Sorry, But I'm Going To Have To See Some I.D.

So, what about that Discord then, eh? Age verification? Not likely, matey!

Except, why? Or, rather, why not, exactly? Because we don't trust them with our data?

But who do we trust? Who hasn't had a "breach"? We give this stuff out and it gets stolen or sold all the time. 

I used to have an app (Well, it was before we called them "apps" so I guess it was a program or maybe just a service.) that was supposed to tell me every time one of my many, many email addresses turned up in some Dark Web fire sale. It was a bit of a concern back then, which must have been a decade ago. Haven't thought about it for years. Certainly haven't had any updates in as long as I can remember. Of course, they might be going to one of those email addresses I never look at any more...

It's not just the security, though, is it? It's the principle. Who are these people to question whether we're old enough to be looking at adult stuff? Why do they get to be the gatekeepers of our maturity? It's the thin line at the end of the wedge. Or the thick end. The something end of something, anyway.

It's not like it used to be, that's the point. And how it used to be was better, wasn't it?  Back when the internet was the the internet. When there were no rules except all those rules we made for ourselves and yelled about (Not in CAPS of course, never in ALL CAPS!) whenever we saw anyone not doing things the way they were supposed to.

People knew their place then. Or, rather, most people didn't even know the internet was a place. It was all 14.4kb dial-up modems and we were happy! Then in came the Worldwide Web and there went the neighborhood.

I may have got some or indeed all of that wrong. I was there but not there. I certainly wasn't paying attention. I was an incomer to the just-born web in the very early '90s but not a digital native. I strongly suspect some of the people making a big to-do about the good old days were barely born when I arrived in about 1992. A lot of the nostalgia seems to come from a decade later by when the digital fields had already been marked out for redevelopment.

Getting back to Discord and its plan to enforce age verification on all users, except for the users it already can somehow just tell are old enough, although no-one's saying exactly how just yet; if it's not incompetence or the breaking of tradition we're worried about, is it some basic objection to the concept? Should the internet at large be free from mundane concerns like who exactly uses it? Ought it to be a free-for-all where, as the old New Yorker joke has it, "nobody knows your a dog"?

I guess not or we wouldn't all be making such a fuss all the goddam time about Roblox and X and all the other reprobates messing with our kids. We love to give them a hard time about it, don't we? Only it's a bit different when someone tries to do something.

Except, is it? I seem to hear a virtual round of applause every time another government or court passes a law restricting the sale of lockboxes. All that EU legislation concerning digital safety seems to get a lot of praise. Well, some of it does. It depends.

Only it's a bit different when the lawyers and policemen come around peering over our fences into our walled gardens, apparently. It's all well and good for there to be restrictions on who can do what so long as they don't get in the way of those of us who know what we're doing, humming along, minding our own business. Nothing to see here. Move along please, thank you very much.

It's all a bit fuzzy, too, because it's Discord. Do we even like Discord?  I mean, we all use it. It's the default now, isn't it? We pretty much have to. But do we want to?

There's a sentiment I've seen that says if Discord thinks it's so special, can do anything it likes and we'll all just have to put up with it, Discord just might have another think coming. Elon thought he could do what he liked with Twitter and look how that worked out! Watch out, Discord! Don't push your luck!

How did that work out for Elon, come to think of it? Didn't he sack 90% of the staff and rebrand the whole thing so the value of what he'd bought vanished overnight? And didn't everyone say the whole thing would fall apart and no-one would be able to fix it because everyone who knew how had been sacked? Wasn't Twitter finished?

Except X is still going and I keep seeing links to it in my news feeds every day just like I used to see links to Twitter. And while there are alternatives, have any of them replaced X/Twitter in the big world outside the tech-insider niche? Doesn't feel like it.

Are we going to have to go through that whole "Alternatives to Discord" phase like we did with Twitter, until eventually one winner emerges, proud possessor of a fairly distant second place to Discord itself, as it carries on as if nothing much happened? Does anyone care enough about Discord to bother?

I belong to... wait, let me count them... thirty-three Discord channels. In a good month I look at two of them. Blaugust, in which I link my posts here and TAGN, where I check what's up with the Fantasy Critic League. Very occasionally I visit one of the others to check some specific gaming announcement I've heard about through other channels but that doesn't happen often.

According to MassivelyOP, Discord has reassured everyone that 

"For most adults, age verification won’t be required, as Discord’s age inference model uses account information such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord communities."

In other words, if you've been acting like a dog for a while they'll assume you are a dog. And anyway, as some wag in the comments puts it, if you don't live in the EU or the UK, where there are enforceable laws about this sort of thing, you might just find you're an adult automatically, no matter what you've been up to until now.

If you don't pass that test, which is probably being administered by an AI agent, I just bet, you get marked down as a teen. What does that mean?   

Well, it means you can't join age-restricted servers, talk in some audio channels and you might get some filters applied whether you want them or not. None of which is going to affect me since I have never once considered joining an age-restricted Discord channel (Nor, until this all blew up, knew such a thing existed...), never speak in voice chat and generally switch on every filter I can see as soon as I join any new service. 

Oh, that's nice, isn't it? Doesn't affect you personally so you're fine with it. Very socially conscious. Bloody solipsists. You're only one step up from narcissists, you lot.

Yes, fine, okay, sure. Only I am kind of in favor of age restrictions on the internet, by and large. I mean, I'm in favor of them offline. Aren't you? Don't you think there should be some age limit on when you can drive a car or join the army or get married or vote? And don't you think you ought to have to be able to prove you are the age you say you are before you can do any of those things?

Maybe you don't. Maybe you're that much of a libertarian or an anarchist you think the only rule ought to be no rules. 

Probably not. Some of the people I've seen complaining about this seem to have quite firm views on other kinds of rules and restrictions. There are all sorts of things they think people shouldn't be allowed to do or say. They just seem to think rules ought to apply differently on the internet, particularly for people who, you know, belong there.

That does tick me off a little. I removed someone's blog from my RSS feed yesterday after reading a rant about age verification. It was the repeated use of the pejorative "normies" that did it.  I'd be very happy to have a filter that caught offensive slurs like that.

I hope this doesn't come over as a rant in the same way. All those rhetorical questions are a rhetorical device (Is that ironic?) designed to dilute the rage. I'm pretty sure there are bigger things to worry about than whether you have to send Discord a selfie. Is it really worth getting worked up over?

