It's Magic!

A couple of apparently unrelated posts I read recently, one by Tipa, the other by Redbeard, along with a flurry of first impressions posts on Palia and Baldur's Gate 3, started me thinking about some of the core concepts of the wider RPG genre. Specifically, I found myself pondering the relative merits of games as opposed to virtual worlds, of settings in which magic is taken for granted and of the often unrealistic expectations of the people who choose to spend their time - and sometimes their lives - there.

Any of these topics could sustain a series of posts but for now I'm just going to fire off a few observations that came to mind as I was reading. If I ever get around to writing about any of this in more depth, at least I'll have some notes I can refer to.

The aspect that interests me the most - and the one I think I've seen given the least attention over the years - is the way almost every RPG, online or off, massively multiple or single player, takes place in a milieu where magic - or science so advanced it may as well be magic - is accepted as the norm. It's so absolutely commonplace in just about every game that we almost never think about the implications.

Redbeard's post makes some astute criticisms of the way NPCs in fantasy games tend to spend all their time gussied up in their Sunday best. I'm not sure it's true to say the farmers are all out there tilling the fields in ball gowns and silk stockings - certainly in some games I've played the farmers are a dowdy lot - but it's definitely the case that around towns and cities you do tend to see an awful lot of very over-dressed citizens supposedly going about their normal, working day.

What his post got me wondering wasn't so much why they'd be doing that as why they wouldn't. These people all live with magic as a part of their daily lives. They may not all be practitioners, although many games are remarkably silent on the degree to which magic is available to the general population, but they certainly see it being practiced in front of them every day.

Most fantasy rpgs include some form of illusion magic, meaning you can't be certain anyone or anything is what it appears to be. Magic-users can transform themselves into just about anything. They can change race, gender, ethnicity, size or species. They can make themselves appear to be inanimate objects or ethereal phenomena. 

You don't always have to be a skilled illusionist to pull off these effects, either. Frequently it's possible to buy potions or magical items that create the illusion on request. Those items are often on open sale in shops in the town squares and side-streets. They're not always even very expensive.

If you posit a society where most people have access to the means of looking just how they fancy, wouldn't most of them choose to look their best? Why would you walk around looking dowdy and down-at-heel, when with a click of the fingers you could look like Lady Gaga on Oscar night?

Even if you choose to believe all those flounces and frills are firmly founded, you know they're still  likely to be something very much other than they appear. Even that much-discussed issue, the disparity between what male and female adventurers wear for protection, recognises a real-world social dilemma, not an in-game credibility gap. 

Don't try and tell me that's not practical adventuring gear!

We all know the armor looks the way it does because the developers expect to market their game to adolescent boys and men with adolescent minds but for the purposes of the world in which the characters operate, the chain-mail bikini makes as much sense as anything. If you can walk the streets with a ten-foot, glowing sword in one hand, leading a saber-tooth tiger on a chain with the other, you can pretty much wear what you damn well please.

All in-game armor provides a level of protection out of all proportion to real-world logic, combined with an equally unrealistic flexibility. Adventurers wear plate armor that somehow fails to drag them to the bottom when they leap into a lake. At most it makes them a little less able to roll and kick like a ninja than their counterparts in leather or cloth - cloth that can turn a blade, if not always as well as steel, then still well enough. 

Every piece of armor is magical. We know that because there are numbers that quantify just how magical it is. Once you give your scrap of cloth a numerical value to indicate how much damage it can take and assign it a slot on a paper-doll representation of the physical form, it's allowed that whatever level of protection it provides applies across the whole of that sector, whether the armor visibly obscures the skin or not. It's magic and there's no arguing with it.

Appropriately dressed for a memorial service?

