If In Doubt, Run Like Hell or How To Say No And Get Away With It

Who's up for another round of "Yesterday In Baldur's Gate"? No-one? Tough! It's all I've got.

My played time now stands at a terrifying fifty-five hours, of which I very much doubt even as much as an hour was idle time. It also appears that I'm still in "Act 1" which, if true, and if the acts were all to be of roughly equal length, would suggest a final running length of somewhere around a hundred and fifty hours.  

I'm guessing what it means is either that I'm spending a huge proportion of my time doing things I probably don't need to be doing, or that the three acts are not of equal length. Possibly both. 

How Long To Beat has a "Completionist" run coming in at 179 hours, with a brisk trot through just the main storyline taking a little less than half that long. They also show something called "Main + Extra" at 115 hours although what that means, exactly, is anyone's guess.

Is this a good thing? Should a single video game take up that much of anyone's time? It certainly isn't necessary to take that long for a game to feel like something special. I completed Disco Elysium in forty hours and that felt like a major event. Broken Sword 5 lasted sixteen hours and Cloudpunk, which I found very absorbing, took me just eleven hours. Quality over quantity, I guess, although I suppose it's a bit rich to balk at both together.

Games eat each other, though. Since I started playing BG3, I've put in far more hours than I'd been used to doing for months, if not years, but I've also played nothing else. Regular readers may remember I was quite happily trundling along in EverQuest II, with vague plans of taking several characters through the new expansion over the rest of the winter. Well, that's not happening.

Of course, EQII will still be there when I finish Baldur's Gate 3. Probably. We hope. If anything's going on there now that I ought to know about, though, I'm missing it. 

I'm not completely wrapped up in Faerun. I got an email from Artix about a giveaway in AdventureQuest 3D that was tempting enough to get me to log in, even though I really don't play that game much at the best of times. When someone offers to give you a bunch of cash shop money just for logging in, though, it's rude to ignore them. 

But that only took five minutes. Other than that, it's been BG3, all day, every day. It's compelling but also confusing, which is quite a strong combo for me. I do like not really knowing what's going on in a game.

Take that three-act structure for a start. I'm not sure it exists, formally, inside the game but it's referenced everywhere outside it and I have clearly misunderstood how it works until very recently. I was sure there was a hard transition between the "Mountain" zone and the "Wilderness" and I think there probably is but the transition evidently isn't where I thought it was.

I've spent a very great deal of time in the area in and around the Githyanki Creche and the semi-ruined temple where it's hidden. I thought that was in Act 2 but it's not. I thought it was on the other side of the mountain pass, too, but it's not that, either. And I thought it was going to be the end of my game but it turned out I was mistaken. Bloody close call, though!

As I almost always do in RPGs that let you form a party as you go along, I'm sticking with the first characters I  met. I know you're supposed to swap them in and out but I almost never do that. I stay loyal to the ones I've got, even if they're useless. I only really drop someone if I find them too offensive in some way to put up with.

My team has been Gale the Wizard, Lae'zel the Fighter and Shadowheart the Cleric from the start. I have a bunch of would-be companions in camp but they never get to come adventuring with me. I'm comfortable with the team I've got.

It's almost mutual. I like all three of my team and two of them like me. Shadowheart isn't so sure, mostly because I friend-zoned her. Twice.

That bit at the start of the game, where you can toggle off Sex and Violence, doesn't go far enough in my opinion. I was hoping it would mean no shenanigans in camp but my character has been propositioned several times, which is not my idea of an adventure.And I'm not having any of it. So to speak.

A refusal often offends, as the oh-so-witty sign in too many gift shops likes to warn us, but luckily a firm "No" doesn't seem to have offended Shadowheart enough to make her pack her hammer and leave. In a way it wouldn't be so bad if she did because she's certainly the weak link in the squad. I though clerics were supposed to be good at healing but she seems more like a trained first-aider than a battlefield medic. She also can't hit the side of a barn door with that hammer...

I like her, though. And I like Gale. But I like Lae'zel best of all, which is why, when we found ourselves unexpectedly embroiled in a long sub-plot involving her opportunity to Do The Right Thing by her Queen-Goddess, I backed her all the way. Another reason for Shadowheart to take against me, now I come to think of it.

Anyway, I cheered Lae'zel on while the crazy doctor tried to get the tadpole out with her organic crab machine and we broke it, which led to a fight that did not go well for the doctor. Then I backed Lae'zel in her obviously doomed but very proper attempt to tell the Creche Boss the doctor had been a wrong 'un and that's why we killed her. He didn't buy it so we had to kill him, too. 

Well, we were in it up to our necks by then. The others would have made a run for it but no, I stuck by Lae'zel, when she thought the Inquisitor was bound to understand. Clue is in the name, I'd have thought, but I agreed to give it a try and to give Lea'zel credit, he did listen. 

He wanted the Artefact that was keeping us all alive and which is something super-important to Shadowheart for... reasons... so I gave it to him. 

Hmm. I'm beginning to see why Shadowheart's going off me now...

He called the Queen, who made us an offer we couldn't refuse. Well, we could have but she'd have killed us. 

Of course, she was always going to kill us anyway, that was obvious, but you try to spin it out, don't you? I kept backing every play Lae'zel made, right up to the very end, when we got sent into the Planes to kill the Mysterious Presence who's been saving us every so often and instead of fighting back, she bared her neck and said we could kill her if that's what we wanted and that finally turned out to be the line I wouldn't cross, even for Lae'zel (Who also wanted to sleep with me, by the way, but who took my refusal a lot better than Shadowheart.).

We went back to the Creche and told the Queen. She was Not Happy. She told the Inquisitor and his gang to kill us and then vanished. At this point none of us had many spells left and we were all quite badly injured so, obviously, I thought that was it. 

Except it wasn't. By the simple expedient of using every speed-increasing option available and running like hell, I managed to get far enough back into the main part of the Creche for Instant Travel to start working again, then I ported back to camp. 

Just me. Everyone else was dead.

I was considering whether to load an earlier save or just recruit a whole new team, when I remembered that leather-faced ghoul who hangs around at the back of the camp. Didn't he say something about bringing my people back from the dead, for a fee?

