Now I'm done with Baldur's Gate 3, it's time to get back to where I was before I interrupted myself. So, where was that, exactly?
I bought BG3 on New Year's Day. It was the last in a line of Steam purchases I handily laid out in a post on the same day, saving me the trouble of listing them here. Except that's kind of what I'm going to do anyway.
There's a nice, neat, round dozen titles in the screenshot I used, which for convenience and out of laziness I'll repeat below. Of those twelve games, six haven't even been installed yet, much less played. The untouched half-dozen are:
Dustborn
Spire Horizon Online
Cat Detective Albert Wilde
Brok the Investigator
Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain
Sovereign Syndicate
Why was that? I have plenty of drive space. 10gb on Steam generally takes a few minutes at most. I could have made a coffee and come back to an installed game. And yet it seemed like it would be too much trouble.
I flipped through the rest. Dustborn is 25gb so that was a non-starter Albert Wilde is 13gb. Ditto. I didn't want another MMORPG so Spire Horizon Online was out. (We'll ignore Ashes of Creation for the same and other obvious reasons.)
Brok was only 2gb and Penny Larceny just 500mb. It was a toss-up between those two until I noticed three of the games were already installed. Can't get a smaller download than no download at all.
Of the three, Steins;Gate I already played (For 38 minutes.) and it bored me rigid so forget that one. If I want to read a book I'll just read a book and a better book than that, too. That left Beyond Two Souls and Road 96.
As I said in the post linked above, I have literally no idea what Beyond Two Souls is. Nor do I have any clue where I heard about it or why I added it to my Steam library, much less why I installed it. I certainly haven't played it. I don't need Steam giving me a Time Played of 0 minutes to be sure of that.
Looking it up, something I didn’t bother to do when I wrote the previous post, apparently, I remember now that I came across it when I was reading about Elliot Page (Ellen Page at the time the actor played the lead role in the game.) although why I would have been reading about him in the first place remains a mystery. It's an action-adventure a little over a decade old. Apparently there's a TV series in development. I might wait for that.
Road 96, though, I could remember. At least I could remember how I heard about it and why I downloaded it. Tyler F. M. Edwards wrote about it on his blog last November and I thought it sounded right up my street. Naturally, having taken possession of the game, I felt no immediate desire to do anything with it, least of all play it, which is how these things usually go with me.
By dint of already being there, ready to play, and not being a completely unknown proposition, last night was Road 96's big chance. I logged in, answered a bunch of the kind of questions they ask you at training seminars, started to watch a cut scene and then Mrs Bhagpuss came in and said tea was ready so I logged out again.
Actually, the game wouldn't let me log out. I had to tab out and kill it from the taskbar, which didn't endear it to me. These days, games that can neither be paused nor closed down at an instant's notice don't make it far up my playlist. Still, I won't let that put me off. Road 96 will get another chance. Just not right now.
Observant readers may have noticed there's one game on the list I haven't mentioned. That's Slay the Spire. I have actually played that one. For exactly an hour.
I bought it because a) several bloggers I follow have raved about it and b) it was super-cheap. Having bought it, I had the bright idea of seeing if it would run on my laptop. In theory, not many games will.
As I wrote back on January 2, 2025, I bought a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T480 to replace my incredibly ancient laptop. The T480 is about as far from a gaming laptop as you can get. It has integrated graphics and, according to Can You Run It?, can't run pretty much anything I own on Steam.
Except it can. Officially, the T480 can't, for example, run the Esoteric Ebb demo. It doesn't meet the minimum spec. Only, I played the demo very comfortably for over an hour on the laptop with no problems at all. It doesn't meet the min spec for Slay the Spire either but it runs the game perfectly.
The problem with Slay the Spire isn't running it on the laptop, which is the only way I'm likely to play it, last thing at night before I go to sleep, when there's nothing I want to watch on the streams and I'm not in the mood to go looking for new tunes on YouTube, meaning it's already right at the back of the queue. No, the problem with Slay the Spire is that it's a bit dull.
It is, though, isn't it? I've put in exactly an hour so far and it's just fights. And they aren't very interesting fights. It's not very pretty to look at, there's no plot to speak of and the fights are all the same. I'm guessing it ramps up as you go along but to get far enough to see that happen, it would have make me want to keep playing and if it hasn't managed to do that in an hour, chances are it's never going to manage it. I may come back to it some day but it doesn't seem likely.
So, after all of that, what am I playing? EverQuest II, of course.
When I said right at the top of the post that it was time to get back to where I was before I got assimilated by BG3, where I was back then was deep in the latest expansion for EQII, Rage of Cthurath. The last time I posted about that was on December 27, right before I started buying new games on Steam with the Steam cards I got for Christmas.
At the time, I'd just finished the main storyline of the expansion and I was thinking about getting the final level needed to hit the new cap of 135. The Signature Questline itself leaves you stranded less than halfway through 134. Or it did me, anyway.
Since finishing BG3 I've played a couple of sessions of EQII, one of which I spent almost entirely working on side quests, quests started by dropped items and repeatable quests. I think I played for about an hour and a half doing those and I made barely 10% of a level.
Seriously, it was like the bad old days! It felt like grinding xp in Ye Olde EverQuest a couple of decades ago. I found myself checking the xp bar after every hand-in to see how far it had moved. 1.2% seemed about the average. And I had a 100% xp bonus potion running!
The conspiracy theory explanation would be that Darkpaw have intentionally made getting to the cap as awkward as possible so as to slow people down and keep the subs rolling in and/or increase sales of xp potions in the Cash Shop. Except that makes no sense because surely most regular players will have an annual subscription, if they didn't buy one of the Lifetime Subs that sold like hot cakes every time they were offered. And everyone has more free xp potions from Veteran Rewards than they know what to do with.
I suspect it's more likely the current xp drought is a response to the complaints that poured in during the period when the signature questlines gave enough xp to hit the cap before you got halfway through. MMO devs have a long history of slewing back and forth, reacting and overreacting to customer complaints so as to be sure no-one is ever satisfied. This is probably just another example.
It's bloody annoying, whatever the reason. I was really in the mood to play some EQII but a session of that nonsense put the dampers on my enthusiasm pretty quickly. I will get Mordita, my Necromancer, to 135 but now I'm thinking I might wait until the new Game Update arrives in the hope it comes with a bunch of new quests that give decent xp. It's currently in beta so I shouldn't have long to wait.
In the past, that wouldn't have been an option. My Berserker has rarely been able to handle the increased difficulty level of a post-expansion GU right out the gate. The Necro, though... she feels a lot more capable. It's why I wanted to switch to her as expansion lead in the first place.
I haven't even upgraded any of her spells yet and she's strolling through the solo expansion content. If I take some time out to harvest enough rares for my Sage to make Expert upgrades for her key spells, I'd hope the new solo content that's coming ought to be in her range.
And of course, harvesting rares is very relaxing. And satisfying. I can do it for hours in a kind of zen trance. What with that and decorating her new house, which is what she spent most of my second come-back session doing, I ought to be able to keep myself amused for a while.
It does make me wonder what I bought all those Steam games for...
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