If that's true for adventurers then why would it not be true for nobles or citizens too? Clothing may not be armor but it provides protection from the elements and from everyday incident. Imagine if nothing you wore ever got torn or soiled and even if it did, that somewhere in every town you'd count on finding a smith of some kind who could magically restore every single item of clothing on your body and in your backpack back to new, for only a few coins. If you knew you could have all damage repaired in a moment for the price of a pub lunch, would you worry about the wear and tear to your best clothes when you went to work or would you strut around like Beau Brummel on a bank holiday while you counted out the carrots?

And since I mentioned backpacks, let me address Tipa's points about "how to get those 200-300 pounds of meat and fur back to your home" after you kill a deer or "why would anyone think they’d be able to single handedly clear out a dungeon full of treasure?" The answer's the same in both cases of course: it all goes in your backpack, along with your horse and quite possibly a couple of goblins and a pagoda or two. 

It's magic. Don't question it. You can't. You don't know how it works. No-one does. Least of all the developers.

Palia fashions are... strange.
Although not as strange as
what's happened to her feet...

Now, Tipa is saying things might be more interesting if the games used real-world physics and that may well be so. Games that make that choice do exist. If you take that route, though, you can't also have almost any of the magic that makes the rest of the game what it is. 

It's not just that once you open the door to things like instant travel, no encumbrance or flying mounts, you're into a brave new world of logistics. It's also that you can't easily separate out the magic you want from the magic you don't without creating just as many cultural infelicities as if you'd left it alone. 

Look at a real-world example: AI. Now the large language models are loose it's proving extremely difficult to contain them. Once a principle is demonstrated, applications follow. The culture is already changing as a result and if draconian restrictions aren't applied and enforced, something which will require a cultural change all of its own, then many things will become possible which used to not to be.

A world in which magic is demonstrably real will necessarily have radically different cultural mores and practices from one where it's not. If we're going to start questioning the internal logic of these societies, we should probably be asking why they look so similar to cultures with which we're familiar, not why they don't look similar enough.

This leads directly in to the more pressing question of whether the games are as entertaining as they could be, although even to get there we first have to get past the hurdle of whether they're meant to be just games or something more. The argument over whether the goal is to create the most enjoyable games or the most convincing virtual worlds has been raging since even before I started playing MMORPGs and that was almost a quarter of a century ago. I certainly don't propose to try and resolve it here.

What I am going to suggest is that the two concepts are considerably less compatible than many people have been trying to suggest for decades now. There's a solid, commercial reason why MMORPGs (And, perhaps to a lesser extent, RPGs.) have become more and more gamelike over the years; it's because that's what players are most likely to accept, to enjoy and pay for.

There absolutely is a market for games where, as Tipa describes, you need a wagon to get the carcass of the creature you've killed back home so you can butcher it. ArcheAge come to mind as a game I've played that incorporates such features. But even in those games, such activities tend to be optional. 

It's also not as easy as all that to set up such systems to be consistent with real-world values, even if you wanted to do it. Star Citizen is perhaps the "shining" example here. In attempting to create a gamespace in which everything really does behave in a way logically consistent with real-world physics, Cloud Imperium Games have... not made a game at all.

We all look completely fine.

If and when they do make a game that conforms to that blueprint, it's odds on that most of the game-playing world, having given it a go, will decide they already have one life to live and can't fit the requirements of another, just as nitpickingly tedious and demanding, inside of it. Every action in a game must be easier, faster and more fun than the real-world activity it mimics. Otherwise, why not just go do the real thing instead?

All of which brings me to unrealistic expectations. These days games are expected to be both rigorously realistic and absolutely convenient. If it takes a long time to get things done it's a grind and if it doesn't there's not enough content. If travel is instant it's an insult but if it's not it's a time-sink. If death means nothing but a brief interruption to gameplay it's trivializing the risk but if there's a corpse to be recovered it's an archaic throwback to the bad old days.

There's so much choice these days, no-one has time to put up with anything that's not perfect. But nothing's ever perfect. Or will be.