Yes he did and it wasn't even a lot. 600 gold and he rezzed all three of them in the camp and it was like the whole thing had never happened. The script made a vague attempt at dealing with the anomaly but it wasn't convincing. It wasn't until we all went back the next day, at full health, and killed the Inquisitor like the script assumed we'd already done that the dialog started making sense again.

Then, since we were there anyway, we cleared out the entire Creche and looted everything. That took a while. Lae'zel, who seems to be an absolute mistress of self-deception, somehow squared all of that with her upbringing and religion and now she loves me more than ever. Even Shadowheart is willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, since we still have the Artefact and no-one stayed dead.

And now, as far as I can tell, we really have done everything there is to do in Act I, or at least everything any of us cares much about, so after I post this we'll be going through the Real Mountain Pass and into the Real Act 2. Probably. 

I imagine things will only get more confusing from there.

Patty And The Hag

I'm just going to keep throwing it out there that I have a lot going on right now, one way and another, so posts here may be more sporadic than usual and definitely shorter. I really don't like missing a posting day, though, so in that spirit, here's a makeshift follow-up to recent commentaries.

First, Baldur's Gate 3. I've clocked up 45 hours so far, all of it in Act I. I finally moved on to the Mountains, which I think is Act II, although they don't seem to use that term in the game, so maybe it's still Act I. 

Anyway, I went to the zone line to see if the warning about finding it "bitterly difficult" had gone, which  it had. There was just the notification that once you leave you can't come back. I didn't really have much left that I thought I ought to do. Make an Adamantine weapon, I guess, but I wasn't keen on hunting for the mithril, so I went through the one-way door.

Of course, it's only one-way if I don't reload the save I made right before I crossed. In the Mountains I've done one fight so far and had one long conversation. Nothing I couldn't do over. So maybe I'll go back to the Forge after all. I probably should go look up how important having one of those weapons is later on. 

That would be cheating but what else have I been doing since the start? Is there any limit on how many times you can save the game? I must be closing in on three figures by now.

[Edit: I must have misread that warning. It seems like it's not a one-way trip after all. I came to another transition that went to a "Goblin Camp" and it turned out to be the same one as before.]

The last thing I did before moving on from the Wilderness was deal with Auntie Ethel, the elderly eye-fancier. Getting to her was a whole hell of a lot harder than killing her, that's for sure. I was always going to kill her, obviously. I've read Prince Caspian often enough not to be fooled by a Hag.

What with that and going along that upper walkway in Grymforge earlier, most of today has been spend disarming traps. It was fun in a puzzle game sort of way but it wouldn't have been if I hadn't saved and reloaded every time the pathing made one of my characters walk over something I specifically wanted them to avoid. BG3 has really bad pathing, even when you un-group the party and move them all separately.

I was expecting the Hag fight to be tougher than it was but I imagine it was meant for a group a little lower than my lot, all closing in on Level 6. I had to do it twice to save Marinya because the first time the cursed pathing took me the wrong way to the control device and I was too late to stop her plunging to her death. The second fight was a bit tougher because I made sure to get Marinya out of the cage first but it was still pretty straightforward.

As for the extremely annoying Nere, the Dark Elf True Soul, who seemed determined to start a fight no matter what I said to him, I spent so long trying to come up with a way to get him out of his predicament without letting him start a war afterwards, he ended up dying of that poison gas before I made up my mind. It's his own damn fault.

What happened was, I camped and came back to find him dead on the floor and the entire Duergar occupation force gone, presumably back to wherever they came from. I have to say it made exploring the rest of the area a lot more fun.  I could open all the boxes without starting a fight and it was great not having to listen to the astonishingly unpleasant conversations of those vile tunnel dwarves. If I ever play this game again I'll be sure not to talk to any of them before I kill them.

So much for BG3. The other update I want to give is on the RetroTV app I was talking about a couple of days ago. I said then that I wasn't sure if it included full shows or only clips but I can now confirm there are indeed some complete episodes in the mix. 

At least, I know there's a full episode of The Patty Duke Show because I watched it last night. I was watching a channel in the 1960s section, 1964 in fact, and after a couple of tunes by Freddie and the Dreamers and The Dave Clarke Five, up it came.

Without that, I doubt there's much chance I'd ever have watched an episode of a black and white sitcom from more than sixty years ago starring someone I'd barely even heard of. Or any British Invasion Beat Groups, either for that matter. Whether that's a point in the app's favor I'm not entirely sure.

There were two reasons I watched the whole thing. The first was to see if it really was going to run to the end but the main reason was the plot, which was bizarre to to the point of absurdity.

Here's my precis from memory:

Patty, who appears to be about fourteen, comes home from school, full of talk about the American Labor Movement, which she's been studying in class. She starts her own union for children, the membership of which is her, her brother (Maybe 11 years old?) and her "identical cousin" Cathy, who inexplicably lives with them and is also played by Patty Duke. 

The rest of the show involves negotiations between the children, as unionists, and Patty's parents, who represent management. There's lots of talk about fringe benefits and rights and how being in a union is so very American. They keep name-checking someone I didn't recognize, who appears to be the founder of the Labor Movement.

There's much to-ing and fro-ing, with the children making demands and taking votes and both sides hammering out a compromise, only for neither side to feel happy with the result. The children withdraw their labor (Notably, the word "Strike" is never mentioned.), the parents form a union of their own, there's some marching  and placard-waving and eventually both sides agree the whole thing was a bad idea. They each take a vote to disband their unions, carried unanimously, and everything returns to the status quo as it was at the start of the program.

I got the distinct impression the writers - and the network - wanted to get through the whole thing without offending any unionists or managers who might be sitting at home watching. Why they thought it was a suitable topic for a sitcom about a teenage girl's home-life in the first place is the real puzzle, though.

I looked it up after and the episode, Patty The Organizer, is Episode 4, Season 2. I've embedded it above if you want to watch it for yourself. It looks like the entire run of The Patty Duke Show is on YouTube, so if you get the taste for it, there's plenty more.

I think I'll be happy with that one episode but it does stand as a great example of the way the RetroTV app can introduce you to things you would never otherwise have known about. It's like having YouTube on shuffle.

