Here, There And Everywhere

As may already be apparent, my game-playing in recent times has become fractured and fragmentary. I play something every day but what and for how long depends almost entirely on factors not wholly within my control. It's weird and annoying.

Factors affecting my "choices" include but are not limited to

• Dog-related interruptions and demands.
• Changing climactic conditions inside and outside the house.
• Work.
• Television programs to be watched at time of broadcast.
• Cloud gaming queues.
• Scheduled testing slots.
• Inertia, laziness and mithering.

For a few weeks now it's been a rare day when I've been able to sit down at the time of my choice, in the place of my choice, with the device of my choice and play the game of my choice for as long as I choose. I can't remember any point in the entirety of my gaming life, which goes back to the very early 1980s, when I had this little control. It's ironic, considering I am now semi-retired with ostensibly fewer responsibilities or commitments than at any time since I left college.

I only mention it to explain why it's so hard to find any through-line in what I post here any more. Of course, that's assuming there ever was one...

As I say, though, I am still playing games. Quite a few, in fact. The selection I'm mostly choosing from at the moment includes

• Cloudpunk
• Wuthering Waves
• Divinity: Original Sin
• Solasta: Crown of the Magister
• The First Descendant

That seems like more than enough to be flipping between but missing from that list only because I have not, as yet, gotten around to making it possible for me to play them on the laptop are

• EverQuest II
• Once Human
• Nightingale

Those three theoretically remain in my "Currently Playing" pile, a designation flawed only in that I'm not currently playing any of them.

Astute readers will notice the absence of a couple of titles I supposedly was playing

• The Outer Worlds
• Hard West

I'll refrain from listing all the games I've bought recently but not yet played at all or those I've signed up for or am thinking about. I probably need to play some games before I add any more to the heap.

On the positive side, I did finish something! Granted, it was only a demo but still. When I posted about Hard West, an anonymous reader left a comment recommending I try Mutant Year Zero. So I did. The demo, anyway.

And I liked it. The setting is interesting, the characters are appealing, the graphics are attractive and the gameplay is involving. When I finished the demo my immediate response was to go to the Steam Store to buy the full game. It was on sale at the time, although I forget what the discount was.

I didn't end up buying it, for two reasons. The most sensible was that, as I think I've made clear, I already have way too many games going unplayed to start adding more. MYZ isn't going anywhere so it makes much more sense to wait and buy it when I might actually play it.

The real reason I didn't pull the trigger right away, though, was the reviews. I read a bunch of them and they were mostly very complimentary. The game has an all-time Very Positive rating on Steam. Many of the reviews, however, make a point of saying how challenging and difficult the game gets in later stages and how important stealth becomes. 

I am not really in the market for anything "challenging" right now, if indeed I ever was, and I have never enjoyed stealth mechanics all that much, so that put me off somewhat. All of which goes to prove that, yes, reviews can make a difference to purchasing decisions.

Nevertheless, chances are high that I will pick up the game at some point, most likely in a sale. I have it on my wishlist. Thanks again to the anonymous recommender. 

As for the games I have been playing, I have a few notes:

Cloudpunk is really good. The story is really draws you in, helped enormously by the way it's told. It would work as a TV show or a movie but for once playing the game is adding to rather than detracting from the narrative experience. 

Things have opened out somewhat from the endless fetch quest architectonics of the early game and there have been some unexpected twists. Camus gets more and more delightful as does Rania's relationship with him. I'm loving the whole thing.

Divinity: Original Sin, though? Not loving that so much. All the same, I'm playing quite a lot of it, mostly because so far it's the only game I have set up to play directly on the laptop without using some sort of remote streaming. That means it's my default choice far too often just because it's less of a faff to log in. I need to do something about that.

Interestingly, when I visited Can You Run It? to see what games would run on the laptop, I checked D:OS and apparently it won't. The laptop doesn't meet the minimum specs. Weird, then, how it runs smoothly at high settings for entire sessions, with the laptop showing absolutely no sign of strain. I used to trust that site but I'll look at the results there a lot more skeptically in future. 

