Black Hole Star? Layoffs Hit Playable Worlds

As you may have seen, either on MassivelyOP or TAGN, Raph Koster's Playable Worlds team has just gotten a bit smaller. How much smaller we don't exactly know yet but presumably it's a significant number or they wouldn't have needed to issue a press release confirming the layoffs.

Playable Worlds is, of course, the studio behind Stars Reach. In fact, SR is the only game they have. 

Realistically, they don't really even have Stars Reach yet. It's still in pre-alpha, which sounds really weird now I say it out loud. I had to go check to make sure that was right. It felt like the game had to be at least in full alpha by now, but no, pre-alpha it is. 

Laying people off before you even get to an alpha build does seem like a worrying sign. Hard to spin that as anything other than a crisis. 

Maybe it's not that bad. I don't want to oversell it. It's difficult to know what to say about events like this other than to express sadness and/or concern and wish the departing devs well in their upcoming search for new roles elsewhere. However you rate it, though, it can't be good.

As I've said many times now, I don't think Stars Reach is likely to be a game I'll want to spend a lot of time with. It's just not my kind of thing. I thought for a while it might be but almost every new build made that feel less likely and now we have a fairly clear idea of what the finished game will look like, I'm as sure as I can be, at this very early stage, that I won't be playing any more, other than in a fit of passing curiosity.

Nevertheless, I do think it's one of the more convincing attempts to bring a completely new MMORPG to market we've seen for a while. The team seems to have a relatively well-defined goal and the leadership looks able to retain sufficient focus not to wander off and make something else entirely, something we've seen happen more than a few times in recent years. Just because I don't particularly want to play it myself doesn't mean I wouldn't like to see it do well.

Looking a little further, beyond my own personal preferences and sympathies, there's also the potential impact a failure here could have on the overall market for new MMORPGs. That's always assuming there is a market, something I think could be up for dispute.

People do keep trying. There are a surprising number of MMORPGs in development still, some in Early Access, others in various types of closed testing. Only a tiny handful could make any kind of claim to having a presence outside their own, specific niche, though, and Stars Reach would certainly have aspired  to be one of that few. 

Whether it ever was is another question but the last thing likely to boost its profile in the wider gaming market is news that the development team is being slimmed down before the game even hits alpha. Following the high-profile implosion of Ashes of Creation, it sends the worst kind of signal about how the genre is coping with the broader issues afflicting the entire gaming sector.

Without wishing to sound like a doom-monger, this does strike me as yet more evidence that the MMORPG genre as a whole is in steep decline. I wouldn't say terminal decline because I believe there's a substantial core audience that still prefers the familiar gameplay we've grown used to over the last twenty-five years to the pared-down, sped-up alternatives. 

The problem for anyone hoping to enter the market with a new MMORPG is that the existing, core demographic is, for the most part, at least resigned, if not actively happy, sticking with the games they know. I suspect the more failures there are among the aspirants, the more strongly entrenched the incumbents will become.

 

None of which is to suggest Stars Reach won't be able to buck the trend. Raph is at pains to make it clear that development continues. He's also going to take a more direct role in that development, apparently. (See the two links above for all the relevant quotes - I won't pad things out by repeating them here.) That did surprise me a little. I presumed he was already calling  the shots.

He also talks about recent builds in the pre-alpha having been buggy of late but he doesn't explain how letting people go is likely to improve things. I'd have thought it would get harder to release better-tested, less buggy updates if there were fewer people on the team but what do I know? 

The team wasn't even all that big to begin with, it seems. Here's a quote Marketing Director Rick Reynolds gave to MassivelyOP last August:

"It’s not a big company. There are probably more people in chat right now than we have in the company, or it’s probably pretty close." 

How many devs can they afford to lose? A fair question, perhaps, but unfortunately the real one is how many they can afford to keep.

The reason behind the layoffs is obvious: lack of funds. Raph doesn't go into details but he does talk about a need to be "prudent" in what Playable Worlds spends on developing the game in future. In an ideal world, you'd like to think developers and their accounting departments would be prudent in all circumstances but in the current financial climate I guess it's more of a necessity than an aspiration.

He's bullish about the future of Stars Reach, as you'd expect and as he has to be. Development will continue and there will be no reduction in scope, although some things that have been talked about may take longer to arrive. 