I'm not that bothered about it either way. It certainly doesn't feel like any kind of hill to die on. Discord is just an app. If people don't like the terms of use they can just stop using it. I'd guess for most people having "teen" filters would make next to no difference anyway. Or maybe I underestimate how much people swear in Discord channels.

Personally, I propose to do absolutely nothing about it. I'll just carry on as I am. If all the fuss hadn't kicked off I very much doubt I'd even have known anything had happened. 

What I do think, though, is that maybe there should be some requirement for all internet users to prove their age at a much more basic, fundamental stage than through individual apps. Something akin to a driving license, perhaps, that could be incorporated into the education system and verified in a much more practical way. In person. 

Why the internet should get a pass on it, when so many other aspects of life don't, beats me. 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the header image, produced at NightCafe using QwenImage SD. The prompt, taken directly from the text, was "Discord and its plan to enforce age verification on all users." To this I added the further instruction "1980s computer gaming magazine cover illustration. Full color, line art." 

Because I keep forgetting to stop it, NightCafe always throws my prompt to an AI to re-write it in a lot more detail. The full version it used was "1980s computer gaming magazine cover illustration of Discord characters debating age verification. Full color, line art style. Vivid colors with a dramatic, cinematic lighting setup. Emphasize retro sci-fi aesthetic, with glowing neon accents and geometric shapes, in the style of Syd Mead and Moebius. ..." I really need to remember to stop it doing that. 

I can't say I can see the Moebius influence and I don't actually know who Syd Mead is, although the name rings a bell. Looking him up, I probably should have known who he was. 

Out of curiosity, I ran the original prompt through the same model again but with the AI "Prompt Magic" that expands on the prompt switched off. That got me the image above, which appears exactly as it was generated. It looks like I cropped it, badly, but I didn't. 

Looks like I either need to keep Prompt Magic switched on or write longer, more detailed prompts. 

 

Coming Soon To A Screen Near You...

This wasn't going to be a post about Baldur's Gate 3. It was going to be a more general grab-bag of media stuff. That's not quite how it turned out.

I'm still playing BG3, although I haven't actually played any video games at all for nearly three days, which is something of a peace-time record for me. I won't bother with the details of why I haven't been playing, most of which relate to work, illness and responsibilities, but the plain fact is, I haven't had the time, the energy or the inclination to log in these last few days.

Before that, though, and since the last time I posted about BG3, I was playing a lot. The main plot progresses even though I'm not particularly trying to push through it. It turns out in Act III just about everything circles back to the central narrative, even when it looks like it won't.

There have been some very significant battles, some of which turned out to be a whole lot easier than I was expecting, something for which much of the credit goes to two years of accrued experience as recorded on the internet. I haven't specifically been following walkthroughs but I have been skimming guides and wikis to see if there are things I should know or ought to avoid. It makes a big difference.

So does running through the opening couple of turns of a big fight to see exactly who the enemies are and what they can do, saving as I go, then going back to the beginning and altering my tactics accordingly. It absolutely is cheating but it's a lot more fun than taking two hours to do a huge fight properly and then losing. If I do it that way, I have to redo it anyway so how is that any purer?

The fight that most surprised me was the one with Orin. I really, really hate Orin. She's utterly obnoxious, with no charm or wit or any kind of mitigating factor to dilute her sheer unpleasantness. I'd been very keen to kill her for a while so when I finally found her lair I was looking forward to getting into it with her...

...and then she turned into some bat-winged monstrosity with what looked like complete invulnerability to everything I could throw at her. I had a few experimental tries, stopping as soon as it was obvious my team was going to be obliterated, then I decided it was completely hopeless and gave up. 

I went to do something else instead because even at this late stage there's always something else to do. Only I was still wondering how the heck anyone was supposed to beat an opponent who has seven layers of invulnerability that refresh every turn. It seemed very unfair. 

So I went and looked it up and it turns out it's not because she doesn't. 

What she has is invulnerability to seven attacks per turn and every strike of a multiple-part attack strips one of the layers. I'm still not sure if that's clear from the in-game description but it makes one hell of a difference. All you really need to do is have someone blast her with a low-level spell like Magic Missile that comes in six or seven bursts for one cast and then she's vulnerable to everything else that hits her.

Which in my case was Lae'zel, hasted, standing next to her and battering her with a Silver Sword. Orin literally didn't get a single action before she was dead. It was extremely satisfying. 

It would have been nice if all her little minions dropped dead of shock but of course they didn't. It took a good long time to clear the rest of them up but none of my party died so I count that as a clean win. 

Unfortunately, I chose both to loot Orin's corpse and release the captive prisoner the moment she died, then save in case something bad happened. Then the fight went on for a while and after it was all over I couldn't figure out what had happened to the hostage so that meant more googling.

I found her eventually and spoke to her.  I've rescued so many people now, I forget where she was. Most of the people I save aren't where they're supposed to be by the time I want to talk to them. I'm used to it now.

I hadn't even been sure who the victim was. Every one of the accounts of the fight I've read talk about the hostage being one of your Companions, someone who could have joined your party, had you not left them languishing back at camp. 

All my companions were still twiddling their thumbs by the fire. The only one that was missing was the little girl with the cat, another waif I rescued at some point and offered sanctuary. 

She'd been hanging out with Withers, the leather-faced not-a-mummy who does all the resurrections. They seemed like an unlikely couple but they looked like they were getting on pretty well so I left them to it until one day the kid just vanished. I asked Withers where she'd gone and he said something about how she'd found out I knew her parents were dead and lied about it so she didn't want anything more to do with me, which seemed fair enough. I mean, I was going to tell her but the time never seemed right.

Well, it turns out he was wrong and in fact Orin had crept into the camp, killed the cat and kidnapped the girl. If I didn't already have good reason to hate her... (Also, Orin did at one point impersonate the girl and tell me a horrific tale about Orin making her eat her cat before I saw through her little ruse but then Orin does that sort of thing a lot and I never take much notice.)

Anyway, it seems all is good between my character and the girl... what is her name? Yenna! That's it. She's back at the camp now, cooking soup for all of us. She seems pretty untraumatized, considering. In my head-cannon she's going to adopt the dog, Scratch, who I picked up right at the start and who lives in the camp and they'll be best buddies now the cat's gone.