Which, come to think of it, is something Google really ought to think about doing.  

A Ghost Of A Chance - Is Sony Trying To Buck The AI Trend?

If you follow any gaming media at all, you've almost certainly heard about Sony's AI assistant, Ghost. I remember reading about something similar last year, when Microsoft was talking up its AI companions. I don't know how far along that project is now but Sony has just taken out a patent and the story's all over the gaming press. I got my heads-up from GamesIndustry but it's on Kotaku, IGN, Eurogamer, TechRadar...

It's a curious development in many ways. Any mention of AI still brings gamers out in hordes, waving their pitchforks and flaming torches, so it's relatively unusual to see any development in the field being received with anything less than complete revulsion. Reaction to this has been at least a little more nuanced.

According to Sony's press release, Ghost will provide "real-time assistance to a player that is encountering some difficulty with a specific scenario of gameplay" by "analyz(ing) a player's game state data to identify the scenario they are trying to progress through." Having figured out how to do whatever it is you weren't able to do from its intensive pre-training on Twitch streams and YouTube videos, Ghost would then "provide the player with visual illustrations of how certain game scenarios are played in order for the character controlled by the player to be able to achieve progress in the game."

This is being presented by Sony as a much more sophisticated and versatile alternative to what many players have been doing for years, namely looking stuff up on the web, reading guides, following walk-throughs, watching other players on video or livestream and then trying to copy whatever it is that works. 

Put that way, it seems eminently reasonable. I've been making the point, repeatedly, not just in my recent posts about Baldur's Gate 3, that an awful lot of games just aren't as much fun without some kind of online spoilers. Having the same information available inside the game without having to tab out or look at a second screen seems like it might be less intrusive and disruptive to gameplay.

Certainly , that's how Sony seem to be selling it. Underselling it, really. All of the linked articles use some form of Sony's formula "assistance during gameplay of a video game." Assistance is such an inoffensive word, isn't it? You'd feel like a jerk, complaining about someone else receiving assistance when they were having problems, wouldn't you? I mean, no-one wants to be the "git gud" guy in this scenario, do they?

I imagine Sony would like to avoid the kind of backlash that faces every company admitting to seeing value in AI. By presenting such an nonthreatening option, they presumably hope to get a partial pass. The gaming press seems, by and large, to be going along with the narrative.

The NME, not being a gaming journal as such, takes a somewhat more populist view. Their headline doesn't mention "assistance" at all, going instead with the much more click-worthy "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." 

Which made me wonder, would that be such a bad thing?

Let's take one example: Wuthering Waves. I really like Wuthering Waves. It has a strong storyline and memorable characters. I'd like to keep up to date with it. 

And yet somehow I can't seem to manage it. I've caught up twice but in both cases it took so much out of me I immediately fell behind again and now I'm so far adrift I doubt I'll ever have the motivation to try again.

I've been thinking about just watching the story on YouTube, where I'm sure I'll be able to find both full playthroughs and cut scenes edited to make full movies. Alternatively, I could do what millions of people do and watch someone else play the game on Twitch.

If there was an AI assistant as capable as NME imagines Ghost to be, though, I could log into the game, set it running and sit back to watch my own character play the game. Of the various options - play the game myself, have an AI play it for me, watch recorded highlights or watch another player - I'd put having an AI play my character second out of the four in terms of involvement and immersion.

Playing BG3, I can also think of other ways AI might improve the experience without inducing the player to resort to online guides or videos. When I was running around the Goblin Camp for hours looking for those damn Warg Pits and getting nothing but vague, unhelpful responses from any goblin I asked, it would have made a huge difference if there had been a conversation option that would have triggered an AI-assisted search and generated an in-character response from whatever NPC I was speaking to. 

What's more, if any of those responses turned out to be hallucinatory, that in itself would just be entirely in keeping with the quality of information you'd expect to get from asking a random goblin for directions! It's a win-win for the AI and the role-playing player.

The ironic thing about the current knee-jerk opposition to the use of AI in games is that before this kind of AI existed, the accepted view for as long as I've been gaming had always been that one day we'd have this amazing technology that would let all the NPCs talk like real people, react to our characters in convincing and realistic ways and generally make games feel like they weren't games at all. Remember StoryBricks and all those unfulfilled promises? 

And now here we are, looking down the barrel of the future we all said we wanted and now we all agree it wasn't what we wanted at all. Are we quite sure about that? If a game appeared that did everything AI promises to do but managed to do it without using AI, would we object to that in the same way? Or are we just cutting off our own noses in an entirely understandable but self-defeating attempt to spite the billionaires' faces? 

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Two illustrations because what else was I going to use? Both done at NightCafe. 

The header image is by the ever-annoyingly-named HiDream |1 Fast from the prompt "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." 1970s Comic book panel art. Default settings. The original has three speech bubbles, two of which were gibberish. I removed those at SnapEdit but otherwise changed nothing. 

The second image is by Google Imagen 4.0 Fast from the prompt "I was running around the Goblin Camp for hours looking for those damn Warg Pits and getting nothing but vague, unhelpful responses from any goblin I asked" 1970s Comic book panel art. 

In this case, the gibberish speech bubbles actually make sense. Well, they don't... they're gibberish... but goblin speech is traditionally rendered like that and it fits the context, so I left it in. 

It's worth noting that NightCafe calls on AI to expand on all prompts of fewer than sixty words. It's on by default but you can toggle it off, which I seldom remember to do. The full prompts, as gussied up by some AI or other, probably Gemini or ChatGPT I'm assuming, are as follows:

Image 1: A 1970s comic book panel depicting a retro-futuristic robotic avatar playing a PlayStation video game, with thought bubbles above the robot and a PlayStation console. The robot has a determined expression as it manipulates a joystick. Text reads "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." Vibrant, slightly desaturated colors, bold linework, and dynamic action lines in the style of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.. 