And there's the real nub of the problem. MMORPGs already take a ludicrously long time to build. Stars Reach, as I said, is still in pre-alpha. Other games in the genre have taken five or even ten years to get from there even as far as Early Access, much less a genuine 1.0 launch. Anything that pushes those timescales towards the back end is very likely to see whatever interest there once was wane dramatically.

It is a bit of a Catch22. Pushing development faster costs money that may not be there. Slowing down risks potential customers walking away. Now the funding streams have largely dried up there's no easy way to find the necessary balance between financial security and getting the game finished in good time.

That said, it is possible. We have a shining example in front of us in the form of Project Gorgon. Somehow, a handful of developers and artists managed to steer that one through the rocks and rapids of lengthy development on a shoestring to the safe shore of a genuine Steam launch and a positive reception that saw the game land with a Very Positive rating and enough new players to require extra servers. And that after years in Early Access, too!

I hope Raph and his reduced team are able to pull off something of the kind. If they do, I probably still won't want to play the game but I'll be cheering it on from the sidelines.

Thirteen Songs For Friday 13. Not That There's Anything Spooky About Them. Well, Most Of Them...

Wow! We're seriously overdue for a "What I've Been Listening To..." post. When was the last one? November?! Geez... Dereliction of duty or what?

So, obviously, after all that time I must have a huge backlog of tunes, right? Yeah, not so much, as it turns out. December was all Christmas music and I really didn't listen to a lot of new stuff in January. 

Does anyone? January's never a great month for new music. People tend not to want to punt their best stuff into a dead zone and the post-New Year slump is as dead as it gets.

Still, the cycle is unbroken these days, what with 24/7/365 entertainment media, so there have been a few highlights. And once you get close to February, everything picks up speed again. I think we'll have more than enough to choose from.

Let's get on.

Punk Rocky - A$AP Rocky

That's going to be in my Videos of the Year, I'll tell you right now. It's funny and smart in all the best ways. Winona's Beavis and Butthead tee (Which is actually the Misfits as the boys, or so someone says in the YT comments.) the cop taking a drag behind the squad car, Danny Elfman on drums... I'd say it was Lynchean except Tim Burton's doing the album cover and there's Winona right there so I guess it's Burtonian. Or is that Burtonesque?

Whatever it is, it's great and so is the song. Is that even hip-hop now? Rocky doesn't really deal in genre any more, does he?  I guess that's a good thing.

Venom - COUCOU CHLOE

There's a case to be made for Punk Rocky as some kind of synth-punk variant but you wouldn't want to be the one making it after this just played. 

God's Lonely Man (feat. Iggy Pop) - Anna Calvi 

Now it's glam-synth-punk! Let's ram it all together! Why not?

Anna Calvi is one of those names I kind of recognize without really having any clear idea why or from where. Probably because she's been nominated for the Mercury three times. She has a massive Wikipedia presence that suggests I ought to have heard her long before this but I swear I never did. I'll be rifling through the back catalog now, for sure.

As for Iggy, he just goes on, doesn't he? On this he sounds almost identical to the Iggy of The Idiot, which came out just shy of fifty years ago. Terrifying. I bought that album on release, too. Of all the sixties hedonists, who'd have had Iggy on their bingo card to still be making great music in his late seventies, let alone great music that sounds like the stuff he did in his prime? 

For that matter, who'd have pegged him still to be alive? One of the great career arcs, for sure.

Dashboard Mary - Modern Woman

Another really good video. Well worth watching all the way through. It builds in intensity just like the song does.

Modern Woman are new to me but they've been around a while. They fit right into the echoing, empty space left vacant by the much-missed Peggy Sue. 

Speaking of whom...

 Day of Atonement - Tenderness

Best track so far from the soon-come debut album by Katy-Beth Young, formerly one half of Peggy Sue, now recording solo under the sobriquet Tenderness. Everything she releases is pure class but this has some extra warmth, I think.

Looking forward to the album, out in March.

Worry Angel - Witch Post

I've expressed a certain anxiety before about this feature turning into nothing more than a roundup of the latest releases from acts whose YouTube channels I follow and these last two tracks do nothing to alleviate those concerns. If these people will keep putting out great songs and videos, though, what am I supposed to do?

Witch Post feature on the NME's list of 100 Essential Emerging Artists For 2026. I scanned it eagerly, hoping - not to say expecting - to see a whole bunch of names I recognized. I mean, I sub NME so surely I'd have at least heard most of these acts mentioned, if not actually heard anything they'd done. 