So that was one fight. There have been a whole bunch of others. One very satisfying one was the top floor of the fireworks factory, which I did almost completely from the outside, lobbing fireballs through the open window and watching the entire stock of fireworks explode and kill half the people inside before the rest made it out the door, where we picked them off from the tower opposite.

I've worked out that in many cases the best tactic is to start the fight from outside a choke point like a doorway and force all the enemies to come to you. The AI and the pathing in BG3 is good but it's far from infallible. Often the enemies can't figure out how to get to you and they never know where their own traps are so they frequently arrive half-dead from their own ordnance. Which is nice.

These are the kinds of games within the game that keep me going now the basic plot has collapsed under its own weight. I think the shark-jumping moment for me was when I found that now I'm supposed to go down below the city to recruit a Brass Dragon to join me in the final battle. That just felt like someone wasn't taking the whole thing seriously any more so why should I?

That's where I am now, anyway. I feel as though it's not impossible I might get to the end although how the last battle is going to work with all the allies I've acquired I can't even imagine. Every turn is going to take about an hour.

Or of course I could just shelve the whole thing and wait for the TV show. HBO has greenlit a series set in Baldur's Gate after the game finishes so presumably there'll be a recap of what happened.

The showrunner is Craig Mazin, the guy behind The Last Of Us, which I haven't seen but which seems to get good notices. No information on when it will be out but I would imagine 2027 at the very earliest.

Luckily for me, long before then I will finally be able to watch HBO legally. Only today I saw the announcement that HBOMax is launching in the UK next month. About bloody time!

There are a bunch of subscription options, starting with the ad-supported cheapie at £4.99 and going all the way up to Premium at £14.99. I'll probably take the £9.99 Standard package with no ads. I've just dropped my Apple+ sub because neither Mrs Bhagpuss or I was using it so the timing is good. There's plenty on HBO I'd like to see. Or there used to be, anyway. I can't say I've checked for a while.

I'll get on that right now. 

 

There's A Ghost In My House

Should've done a post yesterday. Didn't. Sorry about that. Will happen again.

Not today though because last night I watched the final episode of Haunted Hotel, which means now I can write about it.  I've been looking forward to that even though I'm not sure I have all that much to say.

There's that thing, isn't there, where you find something you really like and you just want to share it with the world? Doesn't have to be anything amazing. I don't want to overamp expectations here. It's just that some things are good and word ought to spread.

Does Haunted Hotel need any help getting the word out, though? That's always a problem these days, knowing if the obscure thing you discovered is actually super-famous already and you were just super out of touch as usual. 

Remember when the zeitgeist really meant something? Those were the days, eh?

Now there's so much of everything and it's all so tucked away in its own tidy little silo it's hard to know what's big any more. Donald Trump never heard of Bad Bunny until the Superbowl thing, or so he says. Trump is easy to mock but it's entirely possible most Americans didn't have a clue who Bad Bunny was before then.

I mean, let's be honest, how many people reading this own anything by Bad Bunny? Or could name one of his songs? I've known roughly who he is for a couple of years but I've never actually listened to him. 

D'you know what? I'm going to fix that right now. Talk among yourselves for a couple of minutes... no, even better, join me...

 NUEVAYol - Bad Bunny

Pretty much what I thought he'd sound like. Not my kind of thing but I'd dance to it, if I still danced, which I don't.

The point is, I'm very much into music and I like to keep as up to date as I can and still I hadn't heard "the biggest musical star in the world" until five minutes ago. So the fact that I hadn't heard of Haunted Hotel until it popped up in my Netflix Recommendations back before Christmas doesn't tell me a whole heck of a lot about whether it's already a big hit and I'm just culturally ignorant or whether I've found a rare gem no-one else much knows about.

There are clues, though. For a start, it was created by one of the writers on Rick and Morty. At this point I should probably clarify that Rick and Morty is another Bad Bunny as far as I'm concerned. I know what it is and approximately how successful it's been but I've never gone so far as to watch an episode. I saw a couple of clips and didn't think much of them so I left it at that.

There's just so much stuff, now, isn't there? It's not like the old days. There was a time when a reasonable person could expect to do more than just know the names of the famous things of the day. We all watched the same TV channels. All the radio stations played the same songs. 

I bet a lot more people would have known who Madonna was in the '80s or the Beatles in the '60s than know who Bad Bunny is now. For a given subset of "people", that is.

Now, there's the issue of globalization to consider. Globalization of culture, specifically. Bad Bunny sings exclusively in Spanish or so I've read. I can't really offer much in the way of experiential evidence to support that assertion, having only heard that one song. It is in Spanish, but one example is hardly conclusive evidence. 

The Beatles did not sing in Spanish. Nor did Madonna. They sang in English which isn't really surprising because the Beatles were English and Madonna is American, where the main language is English, even if some Americans prefer to call it American these days.

Abba, on the other hand, who might be in with a shout as the Beatles or Madonna of the '70s, at least in terms of cultural domination, although I'm never really sure how big they were in America, also sang exclusively in English, even though they were from Sweden. Everyone sang in English unless they were a novelty act or they did if they wanted to be famous outside the hinterland of their own language.

While I'm on the subject of Abba, I'm going to take this opportunity to throw in a great cover of what is probably my favorite Abba song. I might not get another because Abba aren't likely to feature on the blog all that often. 

 The Day Before You Came - Pulp

I don't much like Abba. In their heyday I couldn't stand them but time and a broadening cultural awareness has reduced my dislike to a grudging kind of respect. It hasn't been a Pauline conversion like my Road to Damascus moment with the Carpenters, when I first heard Sonic Youth's cover of Superstar and the scales fell from my eyes. More a slowly dawning understanding that Abba's songs might actually be about something and that the words could be working in opposition to the bland, annoying tunes. 

(Don't you wish Hope and Crosby had made a Road To Damascus movie? Kinda like their version of Life of Brian...)

The Day Before You Came is a catalog song. A list of mundane thoughts and activities that recede into irrelevance as the singer arrives at a turning point in her life. It's an extremely well-written lyric with some perfectly pitched specific examples that raise it way above the generic. How many pop songs reference both Marilyn French and Dallas?