Image 2: "A determined adventurer, clad in worn leather armor, navigates a chaotic Goblin Camp under a hazy, ochre sky. The adventurer is actively searching, with a slight frown of frustration. Vague, speech bubble-like glyphs emanate from bewildered goblins, conveying unhelpful responses. The art style is a 1970s comic book panel, with bold, thick linework, a limited, earthy color palette, and a slightly gritty texture. Inspired by the dynamic compositions and character designs of Jack Kirby and Bernie Wrightson. Dramatic lighting casts deep shadows, enhancing the sense of urgency and the grimy atmosphere." 

I really do need to remember to switch that AI assistance off, given how I go out of my way never to use named artists in the prompts. Maybe you can have too much AI assistance after all... 

Also, that second panel looks more like Wally Wood to me, although if you imagined Kirby inked by Wrightson...and the tails on the speech bubbles are all pointing the wrong way...

 

I Got My MTV

Can't blame Baldur's Gate this time, even if I did play for a couple of hours this morning. Many demands on my time from much less entertaining sources mean there may be fewer posts - or shorter posts - here for a while. Still, shorter posts have been a dream of mine for years now so it's an ill wind that blows nobody's hat off or whatever the expression is.

In lieu of a proper post, I'm going to take a moment to share a couple of curious time-wasters I discovered yesterday. That could refer to the... shall we call them apps? Not sure. Websites? Could be. Or maybe it's a somewhat uncharitable description of the people who created them.

Very unfair, that would be. Time well spent, I'd say. It's we who watch the results who will be wasting our time. [Oh just get on with it! - The Audience] 

Very well then. I shall. Here's the first.

This one came to me by way of the NME and so far they're the only media outlet I follow to have reported on it, which is unusual. Firstly, because NME, Stereogum and Pitchfork reliably cover the same stories, day in, day out, and secondly because if it didn't happen in Britain, NME is almost always a day late telling anyone about it.

They were ahead of the pack on this one, although it may be that no-one else thought it worth mentioning. The story, for the click-averse, is that "someone on Reddit" decided to respond to MTV's decision to stop showing any music videos at all by recreating MTV as it used to be when music videos were all it showed.

The "someone" is in fact a redditor going by ShillyLou. Why NME declined to credit them by name is unclear.  ShillyLou's account is currently suspended but only, I believe, because the sudden huge interest it attracted triggered reddit's bot alarm.

The actual website - I'm going with that - is called MTV REWIND and it lets you select any decade from the seventies to when MTV pulled the plug this year. It plays music videos with some period commercials thrown in for flavor. Currently there are over 30,000 videos and ten channels to choose from.

There was some concern shown in the reddit thread for the future of the project. People assumed it would quickly get shut down by MTV's IP owner,  Paramount. That seems a lot less likely when you learn that the entire thing is powered via YouTube's API, meaning every song that plays is an embedded YouTube video. I spent some time researching the legalities when I began featuring music videos here. As far as I understand it, if you follow YT's official procedure, they have all the rights nailed down already, so Paramount will most likely have to put up with it.

With that in mind, I look forward to many hours of quality period entertainment, entirely ad and subscription free. ShillyLou isn't taking money for ads and YouTube's own embedding process excludes theirs. 

I recommend it even if you never watched MTV. I only ever watched it in the 'eighties. I wish I'd watched it more, now it's gone. It's like radio with pictures!

The other, somewhat similar project I ran across while I was reading the reddit thread is My Retro TVs. This one offers six decades (50s to 2000s.) of (American) television. Everything from news and sport to cartoons and drama. 

Again, it's all drawn from YouTube. I'm not sure if there are any full-length shows in the mix. I watched about half an hour of it last night and it was all trailers, commercials and two or three minute clips, although I did sit through a full-length Heckle and Jeckle. They never were very funny, were they?

I'm not a big one for nostalgia for its own sake but for me, not having a great deal of familiarity with a lot of the very specifically US Network TV content, it feels more like some kind of art installation. It's weirdly compelling.  

Last and not least but also not quite the same thing, I'm subbed to a very odd YouTube channel, astryuuna, which commenters keep describing as "how YouTube used to be". It's all too easy to forget that YouTube did indeed used to be the playground for mavericks, tricksters and the techno avant garde. Maybe it can be again. These projects prove that it's still possible.

I enjoy all of them, anyway, so I thought I'd pass the pleasure on. If anyone has any similar gems, do feel free to share.  

When Is A Door Not A Door?

Yesterday, I didn't post when I could have, which is very out of character of me. I blame Baldur's Gate 3. Mostly. Also a lot going on in real life but when isn't there?

According to Steam, I've already clocked over 25 hours in the game, which is ridiculous. I only started playing on Saturday! And that's an accurate record, too. I haven't left the client running, while I've been off doing other things. (Although there has been a bit of tabbing out to look stuff up, now and again.)

This is the problem - and I think it is a problem - that I've seen reported a few times; the game can start to consume your life, if you let it. In my case I suspect that effect will be relatively short-lived but it hasn't started to wear off quite yet.

As far as progress goes, I think I've made some but it's really quite hard to tell. My party is about half way through Level 4 and I have managed to wrap up several quests, although some of them don't end where you'd expect so there's more to do. 

This is where I think the experience of playing the game with and without guides and walk-throughs must be very different. Without hints from outside the game, some of the quests would be causing me difficulties because they look as though I could be working on them now, whereas in fact the areas where the next part happens is out of my reach. 

For example, I'd still be looking for Arabella's parents in Act 1 even though they apparently don't turn up until Act 2. I realize this is all good writing and strong narrative structure and all that literary jazz but the artistry doesn't help when you're looking at a quest journal that says the next step is to go talk to them. I'd rather have my surprise at the twist in the tale spoiled than my afternoon wasted wandering around the sodding Druid grove looking for NPCs who aren't there.

In general, I'm not following any sort of guide full time. I'm just drawing on the wisdom of crowds as and when needed. And I'm only reading as much as I need to get over whatever obstacle I'm hung up on. 

Scratch. Best companion of all.

Mainly, what I'm doing is wandering around, sorting out problems for random strangers like a typical MMORPG adventurer. I long ago gave up on trying to do anything about the tadpole in my head, the urgency of which seems curiously absent no matter what dire warnings people keep giving me. I imagine that will sort itself out in time and if not I'm going to have plenty of company. A lot of people seem to have tadpole-in-the-head syndrome.