As for the game itself... it's a bit wordy, isn't it? I mean, I count myself as someone who's willing to undertake a good deal of reading (Or listening.) when playing video games. I generally like to give myself the full quest text/voice acting experience. But even I'm finding this one a bit much. It's all talk. If I play for an hour I'm lucky to get five minutes of combat - and I have to go looking for even that much. 

It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the writing was great. It's not. It's good, as in competent, grammatically correct, appropriate and all those professional kind of things so many games fail at but it isn't really doing much for me. The jokes aren't very funny, the characters aren't very characterful and the plot isn't very compelling. I'd rather it had less polish and more heart.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister, by comparison, is less professional in just about every possible way but also way more fun. The plot is much more linear but that means I know what I'm doing every time I log in, something that absolutely cannot be said for Divinity: Original Sin. I need to get Solasta onto the external drive asap so I can play it instead.

The First Descendant, as Tyler Edwards suggests, is a lot more fun than it has any right to be. It's the video game equivalent of one of those dumb action movies your friend drags you along to see and you think you're going to hate but you end up having a really good time even though you don't want to admit it. 

I'd be playing it more if it wasn't that the queues on GeForceNow are pretty chunky in prime time. I dropped out of the line twice yesterday evening because it was taking too long and I lost patience but then I tried again in bed and got in almost immediately. Bad omen. 

I played for an hour and spent my free token on Sharen before the event ends today just in case the option goes away. (I wanted Freyna but she wasn't in the offer.) Then I did two missions in a group to get the parts to make the Bunny costume. I had no idea what I was doing of course. I just followed one of the other players and shot stuff and we beat both missions and no-one yelled at me so op success!

There was some issue with the Bunny rewards. One I got, the other I didn't, which I suspect might be because my inventory was full (Don't say a word...) or maybe it was the wrong mission. I think there's a machine you can go to to get stuff from missions you didn't pick up so I'll have to check that next time. 

It's a fun game, anyway, if insanely over-complicated on the back end. I will be playing more.

Once Human I also want to get back to at some point. It's going to need a post of its own soon, for one thing. They're making even more peculiar changes to the Season system, which is now so ludicrously convoluted I can't imagine most players have a clue what's going on. I know I don't. 

I would have picked a new scenario but there's not much chance of me playing until I'm back on the desktop full time. I will try to make time to go through the process though, so I can at least attempt to describe it, if only so I understand it myself.

EverQuest II is another game I really want to get back to playing. It might run natively on the laptop, too. I need to get it onto the external drive to find out. 

I haven't really touched the new expansion, which just feels wrong. I saw the 2025 Roadmap and as usual it's a case of get on the bus or get left behind. I don't want to get left behind but I do wonder if my days as even a semi-regular player may be coming to an end. If I'm honest, I just like modern games better than old ones now. I enjoy the old games when I play them but when I'm thinking about playing I mostly want to play the new.

Speaking of which, I absolutely am going to get back to Wuthering Waves very soon, not least because Naithin says the new content has raised the bar on storytelling in the game and I already thought it was pretty darn good. I have to finish the Black Shores to get to Riniscita so I'd better get on with it.

And that's where I am right now in regards to gaming. I suppose this almost counts as one of those "My Gaming Plans" posts that I keep reading on other blogs but never do myself. Maybe I need to start. Winging it doesn't doesn't seem to be working quite as well as it used to.

First Impressions Box Set

I've had several days to get used to my new laptop and I'm pleased to say I'm extremely happy with it. It does everything I wanted and more than I expected. I'm still in the process of setting things up exactly as I like them but all the basics are in place and I've had the chance to test how a few things work so I thought I'd do a kind of batch First Impressions post to cover what I've seen and done so far.