As the NME pointed out in a news item about Pulp covering the number with the BBC Radio Orchestra, it basically is a Pulp song. Certainly, if you knew Jarvis Cocker's oeuvre and had never heard the Abba original, you'd believe it was one of his. 

(That said, it also includes an echo the string riff from David McWilliams' The Days of Pearly Spencer, which could also be a Pulp song. I'd love to hear them cover that.)

Getting back to Bad Bunny, he's famous and successful even among people who have no clue what he's singing about. That might be a new development. It's noticeable that most of the KPop groups sing at least partially in English. American cultural hegemony is clearly on the wane but English is hanging grimly on as the lingua franca for the world. For how much longer, though?

All of which is a very long preamble to what this post is supposed to be about, namely Haunted Hotel. I realize I haven't even explained what Haunted Hotel is yet. Instead I've covered myself just in case I'm explaining something that almost everyone reading this already knows more about than I do. Look, I'm saying, I may be a culturally ignorant peasant but at least I know I am!

Or maybe I'm not. Maybe none of you know any more about Haunted Hotel than I do. Maybe you know less. Maybe I am, indeed, introducing you to the show for the very first time.

Oh, yes, it's a TV show. Did I even make that clear? Probably not. It's an animated sitcom currently showing on Netflix. There's only one season and it's ten episodes long. 

The situation is that Katherine Freeling, thirty-something single mother to two children, a teenage boy called Ben and his younger sister Esther, has inherited a hotel called the Undervale (Presumably a nod to the Overlook...) from her dead brother Nathan. As you probably guessed from the title, the hotel is full of ghosts. Nathan is one of them.

In fact, anyone or anything that dies there comes back as a ghost. A lot of people appear to have breathed their last at the Undervale. 

Oh, and there's one more regular cast member: Abbadon. Abbadon is "an ancient demon who is trapped in the body of a young boy from the 1700s", some of which you may have worked out from his name. I might have done, too, had I not gone the entire season believing his name was Avedon, like the photographer. It was only when I read the Wikipedia page a few minutes ago I realized my error.

Even though Haunted Hotel is built around a family and has children and teenagers in main roles, it's very much an adult comedy, by which I mean it treats the audience as grown-ups and uses adult themes. I'm not sure I'd classify it as a family show although I guess that would depend on your family. 

I'm not going to make any attempt to analyze of even describe the show other than that. I might have, if I hadn't spent all that time on the Bad Bunny stuff. It wouldn't help much, anyway. When does it ever?

What I am going to do is recommend the show unreservedly. I loved it. It's smart, funny, extremely well-paced and frequently heart-warming. All the characters have depth and detail in the writing, something strongly enhanced by both the excellent animation and the first-class voice acting. The jokes land, the plots work and there's a solid sitcom progression arc that means you come out the end of the season feeling both you and the characters know a lot more about each other than at the start.

I'm very happy to be able to tell you the show has already been renewed for a second season, which does suggest it must have been quite successful, even if I hadn't really heard about it. 

If you've already seen it, why didn't you tell me? If you haven't, what's stopping you?

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Just a short update today (Well, I hope...) on how Baldur's Gate 3 is going. It remains both the only thing I'm playing and the thing I'm playing more than anything I've played for a long time but that isn't necessarily a recommendation. Also, why did I keep using "thing" there instead of "game"? I mean, it's not like if I wasn't playing BG3 I'd be playing the zither...

Steam now has me at 121 hours played. I have become a little more lax about leaving the game running when I'm AFK but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't account for more than a couple of hours altogether, so around a hundred and twenty hours seems fair. 

How Long To Beat has just the main story at a weirdly specific seventy-two and a half hours and "Main + Extra" at a hundred and fifteen, so I'm already past that. They have "Completionist" at a hundred and seventy-eight hours, which is still a long way off but my run so far is very, very far from being complete. Every time I change Acts a whole slew of quests get marked as "Completed", by which I think the game means "Unfinishable" and I have by no means found all the possible quests or even all the explorable areas.

What this tells me is that I'm playing the game wrong. Well, I knew that!

It is, in fact, increasingly obvious to me that Act 3 is a totally different game from Acts 1 and 2, not because of anything the developers have done but because the sheer attrition of having already played the equivalent of two, full-length RPGs even by the time I got there means I am no longer treating the experience even as something from the same genre, let alone as a continuation of the same game.

In Act I, I was pretty much invested in the characters and the storyline. I tried to roleplay most choices and avoid fudging the results as much as possible without actually having to restart the entire game. In Act II, I began to feel a lot more like I was playing a video game, where getting the best result was more important than staying true to the character I was playing, but I was still quite strongly involved in the storyline and the plot and I still wanted to keep things moving in a direction that felt honorable or appropriate.

Act III not only doesn't feel like the same game any more, it often doesn't even feel like a game at all. It feels more like a toy. It's full of big, set-piece battles that I find myself doing over and over to see if I can get a better result. And then I don't always even use the save from the good one when I get it! It's more like Kerbal Space Program than an RPG now, where you just keep fiddling with the controls so you can watch stuff blow up. 

The plot is still there, of course, but it's been a while now since I really cared about it. For a start, it's insanely complicated and I can't remember who is supposed to be doing what to or for whom anymore. It's like one of those Batman stories where someone blows a hole in the wall of Arkham Asylum and the entire Rogues Gallery comes boiling out, every one of them with a plot and agenda of their own. 

As far as I can remember, there are three Champions of Bad Gods, one of whom I killed at the end of Act II, plus at least two Devils, a Mindflayer going by the name of The Emperor, a Vampire Lord and a Hag. Then there are at least two Cults with countless members doing murders, a Thieves Guild and a Necromancer cluttering up the storyline and all of the above interact with each other in various ways.

It's ridiculous overkill and it's had the very negative effect of making it almost impossible for me to take any of it remotely seriously. The whole thing has devolved into a series of largely meaningless fights. I wander around the city looking for them and when I find one, it usually takes me all day. 

For a while I was still attempting to play the game properly, by which I mean coherently and in the manner of a table-top campaign, but that all came to an end after I spent literally a whole day - at least eight hours of gameplay - fighting through the very challenging series of encounters in the sub-plot where the PC tries to break into an Archdevil's storage vault in Hell to steal back the contract they foolishly signed.