The main reason I've found myself resorting to online guides hasn't had much to do with the substance of any of the quests, anyway. It's mostly not being able to find the specific people or locations that the quest text suggests shouldn't be anything like as hard to locate as I seem to be finding it.

The prime example so far is the Warg Pits in the Goblin Camp, as I said in my last post and about which I am still clearly rankling. I don't want to keep going on about it but... damn it!  Yes I do. 

My main complaint is that the game seems to make it quite plain they'll be easy to find when they really aren't anything of the kind. Several goblins mention the pits very casually, as though everyone knows where they are, which I imagine everyone does - if they're a goblin. Some of the goblins even give directions which, again, may well be useful - to another goblin. As a player, however, even with clear human-given directions taken from several guides, I still couldn't find the bloody pits.

I did eventually. They're behind two sets of doors, neither of which I thought to open at the first (Or probably fifth.) opportunity. 

The first is a pair of huge wooden doors guarded by an Ogre. I spoke to him very early on and he told me not go through them and anyway what was behind them was boring. I didn't want to argue with him (There was no dialog option so I'd have had to fight him.) Instead, I took him at his word and went looking elsewhere for about an hour until in the end I checked online and found I was supposed to go through those doors after all.

I think we came this way before, guys. I see one of our markers.

What was really galling was the way the Ogre didn't even try to stop me. Why he's even there beats me. He clearly isn't guarding the place. Anyone can just waltz in on a whim. 

Once inside, things don't get any clearer. I spent several hours in the Shattered Sanctum, the cavernous halls behind the doors, looking for those blasted Pits. All I wanted to do was find them but I ended up dealing with the Priestess instead, getting on the wrong side of her and having to fight her and then kill half the goblins in the place just so I could keep on searching. 

And I still couldn't find them. I poked into every corner but no Wargs popped out. I found the big boss and his cronies and had to make a quick exit. I made friends with some spiders (Handily, I had a Potion of Animal Speaking running at the time I bumped into them.) They came in very handy later, when I went back to have another round with the boss goblin. 

Over the course of several hours, I came in and out of the Sanctum a bunch of times, spent a couple of nights in my camp, wandered all over the map some more, then finally went back to the internet for advice because I still could not find the sodding Warg Pits.

Eventually I found something that said there was a door behind the Priestess's throne and that led to the Pits. I'd been past her stupid throne a dozen times and I didn't see any door but I went back for another look and there wasn't any door. There was a gate. A gate is not a door!

I'd seen that gate before. It was locked. I'd had a go at picking the lock but I failed and ihad no reason to waste lockpicks on it so I left it for later. Why would the Warg Pits, which all the goblins know about, be behind a huge, locked, iron gate?

Of course they wouldn't. They'd be out in the open. I mean, where else would you keep Wargs? Anyway, wouldn't pits be holes in the ground? 

Door? Door? That's not a fricken' door!

No, they would not. The "Pits" turned out to be more like "Cells". A couple of locked rooms in a cellar. I eventually found them, after I picked the lock on the gates, successfully this time, and explored the tunnels and corridors behind them, which were labyrinthine and confusing. 

All told, I must have spent easily six hours looking for those pits. And that's with a whole bunch of guides! If I'd carried on without looking it up I'd still be at it now.

This is the problem with open(ish) world games that allow for a lot of freedom, while providing minimal guidance. You can all too easily end up wandering around for a long time, never really getting anywhere. It's fun for a while but then it becomes frustrating and finally infuriating. 

The point at which I find my mood shifting from entertained to irritated seems to arrive earlier all the time. If I'm being honest with myself, as I've said before about both quests in MMORPGs and puzzles in point&click adventure games, I probably get more out of them when I admit defeat and bring up a walk-through. Working puzzles and mysteries out myself is satisfying, sure, but the satisfaction of working out the solution doesn't always compensate for the time spent doing it.

Unfortunately, I still retain a residual sense of commitment to the idea that I "ought" to be doing it the "right" way. I've largely cured myself of that vainglorious fantasy, helped enormously by the realization, at last, that the fundamental credibility of pretty much every RPG is fatally flawed the second you restart from a saved game file. Especially if it's after every character in the party is dead. 

I may have mentioned before that, for me, no narrative continues to hold credence after the first full party wipe. Unless, of course, as in almost all MMORPGs and too few single-player ones, there's a lore-appropriate explanation. I never have the same issues in games that provide even the skimpiest fig-leaf for credibility, the way almost every MMO has to, just to keep the whole thing rolling. 

In single-player RPGs, though, chances are when the last party member bleeds out and there's no-one left to read the Scroll of Revivification, an actual Game Over message will appear. There's no coming back from that. Except of course there is.

Anyone remember to bring the bucket and mop?

The first immersion-breaker came after only a few hours, when I wandered down a perfectly innocuous grassy path to the shore and found myself facing a gang of harpies far beyond my party's ability to handle. In that case, I stopped the fight before it ended because it was only ever going to end one way. 

A good while later I suffered a proper full party wipe when I foolishly believed four heavily armed and armored adults with numerous magical items and abilities would be able to handle a single, sickly tree-frog. That was just embarrassing.

Before that I was taking the whole thing quite seriously as an immersive adventure. Afterwards it became a game I was playing. Hard to maintain a sense of gravitas after a frog's just kicked your party's ass. From then on I not only looked things up when I was stuck, I also saved far more often and didn't hesitate to halt a fight or hit F5 if anything didn't feel right. 

Super-powered tree frogs are one thing but UI issues are entirely another, as are bizarre and unpredictable NPC reactions. One of the biggest problems I have with the game is that I take an action and it turns out the button I pressed doesn't do what I thought it did or the option I chose has a result I feel could not reasonably have been anticipated from the dialog. I consider that to be unfair play by the game, making it perfectly acceptable for me to halt the action and roll back time so I can do it again and do it right.

I'm not suggesting BG3 is particularly bad at this sort of thing, particularly in respect of the dialogs. It's a lot better there than some games I've played. On the other hand, it's not as good at avoiding mismatched actions and outcomes as something like Disco Elysium, which hardly put a foot wrong over the forty hours I played. 