If you're not really interested in hearing me go on yet again about how easily impressed I am by a four-year old piece of tech that wasn't very exciting when it was new, then I recommend skipping the first few sections of the post so you can read my first impressions on a couple of games that came out several years ago and that everyone's already played. I'm nothing if not up with the times!

The Laptop Itself

The reconditioned Lenovo T480 looks brand new and functions perfectly. (Crosses fingers and touches wood. Not that I'm superstitious, which is what all superstitious people say after doing something extremely superstitious.) 

The vaunted keyboard is very responsive; firm keys and a good, solid feel. The dedicated function keys threw me for a while but that was a quick and easy fix. 

I've written a couple of blog posts on the laptop and now I'm writing this one. The only issue so far is that it takes me a little longer. If I type at my usual speed, I keep missing the smaller space bar so I have to take it a bit more slowly. It takes even longer if I have to keep going back to fill in all the missing spaces.

I can't say I'm delighted with the placement of the touchpad and the pseudo-mouse buttons. The pad is too big so I keep resting the heel of my hand on it by accident, which causes some odd results and the buttons are too close to the space bar, which ditto. As for the red button between the G and H keys that acts as a mouse if you press it, that's a gimmick I'll never use. I have an actual mouse plugged into the usb port.

Performance is excellent, as is the screen. Obviously there's no problem with all the usual stuff - web-browsing and  watching video and so on - but the T480 also works very well as a gaming machine, thanks to streaming technology. All things considered, I'm extremely pleased with it.

Windows 11

I was curious to see how Win11 differed from Win10. I'm going to have to decide whether to make the effort to upgrade later this year, when Microsoft stops support, so it's very useful to get a hands-on with the replacement well before that happens.

So far I can't see much difference. There's absolutely no learning curve to absorb as there was between, say, Windows 7 and 8. It looks the same and most of the functions are pretty similar, as far as I can see. 

The only negative I've encountered is that you have to set default apps for every single file type individually now, instead of ticking one box for all formats. That's annoying but no big deal.

The only positive that stands out is the screenshot option, which I discovered last night by accident. For all I know, this was in Windows 10 too but if so I never noticed it. Now, pressing Prt Scr brings up a tiny toolbar that lets you take screenshots and video but also allows you to select areas of the screen to save, including freeform shapes. I foresee making considerable use of that feature in future.

Other than that, nothing really feels any different. A few things seem to have been simplified or tidied up is about all. At the moment I think I prefer it and I liked Win10 so I'm happy.

Remote Gaming

Splashtop streaming from my desktop works flawlessly, apart from the spinning PoV in Wuthering Waves I mentioned last time, a problem for which I have yet to find a solution. I played a couple more sessions of Cloudpunk that way and it felt smooth as silk, even though it was being streamed and the laptop is using WiFi. If there's any additional latency as a result it's not apparent to me.

I also tried Amazon's Luna cloud gaming service last night and that was a complete success. I have yet to try GeForce Now but I see no reason why that shouldn't also work perfectly. I envisage making more use of cloud computing now I have the laptop than I found the need for previously. I'm not saying it's the future but it's darn handy.

Native Gaming

I wasn't really planning on doing a lot of gaming directly on the laptop but I figured I'd give it a try just to see how it went. I installed one of the games I bought in the Steam Winter Sale - Divinity: Original Sin - on the new 1TB drive I got to go in the enclosure I already had. I'm going to try and keep the laptop's internal drive as tidy as possible although it's probably a lost cause.

The game played perfectly. The laptop's integrated graphics can handle it easily at high resolution but so they should - the game came out a decade ago. Still, if the machine can comfortably run ten year-old games I'm well set; there must be thousands of games, new to me, that I'd enjoy from that era or earlier.

It did get noticeably hotter running that game locally, so I'd probably prefer to play games remotely whenever possible anyway. The most worrying thing is that I can now play video games in bed. I'm not sure I want to be able to do that. It's one more temptation to resist.