Least of all this post, which as I said is just a few jottings on some things that occurred to me while I was reading stuff other people wrote. One day someone might knit all this together and come up with the ideal game but it won't be in my lifetime and probably not in the lifetime of anyone reading this, either.

We're all just going to have to get used to some things in our games not being exactly how we'd like them to be, I guess. Which is probably the closest to reality the games are ever going to come.

An Opportunity To Go To The Moon (And Other Stories)

A little catch up on a few odds and ends that don't merit full posts of their own. Not that I couldn't spin them up into something longer. I can always do that. I just probably shouldn't.

Divinity: Original Sin

Seemingly determined, as always, to be the last aboard any passing bandwagon, this Friday I bought Divinity: Original Sin. It's been in my short but select Steam wishlist for a while but somehow I have only just now started receiving nudges by email when things go on sale.

I'm not sure why that's happening. I wasn't aware I'd changed any settings. It's quite useful. It also goes some way towards explaining the mystery of how people end up with such massive backlogs. Left to my own devices I'd probably think of checking my wishlist maybe three or four times a year. Except for those times, I wouldn't have a clue if anything had gone on sale.

I still wouldn't have bought D:OS just for that. I don't do everything Steam tells me. Valve is not the boss of me. But I had quite a bit of my IntPiPoMo winings left after buying Californium so I thought I might as well spend it. The game ended up costing me about £8.00 in real money, which seems like a fair price for something I was mildly curious to try.

A squirrel wearing a bone mask and riding an undead... something... started following me and won't go away. Also a cat. The squirrel is by orders of magnitude the most interesting NPC I've met so far and we can't communicate. The cat looks like she has something to tell me too. I've never regretted a choice at character select more.

So far I've played for... hang on, Steam knows exactly how long... oooh! Look at that. Four hours! I would have guesstimated two, two and a half. I must have been enjoying myself more than I thought if time slipped by unnoticed.

As I commented at GamingSF, where Telwyn was talking about the upcoming Baldur's Gate 3, under development by Larian, creators of the Divinity series, "D:OS so far ... seems okay. As usual, I can’t as yet entirely see what all the fuss is about. I read people gushing about RPGs and then when I get to play them I’m underwhelmed – I think it has something to do with ovehyped expectations but a lot more to do with what seems to me to be the overall lower standard of writing and voice acting that’s deemed acceptable in gaming."

That's probably a bit harsh. I'm not even off the starter island yet. And I am enjoying it. It just hasn't really grabbed me yet. Mostly I find myself wishing I'd taken the Pet Pal talent at character creation and wondering whether it's too late to stop and start over. Also the camera controls are some of the worst I've ever battled with, which does absolutely nothing for immersion. And it's a pig of a game to take screenshots.

Other than that, not much to say. I'm a little loathe to write too much about it here because I'm fairly sure everything there is to say about the game has already been said. Still, when has that ever stopped any blogger?

Neverwinter

With Divinity: Original Sin, I just realized I'm now playing two Dungeons and Dragons games concurrently (...or not, as someone points out in the comments, because D:OS is not an official D&D product - it just feels like one to me). That's a bit weird. Of the two I'm enjoying Neverwinter more, which is a surprise even to me.

Something has definitely changed but I can't put my finger on what it might be. As I play, I keep thinking "Is it the game or is it me?". The whole experience feels very different from how i remember it on previous runs.

It feels more like an MMORPG for one thing. There are people everwhere. It's really busy. And not just in the sprawling maze of the hub city (which is, of course, caled Neverwinter, not Everdeep as I said in an earlier post. I knew I'd gotten that wrong and I was waiting for someone to correct me but no-one did so I'm doing it myself).

When I'm out and about adventuring I can barely get to the questgivers for adventurers on unlikely mounts. Not quite as unlikely as the ones in Azeroth, Norrath or Tyria but still quite outlandish enough to let me know I'm playing a bona fide multiplayer fantasy rpg with a cash shop.