Then again, I seem to remember even that exemplary game didn't entirely convince me back when I was playing it. Maybe I'm just really hard to please. As long as I keep remembering to play the game, not inhabit the world, it's not a problem. It's when I slip into taking the damn things seriously that I feel my blood pressure starting to rise.

As I said last time, it's just a game. And since I'm here, talking about the same issues all over again, I clearly still have some work to do, convincing myself of that simple truth.

Baldur's Gate 3 - It's Just A Game

This is going to be a very brief post for the extremely good reason that I would rather be playing Baldur's Gate 3 than writing about it, which makes it somewhat surprising that I'm not going to be all that complimentary about it. I don't, so far, find it particularly convincing but, like the other Larian games I've played (Which, now I come to think of it, is really only Divinity: Original Sin 2 and some of Divinity: Original Sin.) it certainly is addictive.

BG3 is much more of a Larian game than a Baldur's Gate game. BG1 and 2 seemed, to me, to be about as clearly conceived as a good fantasy novel. BG3 feels a lot more episodic. It doesn't present a cohesive story in anything like the same way its predecessors did but despite the lack of a clear narrative through-line, it has an immediate impact that pulls you in and grabs onto you like it's never going to let go. 

The other Larian games I played did that, too. The trouble with being grabbed and held like that is that it can be an uncomfortably intense experience, not necessarily a pleasant one, especially when it just doesn't stop.

That's one reason I never got to the end of either of their others. I have just over 90 hours played in D:OS2 but I never finished the game. The story wasn't sufficiently compelling that I needed to know how it turned out and I got to a point when it felt like it was never going to stop so I had to stop it myself. Already, I can sense the same forces at play in BG3.

I only started playing on Friday evening but by the end of Saturday I'd logged more than fourteen hours in the game. I pretty much played all day Saturday which, as anyone who's been reading this blog of late would know, is not something I do any more. Except now I do.

You might imagine that after fourteen hours I'd have made some progress. I have not. That's another trademark of a Larian game. I don't believe in the ninety hours I spent with D:OS2 I ever felt like I was getting anywhere. You just keep going, through more scenery and more fights and it's all good fun until it isn't any more and it's time to stop.

The degree to which I'm not getting anywhere with BG3 is exemplified by my quest journal. After fourteen hours, I have twenty-seven quests (Listed under eight separate categories.) of which I have completed three. My gameplay so far has consisted almost entirely of wandering about, talking to people, agreeing to do things and then not doing them.

There's a lot of talking. A lot more, so far, than fighting, although that may be in part because I can't help being nice to everyone, trying to be diplomatic, seeing everyone's side of the story and ducking out if it looks like there's going to be trouble. If my character, a half-elf sorcerer, has a motto it must be "Can't we all just get along?"

Since every last NPC has at least a line of dialog and the world is very fully populated, just getting from one location to another can take a long time. I started off talking to everyone but I've already put a stop to that, just like I'm not opening every box and barrel any more. Many of the people I meet don't have anything much to say that isn't some flavor of flavor and most of the things I pick up I never find a use for, so it seems better to keep myself to myself and travel light.

I don't know if BG3 is technically an "open-world" game but it sure feels like one. I'm not convinced you can get to anywhere you can see but I'm guessing you probably could, if you had the right spells. You can jump over small obstacles so presumably you could leap, fly or clamber over much bigger ones if you had the spell or item that allowed it.

I don't have any of those yet but a lack of suitable magic isn't stopping me clearing the fog of war from the map, something I keep doing, rather than finishing quests, because it's fun. I always enjoy clearing map fog. Has anyone ever made a game where that's all you do? If not, they should.

The main reason I'm not finishing many quests, however, is because I can't. I can't find the right person or the right place or when I find them I can't get them to do what I want. In one case, I got a stern warning I was getting out of my depth, so I turned back. In another, I found out for myself the hard way so I so retraced my steps back to an easier area and did some leveling-up instead.

Yesterday afternoon, I spent about three hours just trying to find The Pits in the Goblin Camp, so I could get on with the several questlines that demanded it but I couldn't find the damn place even with a walk-through and directions. In fact, the walk-through I followed led me into the Underdark instead, which was very much not where I wanted to be. Or maybe it was, but if the Pits were down there, I couldn't see them.

I did find the Goblin Priestess but I couldn't find any way to conclude my business with her in a non-fatal fashion. Killing her was categorically not my plan. What I wanted to do was make friends with her and the rest of the goblins, who seemed a lot more entertaining company than most of the angsty, po-faced paladins and soldiers who were trying to kill them. Unfortunately, although I had plenty of amusing escapades with my would-be goblin pals, it seemed like everything I did eventually ended with a lot of dead goblins so I'm having to give that plan a rethink..

It is often quite hard to tell what is or isn't meant to be possible. The way Larian structures a dialog tree may be as open-ended and amazing as everyone says but it still has some branches missing as far as my experience goes. Or, if you prefer to think of the narrative as a complex tapestry, even at this relatively early stage I'm finding some loose threads in the weave.

For example, while I was wandering around the Goblin Camp, talking to dozens of goblins, ogres and orcs, along with sundry none-too-fussy hired hands, more than one of them mentioned they were holding a Duke, who they'd captured on a raid on an Inn. Granted, no-one mentioned the Duke's name but when I ended up at the smoking ruins of that same inn a while later I got dragooned into a rescue party, breaking down the door to save "The Duke" who was supposedly roasting inside.

No-one wanted to listen to me trying to tell them they were wasting their time because he wasn't there so,  rather than get myself and my party burned in the futile attempt, I withdrew and left them all to it. Later, when I was back at my camp, a couple of my companions berated me for not doing more to help, which seemed a bit rich, given they were there when the goblins told me they had the Duke under lock and key! 

To top it all off, one of the reserve team, the bunch that hang about the camp, hoping to be picked, revealed himself to be the said Duke's estranged son, something he'd been keeping very quiet about up to then. There was no opportunity for me to tell him about his father's true whereabouts. either. I just had to listen to him beat himself up and all I could do was ask leading questions about their relationship, not tell him where the damn Duke actually was.