Amazon Luna

This was a bit of a surprise. A pleasant one. I knew Prime members in participating regions, including the UK, got to play several games on Luna for free, with the selection changing every month. I had not realized until I logged in that you can also link your Luna account with your Good Old Games account to get access to a selection of GOG games, which you can then play via Luna as well. 

Those don't rotate every month and you can add plenty more from the GOG store. It's a decent selection - 279 titles, although that's misleading since many are DLC for a much smaller number of core games. Looking through the list, I think it might be all the games Prime has given away through GOG over the past couple of years.

I chose The Outer Worlds, which I got free with Amazon Prime a few months back. It played flawlessly with everything on what looked like the highest settings, which is how Luna defaults. I didn't change anything. I saw no lag whatsoever and the laptop remained cool and quiet throughout. I don't think the fan came on at all.

The addition of games claimed on Prime but registered on my GOG account is something of a game-changer (Golf clap...) for Luna. I was never going to subscribe to the service and the monthly choice bundled there directly with Prime hasn't held much  interest me so far but every month I claim two or three titles through GOG and this makes it considerably more likely I'll actually play some of them.

The Outer Worlds

So much for first impressions of the technology. How about the games? 

I played Outer Worlds for long enough to get to the first settlement. Maybe an hour. It's slick and amusing, which I was expecting and ludicrously violent, which I definitely was not. Enemies literally explode when you kill them, even when you're using a sword. I tried to pick up an item in the ground after I killed a Marauder and it turned out to be the poor guy's foot.

The game opens with a good cinematic before dumping you into character creation. I found it fairly easy to get an appearance I was happy with. There are enough options but not too many.

Once into the game itself, I was a little surprised to find there's no third-person option. Looking this up online, it seems the developer literally ran out of money before one could be added. Whether or not that's true, they haven't added one since so first-person it is. I can deal with that although it's never my preference.

I chose the default difficulty and at the tutorial level combat is easy enough. I went all-in on melee so my tactics consist of sneaking as close as possible then rushing in and swinging wildly. So far it's working but I don't imagine that will last.

There seem to be a lot of fiddly skill upgrades and there doesn't appear to be a way to respec so I imagine I'll gimp my build sooner rather than later but for now I'm just dumping points into melee and charm. I'll lie my way out of anything I can and when that doesn't work I'll cut their heads off.

I like the aesthetic, the dialog is mildly entertaining and slicing people into chunks is a bit of a novelty for me so I'll probably give it a few more sessions. Not sure I'll carry on with it for long though.

Divinity: Original Sin

I like this better than the sequel so far. It was very quick to get into. I picked the first two characters I was offered, tweaked them a little and just got on with it and things seemed to go fine. 

Graphically it looks a little less detailed than I remember D:OS2 but not that much. The dialog seems considerably less... Larien... than usual, which is an improvement. I am not a big fan of the studio's house style. 

I noticed quite a few of the reviews on Steam criticize it for being too light-hearted - "more Terry Pratchet than Terry Goodkind" one of them said. While I agree that Pratchett wannabes can be embarrassing to read, I never remotely rated Goodkind as a prose stylist so if I had to choose... And anyway, this is crisper than that comparison suggests.

The fights, as always, are fun. I did find it funny that in both this game and The Outer Worlds, even in the tutorials I was killing enemies by shooting barrels full of explosives they just happened to be standing next to, but that never gets old, does it? I look forward to throwing oil in all directions and setting it liberally on fire in pretty much every fight, which was my go-to tactic for most of the ninety hours I spent with D:OS2.

I expect to play this one quite a lot until I get really fed up with the repetition but maybe Larien will surprise me and come up with a plot I actually care about this time. We'll see.

Cloudpunk

Not going to say much more about this one other than I love it. It's really excellent. Subtle, intriguing, endearing, satisfying... all the good things you want from a game that's aiming to tell a story worth hearing.