It was a good day's play. I enjoyed it a lot. My party won a whole series of fights they really should have lost. I came up with some clever tactics and we had some lucky rolls and it all felt pretty good. Only, after every titanic clash, there was always another and there was never any real opportunity to rest and recover. In the end it just got to be too much.

When the final conflict between my team and the Archdevil himself started I knew there was no chance whatsoever we would win, even after Floradelle, who has a frankly insane Persuasion bonus, convinced one of the Devil's lieutenants to switch sides. We did indeed duly lose and the Game Over card came up and at that point it was plain no amount of retries would make the slightest difference.

I thought about it afterwards. In a way you could say it was a whole day wasted because I did end up going back to a save from before we even went to the Hells in the first place. On the other hand, as I said, it was a thoroughly enjoyable, exciting experience as a sequence of tactical battles in its own right. 

I came to the conclusion that it had been worth the time but only once. No way was I going to try it again, so that timeline was effectively null. It also brought down the final curtain on any lingering ideas I might have had about this being a roleplaying game. From then on it's all been about whether the fights are fun and pretty much nothing else. 

If they are, I keep doing them until I either get the result I want or I've had enough. I did the Hag fight about a dozen times yesterday, saving at every decision point in combat and reloading if I didn't like the way it went. 

As well as all the false starts and aborted attempts, I completed the entire thing three times with different outcomes. I killed the Hag but Vanra, who I was trying to rescue, died. That's actually very easy to do. The Hag barely got a spell off. Then I knocked the Hag out and cut Vanra out of her belly, which was harder but still not too difficult. Vanra ran off to safety and I thought I was done but unfortunately the Hag came back to life because I hadn't destroyed all her mushrooms and kept doing it even after I killed her a second time. 

After a reload, I spent ages trying to destroy all the mushrooms first, so the Hag would stay down, then knock her out and cut Vanra loose, and finally kill her while she was unconscious. I spent about four or five hours trying to do it but I could either get all the mushrooms or the Hag down but never both in the same run.

So I gave up. I'd saved after I freed Vanra so I reloaded and just had all my characters run away as soon as the Hag stood up. I got them all out into the city so instant-travel worked again and took them straight to Camp. As far as I'm concerned that's the Hag finished with for good. I hope never to see her again. 

Whether that will be how things turn out, I can't predict, even though I'm now using walkthroughs and guides all the time. I read several versions of how the Vanra quest can turn out but none of them cover my specific way of dealing with the situation so I have no idea if the Hag will come after us or not. I suspect that hasn't been scripted and she'll just hang about in her cellar until the heat death of the universe but I could be wrong. 

The issue isn't whether Larien has foreseen that particular tactical trick and accounted for it. It's that I really don't care. Further back in the game, I would have been concerned about leaving a threat like Auntie Ethel out there to make someone else's life a misery. To roleplay the character I'd created, I'd have felt obligated to Do Something About It.

Now I don't. It's not a real story any more, just a bunch of fights strung together. The whole thing has effectively collapsed under its own weight. Gravity has done it for gravitas.

None of which makes it a bad game. I'm still playing it. I'm still having fun. It's just that now it's the kind of fun you have when you line up all your toy soldiers and make them fight, not fun like watching a movie or reading a book.

Going back to how long it's taking me, obviously re-doing a lot of the fights multiple times is adding to the count but even without that it does seem to me that I must be taking a lot longer than expected to get through this thing. I'm not aware of taking it slowly but I do open just about every crate and that takes a while. I also find it very hard to follow the maps so I am frequently lost. I wish you could click on the map and just go there, like you could in the first two Baldur's Gates. I bet there's a mod for that but it's a bit late to go looking for one now.

It's almost certain I won't finish BG3. The fights are starting to become too difficult for me; too much going on and too many extremely tough opponents in quick succession. I can only assume the game will build up to a climactic battle at the end and I cannot imagine that fight being one I could win. 

I vaguely remember the first two games having a similar difficulty arc. By the end of BG1, which I did finish, I had a tactic that consisted almost entirely of summoning huge numbers of Monsters using the Monster Summoning line of spells and just swarming the bosses. Those spells don't seem to exist in BG3 so that's no longer an option, sadly. I can't remember how, or even if, I finished BG2. 

I could turn the difficulty down, of course. I'm playing on whatever the Default is but there's a Story Mode below that. And again I imagine there are mods that would make things easier. 

But I don't care enough to do any of that. Mike of The Works of Egan has a long post up about not finishing games and I have to say I think it's a healthy way to look at it. If it stops being fun, stop doing it. I probably wouldn't be so blase about giving up on a movie or a novel but the time investment involved there is literally orders of magnitude less, or it is with this game. 

I am also quite looking forward to stopping just so I can play something else. There's an annoyingly addictive element to the tactical combat that losing interest in the reason the fights are happening doesn't seem to quell. I imagine I'll eventually hit the point where even the fights aren't fun any more but annoyingly I don't seem to be quite there yet. 

Whether this will be the last time I write about Baldur's Gate 3 is another question. I imagine I'll at least want to give some kind of summing-up when I finally log out for the last time. Or maybe this post will be my final word on the subject.

I guess we'll find out. 

Ashes To Ashes

A very unexpected development in the MMORPG sphere yesterday was the news that Steven Sharif, founder and CEO of Intrepid Games, developers of Ashes of Creation, had resigned from his own company. He issued a statement on Discord to say that "control of the company had shifted away" from him and "the Board began directing actions" he "could not ethically agree with or carry out", which seemed to mean making mass lay-offs to his team of two-hundred plus, with some reports suggesting every single employee had been let-go, meaning the company was done.

This generated a lengthy comment thread on MassivelyOP that made much of previous statements from Sharif in which he seemed to be saying he had no Board and answered to no-one but himself. A number of supposedly informed people attempted to clarify that with various legal and administrative interpretations but the general consensus seemed to be that whatever the official set-up, the people pulling the strings must be investors to whom substantial ownership of the company would have devolved in previous funding rounds.

I guess the exact definition doesn't make an awful lot of difference. The point is, Steven Sharif, who began the whole Ashes of Creation project and at least partially funded it out of his own pocket, has now had enough. His vision has not been realized and he no longer has the capacity to veto changes in direction he disapproves of, so he's walking away. 

