follow the waypoints, go to the obvious places the missions lead, with the odd diversion here and there if I pass an interesting looking building or cave en route. I'm not deliberately being awkward or trying to do things out of order to catch out the designers, but as well as the outright bugged NPC on Monarch I seem to going about things in a slightly irregular order. There've been a number of encounters where I wandered into a place just looking for stuff to loot, defeated a few marauders, and had a chat along the lines of:
Engineer Geoff: "Oh, wow, thanks! Mayor Jeff must have sent you to rescue me!"
Me: "Mayor.. who now? What? Err, sure, I guess..."
Later on after finding another town
Mayor Jeff: "Yes, I can help with that information, but first I need the town Engineer back"
Me: "Is he called Geoff by any chance? The chap standing over there?"
Mayor Jeff: "I sent him off to investigate interruptions to our power supply"
Me: "Yeah, he was at the power station besieged by Marauders, all sorted"
Mayor Jeff: "I'll mark the location on your map"
Engineer Geoff: "Uh... I'm right here, boss"
Mayor Jeff: "Talk to me again when you've found him"
Ends conversation. Starts conversation.
Mayor Jeff: "Geoff tells me you rescued him, well done! Here's a file with the data you need."

It can't be easy with so many moving parts and the freedom to travel around at will, but I do seem to be (in technical maritime parlance) twatting into piers a bit more often than would be ideal.

 

 

The veil was torn asunder ‘tween the hours of twelve and one

Breaking the habit of a lifetime (for extremely small values of 'lifetime'), I recently bought a game released within the tenure of the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I realise it was a peculiar habit to get into and deeply inconvenient much of the time (desperately wanting to play Tetris but being stuck with Space Invaders and Super Breakout until 1990), though shambolic Conservative leadership meant it was much less of a hardship for the last few years (Elden Ring hadn't dropped out of the charts before the lettuce wilted). Anyone might think it's a fictional device I just came up with to try and avoid a more prosaic statement about generally being far behind the curve of new gaming releases, but that doesn't sound very plausible does it?

So I picked up Dragon Age: The Veilguard over Christmas, and so far... it's fine. There's much to like, nothing egregiously awful, but it hasn't really sunk its hooks into me. I can play an hour here or there, think "that was all right", and log out quite happily rather than being desperate to see where the story goes next. It's a much healthier approach than bunking off work, living off giant bags of giant Wotsits as there's no time for cooking, and only stopping when you fall asleep on your keyboard; perhaps we should be giving more credit to things that are pretty decent without being addictively good. 

The Dragon Age series has changed protagonist each game and the styles changed more between instalments than, say, the original Mass Effect trilogy, so it's had a tougher time creating a cohesive and involving story across games. A ten year gap since the last game killed off any momentum it might have built up, though going back and reading Wikipedia plot summaries I'm not sure it really had any momentum by the end of Inquisition - I remembered most of the key events of the first two games with a bit of prompting, but haven't the slightest recollection of the main villain of the third. Coryph-who and the what now? It's not vital to Veilguard; you can make a few choices at the start about what happened in Inquisition, but I wonder if they might have been better off starting with a cleaner slate. I found it particularly jarring when the Inquisitor turned up as an NPC; I might not really remember anything I did, but that's still "me", except it isn't any more. 

The rest of the game works nicely. Combat is fast paced; a touch too frantic for my aged reflexes in boss fights at the default level, but that's what difficulty settings are for. The companions seem a decent bunch, and I'm really liking Bryony Corrigan's soft North East tones as the British female Rook. Puzzles so far have struck a balance, not trivial but not keyboard-smashingly irritating.Without being fully involved in the central story, though, it lacks a certain something. A central hub leading to zones with different themes, containing challenges requiring physical or mental skills? If Varric was replaced by a Richard (either O'Brien or Ayoade) it could be Dragon Age: The Crystal Mazening.