The gameplay consists entirely of fetch quests. I mean that's literally all it is. You get given a location to collect a parcel, you fly your HOVA there, park as near as you can, walk to the location, pick up the package, walk back to your vehicle, get in, fly to the delivery point, get out, hand it over, go back to your car. Then you get in and do it again. And again. And again.

And it's fun. Every time. Each location, each pick-up, each delivery tells a story and they're fascinating stories. And while you're driving you get to talk with Control, who's having problems of his own and with Camus, your AI dog. Camus is going to get a post of his own here one day, I'm telling you now.

Add to that the atmospheric world-building by way of commercials and broadcasts and warnings and the whole city of Nivalis comes alive. I got to the part where you work out how to use the radio last night so I'm hoping for some music as I navigate between the skyscrapers and try to avoid smashing into flying trucks.

I think that's about it for now. Did I play anything else? 

Oh yes, I did a whole chapter of The Black Shores in Wuthering Waves yesterday and it was very good. I still have two more chapters to go before I can start on the latest update. Well, I could start on it right away - it's not locked - but there's a warning that it won't be as good if you haven't done all the parts that come before, so better not.

If only I could figure out how to stop the camera spinning, I'd go do another chapter now. Otherwise, I'm going to have to wait for the weather to get warmer.

A Dead Squirrel That I Hit

A quick update on Divinity: Original Sin 2. It might be the game I'm playing the most right now, yet I'm still not convinced. It's addictive, for sure, but these days I'm less willing than I once might have been to mark that up as a positive.

Steam tells me I've played 67 hours so far. That's a lot of time to put into a game you're not entirely sure about, isn't it? There is something of an "I've started so I'm going to finish" in effect, I guess. Theoretically I'm at the end of the penultimate section. I know that because the game told me to go back to Malady and tell her I'd found a way to go to... wherever the hell it is we're supposed to be going.

And there's the problem. Sixty-seven hours in and I have only the vaguest idea of the plot. Let's recap: my character used to be a singer but somehow also a "sourceror", whatever that is. I'm still not at all clear. She has some nebulous bad thing inside her that keeps making me think of Black Desert's Black Spirit, although this one's not in the slightest degree amusing. My character's also a Godwoken, whatever that is. Some kind of big deal, or so they keep telling me.

That's a lot of baggage to be carrying about but there's way, way more. There was some sort of war recently or a demonic invasion or something. The fallout left people like my character subject to arrest, incarceration, interrogation and execution. Never been sure by whom, exactly. A church, a governement, a milatary force. All of the above.

The attitude of my supposed jailers varies so wildly as to be entirely incomprehensible. Some of them act like sadistic psychopaths, some like overworked scoutmasters. One minute they're setting up to torture you, the  next they're offering you cake. And everyone seems to have a plot going but none of the plots to together. Or matter a damn.

As if that wasn't enough, I've picked up three travelling companions, all with backstories and baggage of their own They all joined me with the caveat that they'd better get this thing done that they needed to do right this minute or they'd be off, count on it... and then none of them ever mentions it again.

Well, not unless we happen to randomly run across someone they recognize, in which case they hijack the controls for a few moments, have conversations I can't follow, do things I don't understand, often with extreme violence, leaving me to deal with whatever mess they've made while they step back into my entourage as thought nothing ever happened.

Until last night I also had a squirrel following me about, riding on a skeleton cat, talking about Giant Acorns and the end of the world. And then I had this humungous battle in an tight space Everything that could be set on fire was set on fire and then some.

When the smoke cleared the squirrel was a charred lump on the floor. Of the bone cat there was no sign. I tried to ressurrect the squirrel but the game wasn't having it. I had no idea the creature could be killed but then again I have - had - no control over where he went or what he did so I couldn't have done much about it anyway.

It was a bummer as the kids stopped saying sometime around 1972. Then I went to bed and watched Roswell and Maria broke up with Michael so it wasn't much of a fun evening all round.