He isn't taking his ball with him, though. Everyone seems to be treating this as the end for Ashes of Creation but there hasn't, as yet, been a closure announcement, let alone a sunset date. The game is up and running as I type this, with over three thousand people playing. I guess if they have really sacked the entire workforce, the servers won't be up for long...

Three thousand players is three times as many as there are playing Project: Gorgon, which we're all looking at as a success. The big difference, of course, is that Steven Sharif had a couple of hundred people on staff before the layoffs while P:G's Eric Heimburg had maybe a couple of people helping him, part-time. 

The two games, together with other recent, high-profile examples like New World and Ship of Heroes, suggest a few minimum requirements for a new MMORPG, such as don't spend more money than you have and make a game that works. New World spent a lot of Amazon's money and took a very long time to get it working, by when it was too deep in the red and far too late. Ship of Heroes seems to have at least tried to live within its means but at the all-important expense of making a game that worked, let alone one anyone wanted to play.

Ashes of Creation kind of worked although not at anything like the level it was always supposed to. At a nuts-and-bolts level it functioned well enough but many of the tent-pole systems on which the game was sold weren't even in the build that went into Early Access on Steam. Crucially, to get it even that far took a very large crew. The possibility of getting it the rest of way appears not to have been considered financially sustainable by the people who'd have been spending the money.

Project: Gorgon, on the other hand, began with a playable build and kept a very enjoyably-playable version of the game up and running for the entirety of the development process. Only the minimum number of people were ever employed to keep development going and only small amounts of money were ever raised and then only for specific, hypothecated purposes. 

As a result of the way development was handled, those thousand concurrent players may well represent a sufficient number to keep the game running and to allow development to continue, as it always must in a live MMORPG. Paying more than a couple of hundred people every month to do the same for Ashes of Creation never seemed like it was going to work.

What does all of this say about the MMORPG genre as a whole? 

Throw in a couple of other examples like Pantheon and Monsters and Memories, too, and what it looks like to me is that, as far as traditional, Western MMORPGs are concerned, the days of glory are long, long gone. Success now has to be judged by how well a  team can define a project and then pitch it to a very specific audience. The idea that you can build it and they will come, a philosophy that saw the creation of a whole slew of games in the post World of Warcraft era, has no tenancy any more, if indeed it ever did.

It's hard to claim interest in MMORPGs has dissipated entirely. Lots of very successful, mass-market games either claim to be - or do their best to pretend not to be - part of the genre. There's a huge difference, though, between what currently passes for an MMORPG and what any of the games I've named in this post so far are - or were - trying to do.

One of the biggest problems for all MMORPGs and especially for those whose funding is not as reliable as it could be is the extraordinary length of time it takes to get from the first excitable announcements to something that passes for a finished game. Development time is a problem throughout the Western gaming industry, not just for MMORPGs, with numerous single-player sequels occupying the time and resources of whole studios for five, six, seven or even more years but MMORPGs somehow manage to double even that. In either case, if the game that comes out flops, that's usually it for the studio. 

Ashes of Creation, often described as a Western version of Black Desert Online or ArcheAge, has been in development for a decade. Back in 2016, BDO was just a year old and AA only a couple of years older. A home-grown take on those then-popular games, made more culturally appealing to a Western audience, must have seemed like a decent bet. One that might have paid off had the game released in 2017 or 2018.

Unfortunately, AoC didn't even go into Early Access until a few weeks ago, by which time ArcheAge had completed its entire life-cycle and closed down. BDO is still up and running with over twenty thousand players logged in through Steam as I write but no-one is talking about it any more, let alone suggesting it should be the model for a new game. It's joined the great parade of legacy MMORPGs that trundle on, unnoticed, played by their hardcore fans and no-one else.

What happens to most would-be new MMORPGs is that they take so long to develop, by the time they're ready to play they already look long out of date. If you're making a retro game that's supposed to look old-fashioned, like Pantheon or M&M, that's fine, so long as you make a good job of it and market effectively to the right niche audience, but if you're trying to push your way to the top table and claim your hundreds of thousands, if not millions of players, you'd better have something that doesn't look (Or play.) like it should have come out ten or twenty years ago.

And even then it almost certainly won't work. New World looked fresh and had the buzz to pull in millions and it still failed. Partly that was because the team behind it kept making mistakes but in my opinion it was mostly because traditional MMORPGs have outlived their time. I suspect even a really good one would fail to hold the kind of audience the first two waves managed with ease. The gameplay just isn't fun any more for most players.

The genre was infamously built on the psychology of the Skinner Box and dopamine hits. One of EverQuest's nicknames was EverCrack. There were countless jokes and insults built around the addictiveness of the games and serious concern expressed by health-care professionals and even governments about the deleterious effect playing MMORPGs was having on the health of young people.

No-one talks about that any more. MMO addiction seems to be a thing of the past, at least as far as the media is concerned. And gamers have entirely different ways of getting their thrills in this era of action gaming and Souls-Likes. What gamers, these days, are devoting tens of thousands of hours to the same game just to get those increasingly infrequent dings and drops? 

Probably only a small subset of the same demographic that was obsessively doing it fifteen to twenty-five years ago, I'd guess. They and very few others. To be successful these days, MMORPGs have to cater for bite-size sessions and casual involvement. Players today think a hundred hours is a huge investment of time. In an MMORPG, a hundred hours is nothing!

If you can't get the players, you can't carry on with the game. With a staff of more than two hundred to support, how many players would Ashes of Creation have needed to continue? I have no idea but I'd bet it would be more than the tens of thousands they had. A lot more. Estimates for WoW's team generally run at around five hundred. WoW may not have as many players as it once had but it's safe to say it still has millions. It can afford that level of investment in people. AoC could not.

Steven Sharif may not like it but Intrepid was clearly living beyond its means. The chances of development continuing at the required level to make the game he imagined a decade ago a reality must have looked very slim indeed by the end. And even if it had been possible, would it ever have attracted enough people not just to try it out of curiosity but to stick with it for years?

It looks as if we'll never know for sure. All the news items I've seen assume the servers will now close although, as I said earlier, they're still up today. 

To take a more optimistic view, Ashes of Creation does at least exist in a playable form. It would certainly take a lot fewer developers to keep it running and gradually add to it over time. It won't be the game it was meant to be but it would be a game and it might even be a game some people would want to play. 