Get Dressed You Merry Gentlemen

As is ancient tradition^*, here's the Christmas Spitfire to lead everyone in a joyful rendition of GEEEEEEEEETTTTT dressed you merry gentlemen.

I hope your 2024 was generally bearable, and that 2025 may be as close to acceptable as is realistically possible in the circumstances. Happy Christmas one and all!

Uttering idle words from a reprobate mind

I started playing Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms three and a half years ago, and having ticked off 99% of the achievements there's not a huge amount left to do in there. I still hop on, particularly for the monthly events to unlock new characters, but not religiously, so I was poking around for some other options. Doctor Who: Lost in Time popped up in the Play Store, I thought I'd give that a look being a bit of a fan.

Frankly, it's not great. The artwork is nice, pleasing cartoon renderings of various doctors, companions and monsters; they pop up in little chunks of story as you progress rather like a comic chopped into three panel strips. Some of the stories are quite fun, others don't really seem to capture the voice of the characters, they're all pretty incidental. The gameplay itself is standard idle clicker; tap on a thing to collect currency to upgrade a thing to produce more currency to unlock another thing producing yet more currency, eventually automating the collecting so you can wander off and watch telly while it ticks along. There's a bit of obfuscation with different types of resources and currencies but very little in the way of compelling challenges. Needless to say you can fork out real cash for virtual trinkets to boost your progress, or watch adverts to be grudgingly thrown a few free scraps. If you're sitting there thinking "you know, I just haven't seen enough adverts for Temu in the last seventeen seconds" this might be just the game you're looking for, although psychological help may be a better long term investment.

There've been plenty of games I've played for a few hours to get an idea of key mechanisms, usually some sort of puzzle, resource collection, or turn based combat with endless layers of gacha upgrades. A few I played for longer, where the monetisation wasn't too obnoxious. Where they hit a sweet spot of cash items being a useful little boost without unbalancing things I've actually spent a bit; Marvel Puzzle Quest and Idle Champions are a couple that I've played for years and spent a few quid here and there. They have cash shop options for frankly ludicrous amounts of real money, and tuck rewards away in chests/packs with random content, but don't feel overly coercive about it all in the grand scheme of things. Most importantly a free player doesn't feel especially disadvantaged. Idle Champions has no competitive aspect so it really doesn't matter what other players are doing; MPQ does have a form of PvP, and PvE rewards based on leaderboards, but in both cases they're primarily dependent on time, so you just need to make peace with never cracking the Top 10 unless you make it your sole life mission.

Progress in Lost in Time is dramatically accelerated by spending money, a very direct connection with leaderboard results in events. It frequently shoves adverts and 'offers' at you, and there isn't much in the way of interesting decisions to take. I can't really see any compelling reason to keep playing, and yet... I have been. Certainly not spending money, and I'm not sure I'll keep going once I find something else, but there's something there. I guess making numbers go up just scratches some sort of itch. 

Here I sit so patiently, waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice

It's been pretty quiet on the gaming front since wrapping up Baldur's Gate 3, back to my regulars for the most part with a dash of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide when I fancy a bit of monster-biffing.

I've taken the opportunity to do a bit more reading. Fancying something in the vein of Joe Abercrombie I found Alex Marshall's Crimson Empire trilogy, starting with A Crown of Cold Silver. With expectations set appropriately (that the moment there's a glimmer of hope for any character it's sure to be dashed in short order) they were most enjoyable. I preferred the more human elements of the series, I found the supernatural horror that creeps in a bit uncomfortable, probably the point, but recommended for anyone whose ideal book involves every chapter soundly disproving D:Ream's 1993 assertion that Things Can Only Get Better.

After those I thought I'd head back to the cosier territory of the Cold War. I'd assembled all 19 of Anthony Price's David Audley series in a haphazard manner from jumble sales and second hand shops, with the gaps filled in by the internet later. It must be a good ten years since I last read them, long enough for the finer details to be hazy, though the broad outlines usually come back to me. The series isn't strictly chronological so it wasn't a major issue not to have read them in order the first time around but it's nice for the cast to develop as the series progresses. I'm just over halfway through and very much looking forward to the rest.

