When Is A Door Not A Door?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scratch. Best companion of all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone remember to bring the bucket and mop?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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