It may be that this is my misconception. Perhaps there were two Dukes at the Inn. I'll never find out if I can't get to the blasted Pits. I suspect, though, that it's just one more example of why Baldur's Gate 3 is an extremely entertaining game but a very unconvincing and awkward way to tell a story.

[Edit: As soon as I logged in after writing this I left the camp and found myself back at the Inn, where the fire was nearly out and the rescue efforts had ended. I spoke to a guard, who was looking at the marks showing someone had been dragged away, possibly the Duke, and the option came up for me to tell them I knew the Duke had been kidnapped, although it didn't let me say how I knew or who'd told me. The guard just assumed it was now general knowledge. Whether this NPC was there the first time or whether they only appear when the fire has gone out, I could probably tell if I reloaded an earlier save but honestly I'm not that interested. Either way, I can't give the information I have to either the authorities or the Duke's next of kin so it doesn't much seem to matter.]

Although a lot of the publicity revolved around the intricacies of the story and the way the player could take things in almost any direction, I don't recall as much discussion of the mechanics of adventuring in Baldur's Gate 3. There does seem to have been considerable effort expended on filing the rough edges off the usual RPG experience. 

I started by accepting the offer to have any overly sexualized or violent imagery suppressed and chose the default difficulty option, both of which choices indicate a willingness to tailor the whole experience to the taste of the audience rather than sticking to a strict narrative convention. So much for the broader approach. The small details are equally amenable to customization, albeit less overtly so.

To pick one small example, there's the Send To Camp facility that lets you move items from your backpack to a chest in your camp, remotely. I one hundred per cent appreciate and welcome the ability to clear my bags with a few clicks. It's a massive boon for playing the game enjoyably. It's purely presented as a game mechanic, though, with no attempt to embed it into the lore.

Solasta, a rather similar if less celebrated game, came up with a much more lore-appropriate way of handling the practical problem of how to get your heavy loot back home from the dungeon. In that game, there's a guild of scavengers who follow adventurers around, offering to go in once all the monsters have been safely disposed of and bring any remaining loot back to base - for a percentage of the profit. You just sign up with them and then check in with their representatives in towns you visit and pick up your money or the actual items, should you want any of them.

 

That may be a little far-fetched but it's within the bounds of believability. The BG3 solution is pure gaming convenience, as is the whole camping deal, for that matter. In other games where you need to take a night's sleep to rest your health, you have to go to inns or pitch a camp of your own. In BG3, I can go back to my camp at any time, from anywhere, instantly. 

Somehow there's always a camp nearby, even though I never set one up, and I magically appear at it just by clicking a menu option. Then, when I've had a good night's sleep and got all my spells back, I just click another button and I'm back exactly where I was the day before. I'm not for a moment suggesting I don't prefer this to having to walk back to an actual campsite but it very much reminds me every time that I'm playing a game not having an adventure.

What's more, when I meet people along the way who might be useful additions to the party, they always conveniently volunteer to meet me at my camp later, even though I couldn't tell them where it is. And then, even if I never let them join my team, they hang around waiting for their turn and acting as though they're somehow part of the organization. 

Don't these people have lives to get back to? Do they have infinite patience? And why am I the one in charge, anyway? Because I'm The Player and this is A Game, of course. Thee can be no other explanation.

It is possible all of these and many (Many...) other curious or unconvincing foibles will, at length, be explained in lore-appropriate ways. Certainly they could be. Any world that has magic as a part of the natural order is amenable to all kinds of unlikely ways of doing things. I suspect, however, that it won't be the case here. 

I'm not surprised Baldur's Gate 3 is such a popular game. That's because it puts being a game far ahead of anything else. Which is fine. That's why it's so compulsive and appealing to play and also why I'm going to stop writing about it now and go play it instead.

Stranger Things Season 5 - A Rambling Review

I came late to Stranger Things, mostly because I came late to Netflix. The two are symbiotes, of course. You can't have one without the other.

When I did finally get a Netflix account, it wasn't to watch the platform's flagship show. I subbed for The Umbrella Academy but once I was in I started to work my way through all the other shows that interested me. And even then, Stranger Things wasn't all that close to the top of my list.

That was Netflix marketing department's fault. By then, I'd had a certain amount of involuntary exposure to the show through advertising and merchandise and all of it had confirmed a couple of things in my mind: it was some kind of kids' show and it was all about 'eighties nostalgia. If I'd stopped to parse that I might have seen the paradox: kids have no nostalgia for the eighties (They might have anemoia but that doesn't sell subscriptions.) 

I also had the vaguest notion the show had some kind of fantasy or science fiction edge but if I thought about it at all I figured it would be something like a junior version of The X-Files, one of those Monster of the Week kind of deals. And then I watched the first season and it wasn't quite like that at all. 

I just checked my notes to see if what I've written today tallies with what I wrote back when I first mentioned the show here, five years ago. It tracks almost exactly, even to the repetition of the same reference points and analogies. It's reassuring and worrying to see that kind of consistency.

So, here we are, more than a decade after the show began, half a decade after I started watching it. And now it's over. There will be no more. (Probably. Never say never where money's involved. Also the Duffers have said there will be more. Just not more of the same.) 

How did Stranger Things go out? Banging or whimpering?

Hmm. I'm going to say upfront that I loved the final episode. It was two hours long and I don't watch anything that length any more. I was dreading having to sit there for a whole two hours, let alone having to do it with the existential fear of disappointment hanging over me like a fog. 

And then the hours just flew by. I didn't notice time passing at all, until right at the end, when I was hoping there was more of it left than there was. The finale was an unalloyed joy from beginning to end. A triumph.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the whole of the final season. All eight episodes. I even appreciated the odd cadence Netflix chose, split around Christmas and the New Year. It did have the intended effect of making the whole thing feel like an event.

So, what did I like about it? Oh, just liitle things, like how it looked, how it sounded, the dialog, the characters, the action.... 

There were a few things I was less sure about... 

Ah, yes. Reviews always focus on the negatives, don't they? It's what people like to read and what reviewers like to write about. Why shy away from it?

Okay, it's the plot. Everyone knows it's the plot, right? 