Gate won't close, railings froze

When asked why people should try Baldur's Gate 3, Neil "Astarion" Newbon said something like it was the closest you could get to playing pencil and paper Dungeons and Dragons on a computer. Of course we've had plenty of computerised D&D going back to the Gold Box games of the late 80s that I cut my teeth on: Curse of the Azure Bonds in the four glorious colours of CGA, isn't it? Wasn't it? Four 5.25" disks, swapping them around every time you entered combat for goalposts... BG3 really accentuates its tabletop origins, putting the D20 front and centre (literally, for some skill checks). I don't know if there's a carefully calibrated level of distancing, if anyone's tried a CRPG where you start in a first-person view walking up to a table, sitting down, and filling out a paper sheet of stats before the screen dissolves into graphical character creation. Maybe they did but Brecht said "guys, tone down the alienation a bit" in play testing. Anyway, BG3 has a nice balance, the narrator/DM complementing the visuals to set the scene and stat/skill checks being flagged up in conversations or popping up on screen as they happen. Those dice checks can be a little frustrating; oddly I mind it less if there's an obvious impact on the game, like failing a charisma check meaning you can't talk your way out of a fight, that seems fair enough and you can always reload the game if you're absolutely desperate to follow that path. It's the little things like missing out on a bit of extra information from a failed knowledge check that don't seem to add much. At least in a pencil and paper campaign a set of hilariously bad rolls can lead to some fun roleplaying opportunities if the DM and players are on board ("Team Oblivious don't recognise the markings on the stone. In fact they're pretty hazy about the concept of 'markings' at all, and while Geoff is reasonably certain he's seen a stone before the rest of you aren't convinced...") That's a pretty minor quibble, though.

Combat is (as far as I've read) a good representation of the 5th edition rules, I haven't kept up with things since 3rd edition and it took a little while to get used to bonus actions, class and item abilities and the like. As well as being rusty on the ruleset I'd grown accustomed to games easing you in with an hour or two of ineffectual minions barely able to dent your health bar ("Oh I'm sorry, I'd just gone to make coffee, I didn't realise you were attacking me. Would it help if I said 'ow!' a bit?") An early encounter quickly reminded me how squishy low-level D&D characters are; spotting a couple of thuggish types I casually ambled over and half my party were down within a couple of turns, previously unseen archers in elevated positions proving most unsporting. 

Being purely turn based, rather than real time with pause like the first two Baldur's Gate games, combat can be a time-consuming affair which presumably accounts for the lack of ineffectual minions. The game doesn't constantly throw 'trash mobs' at you, few encounters are trivial, though things got considerably easier as I got the hang of positioning and movement (the leap action: not just for jumpy puzzles) and environmental interactions (like water/lightning or grease/fire). Increased familiarity with the rules also allowed for a bit of character tweaking after accepting recommended choices for a while, though I didn't go full munchkin (I should've probably added a few levels of Fighter to my Rogue for optimal dual-crossbow plinking).

If a straight fight is proving tough there are usually other ways to approach things, sometimes obvious (load up on silencing spells and arrows when facing mages), sometimes a little borderline (carefully positioning your main character to avoid triggering a battle-starting conversation while another member of the party artfully places explosive barrels amongst a not-yet-hostile crowd). That's the beauty of a single player (or co-operative hosted) game, you can either adjust the difficulty setting or be as 'cheesy' as you feel comfortable with (more irregular verbs: I am tactically innovative, you are cheesy, they are a dirty exploiter). 