I have a quest journal that is beyond bursting with storylines I've started but not finished. Almost nothing ever gets finished and even if it does it's purely by chance. I gave up trying to bring any of the side quests or sub plots to a conclusion long ago. That way madness lies.

Still, with all that unfinished, it seems ridiculous to go tell Malady we're done so I'm wandering about hoping a few things will sort themselves out by sheer momentum. About all I've learned is that some areas are a lot lower level than others and I probably went the wrong way at the beginning because all the almost impossibly hard fights I eventually won mean I'm now laughably overpowered, overlevelled and overgeared for the areas I'm discovering I missed.

My overal impression of the plot is that I have no idea what it is and I don't really care. The tone of the game is darker than I'd like or, more accurately, dark in a really unoriginal, boring, heavy metal kind of way. I have yet to meet a character I care about. I didn't even like the squirrel much; I just don't like feeling responsible for charring him to a crisp without even noticing.

I haven't taken any screenshots since I took some for the last post. Not one. What's more, it occurs to me that I never even thought of taking any. The game is quite gorgeous but the enforced camera angles are so appallingly awkward it's a struggle to appreciate the scenery. Lining people up for a shot is like buildng a card house wearing boxing gloves.

There's also a gaping chasm between the actions of my team's actions and the consequences. The game gives warnings should you attack guards or murder or steal in plain sight but we routinely leave town squares looking like slaughterhouses and no-one seems to notice. The bodies of people we killed a week ago are still lying in the same pools of blood as commerce and conversation carry on all around. It makes it hard to believe anything we do is real, let alone important.

The game's one saving grace - and it's a huge enough one to explain the many hours I've put in - is the tactical combat, which remains fascinating. I constantly discover new tricks, some of which are cheesing game mechanics, others which feel like genuine inspiration.

I won a huge fight with some much more powerful opponents by moving a dozen barrels of oil into their building using telekinesis. The I blocked all the exits with wooden crates while the guard on the door quite literally allowed me to box him in. I lobbed in a fire grenade and the whole thing went up like a fireworks factory. By the time the fire went out most of my opponents were already dead. Of course, so were all the NPCs inside I might have rescued or spoken to, but they were another kind of bad guy so...

Another even more unwinnable fight I ended up winning by having my most of the party stand way off in the woods then getting one person to pull like it was classic EverQuest. Splitting them was tough but it turns out mobs in D:OS2 do leash, eventually. That took me the best part of two whole evenings.

This kind of thing requires very intense concentration while at the same time taking place in a kind of stop motion that allows for breaks to be taken at any time. It's ideal for getting your mind off other, worrying topics. The necromantic abilities that require you to get close to someone and touch them to give them a disease are a little unsettling but that's about the only call back to reality.

That's where I am right now. It's very apparent that, with the mind-boggling depth of decision trees, this is a game that could be played and replayed but I think once will be enough for me. More than enough, most likely.

Then what? Steam sent me an alert today to let me know a game on my wishlist was on offer. It's Unavowed, described by PCGamer as "one of the best adventure games ever made" and by Rock Paper Shotgun as "unquestionably one of the most impressive point and click adventures made in many, many years."

I was going to buy it so I'd have something to keep me occupied during the lockdown after D:OS2 is done but then I read the description: "A demon possessed you one year ago..."

Been there, done that.

Tuesday's Gray

This morning I find myself in the unusual position of having all the time in the world to write a blog post but nothing much write about. Still, when has that ever stopped me?

As is traditional at this time of year, I have a week off work with nothing much planned. Having worked for the same company for almost twenty years I've accrued a lot of holiday entitlement and this is the time of the year when it has to be used or losed... er lost. Just to make things even more complicated, although I'm one hundred per cent certain I only had a week's holiday left and that's all I booked, I've been given this week and next week off.