Maybe it does have some kind of future. Just not the one we were promised. 

Yesterday Project: Gorgon, Today Project Genie

 

The release of Google's Project Genie has generated a certain amount of attention, almost all of it revolving around the apparent lack of concern expressed by the tech giant for the basic concepts of intellectual property rights and copyright. The news items I've seen so far all focus on how famously defensive IP owners like Nintendo and Disney are likely to react to an app that supposedly lets anyone clone and iterate on their copyrighted properties for the low, low price of $124.99 a month.

According to IGN, some investors are already marking down stocks in other game-making platforms like Unity and Roblox, presumably on the basis that their day is done and in some bright future we'll all be our own game-makers. Or something.

All of which is twaddle, obviously. As all the reports make clear, Project Genie can't make games. It can't even make frameworks for games. Neither can it make virtual worlds. 

What it can do is generate a sixty-second interactable snippet, a fuzzy glimpse into a notional, imaginary, three-dimensional environment that has neither persistence nor purpose. It's a curiosity that would probably help a few idle hours pass happily enough, a bit like making paper planes and throwing them out the window or having a tea-party with your stuffed toys. 

Personally, I wouldn't pay $124.99 a month for the privilege but if it was on Steam for less than $10 I might give it a go. I imagine it'd be quite amusing to play, with for a while.

Of course, that's ignoring the legal issues. As I said, the first thing everyone seems to have tried to do is replicate their favorite video game, mostly with very limited success. 

Even if the results are useless in any practical sense, though, it's hard to imagine the companies currently milking those IPs for every last cent feeling particularly sanguine about letting unlimited, bad versions loose into the community. There's such a thing as tainting the brand, after all.

Let's imagine the famous characters aren't up for grabs. You can't make your version of Mario or Sonic. You have to stick to an original idea of your own. Is anyone but you going to be interested?

One day it may indeed be possible for you or I to type a couple of paragraphs in plain English into an AI app and get a finished game out the other end. I'm close to the end of a book called Supremacy by Parmy Olson on the development of AI and if there's one thing that comes through very clearly it's that the software consistently outruns the expectations of the people behind it. One day you're crowing about some really not very impressive development you've just made and the next thing you know is someone else has jumped ahead a couple of orders of magnitude, leaving your seven-day wonder looking like yesterday's news.

If that does happen with the game-making AI, though, it's unlikely Project Genie will be the name on the box. Everything in AI seems to move forward in a weird, leapfrogging dance. Whoever starts something rarely gets to finish it. 

Even if it does become possible to generate fully functional virtual worlds from plain English text prompts, the history of gaming doesn't entirely suggest that would wipe out everything else. Roblox is an outlier. A very, very big outlier, true, but an outlier all the same. There's clearly a sizeable market for making your own video games and selling them to other gamers and Roblox has mostly cornered it.

 For as long as I've been gaming, which is getting on for fifty years now, there have always been game-making programs that purported to allow gamers with imagination but little or no technical skill to create and sell their own games and those have always been niche.

In the 1980s I wrote text adventures with  a utility called The Quill. Lots of people did, then saved them on cassette and sold them through the back pages of gaming magazines. In the '90s I made a full-length RPG scenario with Neverwinter Nights and uploaded it to one of the dedicated, online repositories along with many thousands of others, where it probably remains to this day.

I've dabbled with many other game-making packages, none of which required anything less than a huge amount of time and effort to create anything recognizably game-like. There have even been programs to make your own MMORPG, none of which seems to have resulted in any MMORPG I ever heard of. And of course there are the semi-pro, cut-down versions of the real thing, like Unity or Unreal, that you can buy into for an almost not unreasonable investment.

If anyone with some minimal degree of skill and a very much larger amount of time and enthusiasm wanted to make a "playable world", they have and have had for a very long time, the means to do so. The appeal of AI is that soon no-one will need any appreciable skill or time to make a really impressive video game. It'd be nice to think you'd still need the enthusiasm but honestly that's probably optional too.

Except I'm not sure all that many people really want to. Imagine for a moment a scenario where Project Genie actually works. Imagine you could type in a brief description of the sort of virtual world you'd like to see, the kind of characters and plot you'd want to engage with and the general gameplay you'd enjoy there. How about...

Setting: A High Renaissance setting in which the industrial revolution happened a couple of hundred years early. Some Steampunk trappings but not too many. The game is set in a small city-state with a coastal border and some mountains, a lot of forest. Low magic, some werewolves and vampires, grudgingly integrated in the cities, not tolerated in country areas. 

Plot: The high king is ageing. He has no obvious successor. He wants to leave a legacy so he makes covert moves to back a potential candidate who wishes to improve the status of the non-humans in the state. This is potentially popular with the urban elite but could cause rebellion in the countryside. 

Gameplay: RPG mechanics with hierarchical magic and skill development. Dropped gear. Turn-based combat.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Took me less than ten minutes, straight off the top of my head. Imagine if I could drop that into an app, go make a coffee, then come back and download a complete game.

It'd be fun once. Just like writing a game with the Quill and NWN was fun, once. I even enjoyed playing through my own games. Again, just once. 

Did I send off for anyone else's self-written Quill games, though? No, I did not. I didn't even download any of the myriad, free NWN adventures. Maybe a couple, just to have a look. But even then I never played them for more than a few minutes.

What about Second Life? All the games people made there? Did those take over the market? Not hardly.

And even the supposedly ubiquitous Roblox hasn't exactly wiped every other game off the screens, has it? Sure, a lot of people, kids mostly, play it but is it all they play and do they mostly play it because it's what they have access to and what they can afford? Like Runequest, famously the first MMORPG of so many people when they didn't have the money or the technology for anything more impressive, are these games really successful because of how good they are or how accessible and available?

It's really hard to be sure. If AI output was demonstrably not slop but really top quality, indistinguishable from very good human-made work and you could generate whatever you wanted on the fly - books, movies, games - would most people move over to it? I'm not sure they would. 

I think they'd still need to be marketed to. I think there'd need to be a buzz. People like to watch, read, play things lots of other people are playing, so they can talk about them, argue about them, share the experience. At that point, it might not matter that the product was AI-generated but it would still very much matter that it was high-profile and being talked about, out there in the media.