Hah! Fat chance! Guess how many names I recognized? Two. Seriously! Two. So low it doesn't even qualify as embarrassing. It just isn't.

The two? Witch Post, of course, and Florence Road. I thought it was three for a moment when I saw Punching Bag on there but Punching Bag is a different band from Punchbag. I like Punchbag a lot more than Punching Bag so one point to me.

I guess I ought to work my way through the whole hundred and give some feedback. It can't be worse than the bloody Glasto emerging artist lists of the last couple of years. I trust NME a lot more than the people who book Glastonbury. Still. A hundred. It's a lot.

Legs In A Snare - Lip Critic

Here's someone new. Okay, I know it doesn't sound new. What does, these days? It goes though. It goes hard.

 Arms Wide - sadie

Sometimes all you want is autotune and a string section. All you need, I mean.

Or maybe you'd prefer a song you already know?

 Making Plans For Nigel

H. Birdbath & Andreas Bonkowski

Alert readers may have noticed a significant drop-off in the number of covers appearing here of late. Two reasons. 

The positive: I've been holding most of the good ones back for an all-covers post.

The negative: Dull covers are ubiquitous now. Inventive ones are really hard to come by.

There was a time, it seems long ago now, when to come across a cover of a favorite song was a charming surprise. Now it feels like I'm deluged with the things day in, day out. Most of them seem to try and stay as close as possible to the source, which is very boring and largely pointless. I still check the ones that look like they might be unusual but it takes a lot more to trigger my enthusiasm than it used to do. 

Not quite sure why I noticed this one, other than it's always good to hear the song again and the way she sings it is slightly off, somehow. I like that about it. Her name helps, naturally. It came up on a recommend for a song called Dead Air and who could resist clicking on someone called H. Birdbath? 

That one was an original and, once again, it falls into that slightly atonal dark-folk pit where Peggy Sue prospered. I liked it and followed through to see what else there was and there was Making Plans For Nigel and now here we are. 

Boylife in America - Dominic Fike (Cody ChesnuTT cover)

Here's that awkward question again: if it's a cover of a song you never heard before, is it truly a cover? Not going to answer that one. Or even try.

I had not heard the original, though. Or of it. Or even of the original artist. Cody ChestnuTT with the idiosyncratic typography was new to me although looking into it I'll give myself a pass. It seems it was seen as a fairly obscure pick from Dominic Fike when he covered it for TripleJ's Like A Version recently. He also covered the South Park theme tune but I never liked South Park.

And now we're pushing into double figures so I guess I'd better wrap things up. Plenty left in the barrel. What to choose? hemlocke springs? Frost Children and Ninajirichi? Fcuckers? Goldie Boutilier? Telenova? All very familiar names here. Let's try again.

How about

 Ants In My Room - Carter Vail

Hmm. Is that a justified pick? Or is it cutting in and by cutting in I mean cutting out something more deserving? Novelty or quality? Does it matter?

I Know Where Mark Chen Lives - Joyce Manor

No questioning the quality with that one. Joyce Manor have gravitas to spare. 

Hands up, who knows who Mark Chen is. Not where he lives. No-one's expecting you to know that even if they do.

No, Mark Chen is not Lead Researcher for OpenAI, no matter what google just told you. That's a different Mark Chen. If Joyce Manor were telling us they knew where he lived I think the whole song would have a much darker vibe to it.

Their Mark Chen is - or rather was - "a singer and songwriter for the bands Summer Vacation and Winter Break". Two more bands I never heard of. Here's the pitch. And here's what they sound(ed) like. Very long, silent intro on that video, by the way. The song itself is barely a minute long.

I credit Joyce Manor with inculcating me into the elusive joys of midwest emo and its related sub-genres even if I'm not sure that's what they play any more. They mostly sound like a really, really good rock band these days, or they do to me, but what do I know?

 SPEAK SOFTLY - Camp Claude

And finally, a band I've liked for a long time now. They don't make a lot of records and they never seem to get anywhere but they persist. 

As do we all.

Slightly More Than Zero Expectations

Disco Elysium was always going to be a hard act to follow, even without the drama that overtook development studio Za/Um soon after after the game became a hit. Now, with that stinking fish hanging around the necks of whoever held onto the name, a second success has quite the headwind to overcome, as the comments following the just-released "First fifteen minutes of gameplay" video for the follow-up, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, make all too clear.