I'd somehow always thought of Neverwinter as closer to the original Guild Wars - a central hub with instanced adventure areas - than a traditional quasi-open world MMORPG but many of the zones I've been adventuring in are open to all and the gate system for travel is no more artificial than EverQuest II's world bells.

The open air zones are attractive if a little hazy. So far I've been too focused on following the sparkly trail to the next quest marker to explore but at least they look like places you might want to explore if you found yourself with time on your hands.

The biggest change from previous runs is definitely the gameplay. The whole thing feels more streamlined, cleaner, smarter. I can see there's a lot of work waiting to be done in gearing up for anyone who takes the whole thing seriously and that's quite re-assuring to know. For now, though, everything seems to trot along quite nicely without much behind-the-scenes preparation from me and I'd like to keep it that way as long as possible.

I did the introduction to crafting. It made me think of Black Desert, which in turn made me think I wanted to stay as far away from it as possible. Not because either of them are bad systems - just that they involve a level of micro-management I don't find particularly entertaining. I'd rather gather my own mats and craft my own stuff, if I'm brutally honest. I don't much relish roleplaying the branch manager of a regional garden center franchise, which is what these things sometimes feel like.

I think that so long as I stay well clear of the workshop I should be fine. My Warlock dinged twenty-three last night doing some proto-espionage work for The Harpers. It felt a lot more like the kind of thing I've been looking for. I look forward to quite a few more leveling sessions having jolly, swashbuckling  adventures, at least until my Warlock's  black crows all come home to roost. When you look at her backstory, it's no surprise the Moral Majority used to call D&D out as a gateway drug to Satanism.

EverQuest II

Yesterday I finally got around to finishing the Signature adventure questline from Blood of Luclin on my Berserker. It sounds late, given the expansion launched well before Christmas, but it's actually quite speedy for me. It took me more like six months to get to the same point in 2018's Chaos Descending.

The main reason it took as long as it did was that I was anticipating the final instance being hard work. When I finished the penultimate stage I made the mistake of going to the Wiki and reading the walkthrough for what came next.

There's a perennial problem with walkthroughs on the excellent EQII wiki: they almost always make things sound more complicated and fiddly than they really are. It's hard to avoid. Try writing a detailed, step-by-step guide to a series of scripted encounters without leaving anything out or being vague.

I've tried it and it's difficult to be concise, clear and comprehensive. In an effort to cover everything it's almost impossible not to make things sound more obtuse and convoluted than they are in practice. The EQII wiki does a brilliant job but the sheer level of detail can feel intimidating. That's why I used to love Borgio's video walkthroughs - he made everything seem really easy. Unfortunately he had a falling out with the game a couple of years back and that was the end of that.

The other reason I hadn't finished up the questline was that the same walkthrough showed me the rewards and they weren't anything I wanted. My Berserker could already fly in BoL zones thanks to having done the crafting Signature line and the weapon is a choice of one-handers, whereas he's used a two-hander almost exclusively for years.

Even so, it needed to be done sometime and I had the afternoon free so I set to it. And guess what? It was easy. The instance took around an hour. All the bits that looked annoying in the walkthrough were a lot more simple in person.

There were a couple of mana drains but I managed them effectively with the help of some of the Clarity potions I got from Overseer missions. My almost maxed-out Inquisitor mercenary did a great job curing detrimentals. My DPS was plenty good enough. The trash fights took seconds, the boss fights two or three minutes. None of those attritional fifteen minute slugfests from a couple of years back.

After an hour it was off to see The Duality for a debriefing session that made it very obvious our visit to the moon is going to be a two-parter. We haven't heard a peep out of Darkpaw about this year's expansion, except a very vague nod towards there being one, but I'd lay heavy odds on a trip to the dark side of the moon.

Over the coming months I imagine I'll slowly finish the Adventure sig line on the other five max levels and the tradeskill line on the three that craft. Plus I want a Provisioner, so there's that to do as well. Should keep me logging in for most of the year, on and off.