If it was something no-one but the person watching or playing it would ever hear about, I suspect the potential audience would be somewhat limited. I think there's certainly a demographic that'd be happy to sit at home, alone, playing reading and watching the insides of their heads acted out by imaginary characters but, like VR, I just don't see it becoming normative, mainstream behavior.

In the end, I suspect that even were AI ever to reach the point where it can produce high-quality entertainment with almost no human input, it's still going to be only a certain, very small percentage of that work that gets the attention of a human audience. And it won't be for it's AI qualities but for the human-to-human interactions it facilitates.

In other words, we may all end up playing AI-generated games but we'll still be playing the same ones or else we won't be able to talk about them. And more importantly, no-one will be able to sell them to us.

Persistence Pays Off - Project:Gorgon Goes Live At Last!

Hey! I played another game! For nearly an hour! And really enjoyed it, too. It had that true, old school MMORPG dopamine-drip grip, the one where you want to keep moving from mob to mob just to see what they drop and to watch your skills tick up.

It was Project:Gorgon, of course. The long-running project of Eric Heimburg and the now sadly-deceased Sandra Powers finally went Live yesterday. It's a game that hoovers up all the bits that worked in all those Golden Age classics and throws them altogether in a kind of MMORPG gumbo that somehow tastes really good. That's not just my opinion, it's what everyone was saying, albeit without the culinary metaphors, in General Chat, which for a change was mostly polite and amicable.

Everyone was going on (And on...)  about the games they used to play, back in the day, and how much P:G felt like all of them. It reminded people of Vanilla WoW, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call (1 and 2), EverQuest (1 and 2), Anarchy Online... I imagine there were more but the chatter was so distracting I had to turn it off so I could concentrate on what I was doing.

What I was doing was mostly wandering around, opening the map, raising skills and killing mobs. I could have worked on some quests - I've played Project: Gorgon before (There are two dozen posts about it on the blog, the earliest dating back to 2013. ) and I had some pending - but I just wanted to relax. Questing involves too much thinking. 

Slaughtering mobs doesn't. Neither does raising skills. That's one of the joys of P:G, at least in the early stages. There are a whole lot of skills and doing almost anything is likely to raise at least one of them. What good that does is another matter but it's always fun just to see the numbers go up.

Happily for me, I was also playing a character for whom the mobs in the meadows around Serbule, the starting city, posed little threat but still gave good xp. Well, until I made the mistake of attacking two Mantises, that is. Not the first time I've made that mistake, either.

Before any of that, though, I had to remake my character for looks. There are new character models and character creation options and they're a huge improvement. Here's what my character looked like before and after:

Okay, not exactly a fair comparison but I promise Rarrfa didn't look any better in the original with her helmet off. She looks great in the new version, though, doesn't she? I was really happy with how she converted.

The whole game looks better although graphics have always been very weird in Project: Gorgon. As I believe you can still see from the 2013 post linked above, the game has never looked quite as visually impressive as it did in the pre-alpha demo, when the buildings, at least, were almost photo-realistic.

The current version is excellent all the same. Or at least it is once you get into the Settings and tweak the details. I thought the whole thing looked a bit ropy when I got in so I opened the controls to see what I was on and it turned out the game had defaulted to "Poor".

It says something about Eric's approach to marketing that there even is a setting called "Poor". Most designers would avoid using negative concepts like that, preferring to call the low graphics option something like "High Performance". 

I was pretty sure that if my PC could happily run Baldur's Gate 3 on decent settings it could do a lot better than "Poor" for P:G but I was curious to see what the game itself would choose. There's an option to auto-adjust the quality level so I checked the box and was instantly upgraded to... Fair.

Seriously? You think that's the best I can manage? I toyed with the idea of banging it all the way up to Ultra or whatever and then bringing it down when I ran into problems but in the end I just wanted to get on with the killing so I left it on auto, which uses frame-rate to decide on the graphical fidelity.

And it has to be said, the game looked pretty good, although that might have been because of the other visual setting I toggled - Brighter World. I thoroughly recommend switching that on. It makes a huge difference. In the day it can be a bit garish so maybe just put the lights on when the sun goes down although if you like a super-saturated, almost psychedelic filter, you might want to keep it on all the time.

Once I'd sorted that out and also set a key for hiding the UI (Why that's not a standard preset in all games beats me...) I was off on my killing spree.

I killed a lot of Brain Bugs and various spiders. I killed some pigs and a wolf. A tiger attacked me so I killed that, too. Most of them dropped something and sometimes it was actual gear. That's so old school, getting your armor and weapons off the local wildlife.

I butchered all of them for the skill-ups and botched most of the butchering. Then I buried the results which increased my Compassion. What good a high Compassion skill does you, I have no idea but I'm sure a high one is better, somehow.

As I wandered about from mob to mob I noticed I was also getting skill-ups in Cartography. The map was slowly filling itself in as I went but not in those big chunks you usually see with Fog-of-War systems, just a thin line where I'd been traveling. It looks like it would take an awfully long time to uncover an entire map that way but I still much prefer it to, for example the Stars Reach method of finding and activating specific points, which turns into a very frustrating scavenger hunt after a while.

After about half an hour, I ended up at the graveyard, where several players were fighting with the undead. I sent a few skeletons back to their unquiet rest before making my terminal error of pulling a couple of lurking Mantises.

When I revived back in Serbule I thought I'd take that as a good moment to stop, so I did. You need something like that as an exit line in Project:Gorgon because, like all the games it echoes, there's no end to anything. You log in and do stuff until you don't want to any more and then, if you have the will-power, you stop. And if you don't you carry on until you're entire life falls apart and you rage-quit and spend the next two years bad-mouthing the game on every forum you can find. Or at least that was the traditional response, back when there were forums....

If anyone's looking for a good, old-fashioned MMORPG that also recognizes times have changed since the Golden Age, there's no need to look any further. Project:Gorgon does everything everyone keeps saying MMOPRPGs don't do any more. Apparently that's still not enough to get a thousand people online playing it at the same time but what more people are waiting for, I can't imagine.

If it's the closest thing to EverQuest in 1999 you're looking for, I'd still recommend Monsters & Memories but if you want something less specific and with potentially broader appeal, you probably can't do much better than give Project: Gorgon a few hundred hours of your valuable time. 

Or a few thousand. It is an traditional MMORPG, after all.