The interface can be a little finicky at times when trying to get a good view of a particular area or select a specific item, and the AI pathfinding can't be relied on for delicate manoeuvres. If I forget to un-group the party and start cautiously picking my way through some caves the other three get into a quick huddle: "Right, this is a very dangerous environment, we'll need to be on top of our game here. Karlach: you run back into that chamber over there, do a couple of laps of it, come back out, then straight back in again. Gale: trap duty. If it explodes, releases poison gas, or shoots an arrow you're shoving your face into it. Now off you go while I hurl myself off this precipice, almost kill myself with falling damage, and run through every single passageway as I make my way back to Tav pursued by 17 spiders, three umber hulks, and a particularly confused Darkspawn who tunnelled in from a nearby franchise. Go, go, go!"  Overall, though, it's all done very well and feels like a pencil and paper game without 'gamified' elements - no gathering 100 of a particular resource to upgrade a thing to allow me to refine 100 of a different resource into another thing. That can be fine when integrated well, I love making numbers go up as much as the next person, but can be counterproductive when trying to tell a story - looking at Bioware the path from Mass Effect 3 to Dragon Age: Inquisition to Mass Effect: Andromeda to Anthem wasn't exactly a glorious triumph (to the point I had to check Google as I couldn't remember Anthem's name). Fingers crossed for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Anyway, BG3 has a really sound foundation to tell its story. Or stories. There's a lot packed in.

The combination of the writing, direction, performance capture, and visuals are truly remarkable. The main quest is a good backbone, it pushes you on but gives plenty of space for the rest of the world, from little vignettes you might stumble across to your companions stories, probably the heart of the game and what really sets it apart. Of course there've been great companions in other RPGs but I can't think of a better set than the origin characters of BG3. Some are immediately likeable (I was hopelessly smitten with Karlach from the first meeting), others a little standoffish or actively hostile, but they all have layers and depths as you spend time with them. Hearing the developers and actors talk about the process has been fascinating, the main cast really seem to be passionate about the game (or are good enough actors to come across like they are). That's not a prerequisite for a fine performance, Alec Guinness in Star Wars perhaps being the exemplar, but you'd imagine it makes a difference, even if only subconsciously. A stream of the cast playing pencil and paper is lot of fun, also showing the strengths and weaknesses of computer vs tabletop. A good human DM can improvise and adapt, give context and flavour to dice rolls, and gently nudge players without removing their agency but, even if he do the police in different voices, can hardly rival 200+ human actors for the NPCs (unless they have (hello to) Jason Isaacs and JK Simmons on speed dial). Even the smallest encounters in BG3 can surprise you with NPC performances.

Six seems like a sensible number of primary companions, especially with a party limit of four. Games with 12+ companions like Mass Effect 2 and Midnight Suns (especially with DLC) felt over-stuffed; you didn't have to recruit everyone or spend time with them but when there were in-game benefits for doing so I always felt compelled. The option to fully respec every member of the BG3 party is fantastic and means you don't have to include or exclude anyone just for their role; I had the Rogue side of things covered so Astarion had to sit tight at camp ("a travesty, dahling!") until I was confident enough to respec him. After finding a bunch of robes and items boosting unarmed combat I turned him into a Monk, and blimey the lad couldn't half stun opponents. The attention to detail, each cast member recording themselves casting spells for all the classes, is most impressive. There are others you can recruit as you go through the game but I felt it gave enough space to follow everyone's story, or at least one version of that story, without excessive diversion or bogging down into a rut.

Act 3 did feel a little over-stuffed compared to the first two and perhaps could have done with a little more direction; one particular quest sounded like it was building up to a grand confrontation so I'd been carefully avoiding that and skirting my way around the city, but it turned out to be a more minor step that I'd skipped. Fair play to the writers, though, everything still worked in the order I did it, even if a couple of bits didn't quite make as much sense as they might have done. I can only imagine the flowcharts needed to keep track of all the possibilities, especially being able to play as your own character, any of the six Origins, or the Dark Urge. I might well go for another run in the future, once I've given it a little time to digest. All in all it's been quite the ride and I very much look forward to seeing what Larian might do next, and if someone else picks up the Baldur's Gate franchise hopefully they can do something equally interesting. Bravo!