Here's a taster of the general sentiment:

"Brought to you by the people who stole Disco Elysium".

watch the NOCLIP documentary on the making of "Disco Elysium" instead

Can’t wait to pirate this

Same shit, but way worse. Good luck trying to sell that lol

Forced, uncool, soulless, and most of all- not disco.

All of which is fine but I'd have to say a video of the first nineteen minutes of Disco Elysium itself probably wouldn't come across as a work of genius, either. It took me quite a while to get into  that one and I wasn't completely sold until on just how good it was until I was maybe halfway through my forty-hour run.

Here's the whole video if you want to make up your own mind.

Having watched the whole thing, I would have to say there are some fairly obvious problems, foremost amongst them the voice acting. There are only two speaking parts in the clip but neither is enjoyable to listen to. One is just dull but the other is very annoying, something that's especially worrying considering it's coming from the character you are going to be playing for upwards of thirty or forty hours. 

For some unfathomable reason they've chosen to give her an abrasive and unconvincing estuary accent, all glottal stops and dropped consonants. I'm not sure how that comes across in other territories but in the UK it comes with a lot of baggage that's quite hard to override. 

For anyone, I would imagine it has a certain lack of charm. It's distracting and misleading given the context and although I did begin to tune it out by the end, my strong feeling was that if I was playing the game I'd have to turn the voice-over off altogether.

I'm not alone in my discomfort, either:

Narrator's voice is fkn terrible, can't imagine a sane person listening to this for 20+ hours

narrators voice is horrible

turn-a! in-a! ... they really f'ed up with voice ... played disco Elysium 3 times and i enjoyed the narration there ... here it sounds just annoying.

If the voice acting is disappointing, at least the writing doesn't seem too bad. I'm not sure there's enough in the video to tell if it's going to end up feeling like a pastiche of the original but I fear it might. The vibe is similar for sure but how far it might diverge from the template it's too soon to say.

One thing that jumped out at me early on was a reference to "The Whole Sick Crew", which appears in the dialog in quotes. The Whole Sick Crew is a phrase I attempted to popularize as a name for my friend-group in the 'eighties, which sadly never caught on. I also used it here as a title for one of the sidebar collections until I thought better of it and changed it to something less potentially offensive.

I'm not claiming to have invented it. Like whoever wrote the in-game dialog, I stole it. For anyone who doesn't recognize it, it's the collective name given to a group of characters in Thomas Pynchon's novel "V". To see it used in a video game is both encouraging and worrying although the fact that it appears to have been used as a throwaway does incline me more to the positive end of the curve.

I also don't know how far along in development the game is but there are a few moments when the voice-over doesn't match the text. Then again, that's true of almost all finished games, presumably because if the actor ad-libs or extemporizes or has a slightly variant script to follow, it's too much trouble and expense either to re-record or get the art department to alter the visuals.

Speaking of the visuals, that looks to be one area where there won't be too many complaints. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (Which is a truly terrible title, by the way...) looks like Disco Elysium (A superb title.) but better, somehow. The images look bigger and clearer without being in any way less painterly. I particularly liked the animation on the player-character, which seemed unusually naturalistic.

What little gameplay there is on show in the video looks as though it might be slightly more challenging than the first game. On the other hand, there's such a scripted feeling to the entire fifteen minutes it's very hard to be sure. 

There are counters for things like Anxiety and Delirium that quickly go into the red and require some corrective action but it's impossible to tell if there's anything the player could have done to avoid ramping them up to that extent. It looked to me as though they were going to go critical no matter what, possibly for plot reasons.

Anyway, I'm not about to start reviewing the game on the basis of a video of someone else playing the first quarter of an hour. Even though I was obviously starting to do just that...

No, what I am going to do is review the demo, which isn't available yet but soon will be. It's going to be part of the next Steam Next Fest, which runs from 23 February to 2 March. It includes "two quests...various side stories... and some of the quirky and questionable characters..."

I do already have the game on my Wishlist although, like everyone else, I am somewhat dubious about the provenance and suspicious of the circumstances that brought it into being. I'm hoping the demo will be enough to make it clear whether the people that retained the name also kept the talent. 

We could certainly do with another RPG as good as Disco Elysium. Whether this is it remains to be seen. 

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.