I'd need to re-watch to be absolutely certain but my memory tells me the first three season were plotted extremely precisely. Chokingly tight. No holes to be found.

Then there was Season Four, where the threads began to unravel and the holes began to appear. And now, in Season Five, there are more holes than thread and you could drive Murray's truck through some of them. Sideways. 

This is where the inevitable SPOILER WARNING appears. Imagine a siren and flashing lights. 

We'd be here a long, long time if I tried to list all the moments I widened my eyes and mouthed a silently "Really?" A couple stand out, the kidnapping of Derek's family in Episode 3 most notably. Glaringly. Incomprehensibly.

Nothing at all about it makes any sense whatsoever. How it's done. Why it's done. That it's done. But even giving all of that a pass, which would be a loooong Hail Mary, once it's done, the entire farrago is just... forgotten.

Having been drugged, kidnapped, threatened and traumatized, Derek, one of several excellent additions to the ever-growing cast, goes on to play a significant part in the rest of the season. His parents and sister, likewise drugged and kidnapped, along with having their house almost completely destroyed, are literally never heard of again. 

The last I remember seeing of them, they were still tied up and unconscious in a deserted barn, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. None of the cast ever mentions either them or the incident again, other than for a couple of ironic call-backs, when the idea of further kidnappings are vetoed.

Oh, wait... except there's that key plot point a few episodes later, when Derek is dissuaded from backing Holly's attempt to convince the other children of Henry's villainy, by Henry showing him a vision of the his parents and sister lying dead, blood seeping from their eyes.  

Now he cares! Has he spared a thought for them any time since? Has he hell! But then, why should he? Neither has anyone else, most especially not the writers.

It may be there's something I'm forgetting here. Was there a brief explanation I missed, a fleeting scene where the rest of Derek's family are shown, safe and well? Not traumatized at all. Not being interviewed by the authorities about the whole lunatic experience. Remind me of it in the comments, please, if I missed it. I'd like to go back and see it happen.

One thing I definitely didn't miss, because it happens All. The. Time. is the vast number of murders committed by many, perhaps most, of the main cast. How many soldiers do they kill? It seems like it has to be hundreds. Nancy and Hopper alone must have scores of confirmed kills to their names. And no-one cares.

Granted, the soldiers are The Enemy. Well, one of the enemies. Granted, the whole Hawkins/Upside Down deal is a head-fuck. Even so, the complete lack of affect shown by every single character, whenever they shoot or stab or blow someone up is... surprising.

Not as surprising, however, as the complete absence of any consequences whatsoever. If I had to name the single most unbelievable aspect of the entire final season, it would have to be the "18 Months Later" coda, in which the army appears to have completely capitulated, left Hawkins and given everyone a pass for everything that happened, including having killed maybe hundreds of serving members of the U.S. military. 

At no point in the entire history of the show have we seen the slightest sign of compassion from the military-industrial complex that forms the real villain in the show. Okay, alright, there was that part in Season Three (Or was it Four?) with the scientist guy who started it all and Eleven. I'll give them that. But that was one person, one time...

In fact, wasn't the absolute intransigence and indefatigable persistence of the military the specific and only reason Eleven had to make her grand sacrifice? They will never give up. That's what Kali said. Looks like she was wrong about that. Dead wrong, in her case. And Eleven's, unless you believe Mike. (I believe! Yeah, no I don't.)

Also, while I'm on the subject of Kali and Eleven's suicide pact to save the world, what about all those pregnant women? Didn't they all have Kali's blood in them already? Don't the military already have what they need? Eleven's blood would just be insurance. How does her vanishing put a final stop to the whole thing? Barely an inconvenience.

Of course, that all presumes that a) I understand the plot and b) the plot makes sense. I don't believe either of those propositions to be true.

And it doesn't matter. Not one jot. I loved that finale episode and I thoroughly enjoyed all the others leading up to it. The thing about Season Five of Stranger Things is that it's the show finally going full comic-book superhero. And I'm a lifelong superhero comics fan. If there's one thing I do not need to enjoy my superhero comics, it's a plot that makes any sense at all. 

Logic and proportion are two of the things that fall sloppy dead in Season 5. Another is the good old 'eighties. That whole super-accurate recreation of the Decade Taste Forgot (Title to be decided in a cage match with the 1970s.) is barely an after-thought in the last season. How could it be anything else? All the action takes place in either a militarized zone or another dimension. No-one has time for leg-warmers and Tiffany.

Do we miss the eighties vibe? I don't imagine so. I wasn't that keen on it in the first place. For that matter, I wasn't particularly struck by all the endless references to Dungeons and Dragons, either. Those seemed like just another 'eighties trope at the start but by the end there was a whole meta-fictional underpinning going on that threatened to turn the entire show into something completely other and I'm not convinced D&D can carry that weight.

Speaking of, I have another candidate for the most unbelievable thing that happens in the fifth season. It's that final scene, when Holly and her pals storm down into the basement to play D&D and there are more girls than boys. Playing D&D. In the 1980s. Yeah, right...

Anyway, I could go on for another few thousand words, nitpicking the plot. I'm not for one moment suggesting that wouldn't be fun. It's why we watch these things as much as any other reason, isn't it? But it would obscure the main message here, which is that I really liked the final season, in all the ways that matter. It pressed all the right buttons at all the right times. The dopamine hits were very real, especially whenever Nancy pulled that trigger.

I'll finish by mentioning something that kept occurring to me as I watched, especially in the last two episodes. It felt just like the way Buffy went out. That whole thing, where the team keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, until they literally need a bus or a truck just to get everyone to the fights. I loved that in Buffy and if anything I think it works even better here. Cometh the hour, cometh...everyone.

That's the most inspiring part of the narrative. The way so many people just get on board as soon as they understand even a little of what's going on. Hardly anyone questions it. The way everyone has the capacity to be a hero in their own way. 

There was a lot of that in Season 4, especially with Erica and Max, but in Season 5 it seems like anyone can join the gang. It leads to a lot of very unwieldy group scenes but the spiritual message is Anyone Can Be A Slayer. 

Er.. sorry... crossed the streams again, there.

In the end, none of it made sense but I loved it anyway. And you can put that on the posters.