It sounds like a simple error but since I had so much time off sick last year, no-one's really sure how much holiday I might still be entitled to, least of all me, so it's not impossible it could be right. I've queried it but the entire operation is transitioning to an online self-booking system which is currently both in lockdown and not working properly, so it can't be accessed, not even to check anything, not even by the administrators. It's supposed to be fixed by Friday, but until then no-one can tell me for sure if I'm working next week or not. It's kind of like living in a Kafka novel as rewritten by Enid Blyton.

There's a ton of stuff I could usefully do around the house, indoors and out, but the weather is miserable and I'm not going to be cutting any hedges or mowing any lawns any time soon. It's even too dank to get on with much indoors - at least in our old, drafty, mostly unheated house. That's going to have to wait for the fine weather, assuming we ever get any.

I have to admit that spawning a second boss who hates both sides in the middle of a boss fight is a new one on me.

So I'm holed up in my room playing games. That ought to give me plenty to write about, only the games I'm playing are the same games I always play and I'm doing the same things in them I always do. It works for me but even I'm struggling to squeeze anything worth posting out of yet another round of dailies and Overseer quests.

The game I'm playing most is Divinity: Original Sin 2. In theory I could write about that but I pretty much said everything I had to say about it in the last couple of posts. I don't want to bang on at length, re-iterating the same set of problems, none of which have gotten any better as I put in more hours.

Neither do I want to give the impression that I dislike the game or that I think it's bad. I don't think either of those things. It just annoys the merry hell out of me, partly because of any number of really irritating design choices and because, even though I don't much want to play it, I can't leave the blasted thing alone. It's like an itch you know you shouldn't scratch because you'll only make it worse and then you do and it feels good for a little while and then it itches more so you scratch it harder...

I did finally get to the end of the part on the prison island. That took me... hang on, let me open Steam and check. I bet it's going to be longer than I imagine... thirty one hours. That seems like an awfully long time to get through the opening act but even then I left a ton of things unfinished.

*Fake edit* - It would seem long for an opening act if that's what it was but it's actually Acts 1 and 2 by some counts. And 31 hours seems to be on the short side compared to the times many people are quoting. 

Just you wait, pal.

The big boss battle at the end was the most fun part of the whole affair. My first attempt was a wipe but there was a point at which it was obvious it was going to happen so I saved the game. It was the first time I'd tried doing that in the middle of a fight and I didn't expect it to work but it did.

When the last of the party went down I loaded back into the middle of the fight and had the toughest fighter run away. I was surprised to find that once he got out of range he dropped out of combat. He just stood around until the rest of the party died then he crept back up and rezzed them from a distance, one by one.

Meanwhile the enemies just wandered about chatting to each other. None of them healed up or did anything useful so I was able to get all my people into position for an ambush, which they executed rather smoothly. A bit of mopping up and that was it.

I wasn't quite sure whether to congratulate myself on a job well done or scold myself for exploiting lazy game mechanics. Given that D:OS2 has been around for a long time and the version I'm playing touts itself as "Definitive", you might think these loopholes would have been closed by now so I'm letting myself off the hook.

Either way, it was a really fun fight. I like the combat in the game a lot. It's all the rest of it I'm not so keen on.

I found it especially jarring to be hoiked into a lengthy dialog with a snarky NPC I couldn't recall meeting before, when I hadn't even had time to loot the bodies. It was even more annoying to get a pop up at the end of the conversation warning me that if I accepted the NPC's offer to get me off the island all my Journal entries would be marked closed and I wouldn't be allowed back.

I bet you wish you'd taken a moment to heal up and rebuff now, eh, Alexandar?

Shintar posted about pick up groups skipping trash mobs and, by implication, the annoying prevalence of speed runs. Apparently this infuriating mentality even infects NPCs in single-player games now. Malady (for it was she) literally huffed, turned her back and went to stand at the edge of the water, staring into the middle distance and tapping her foot in impatience when I insisted on finishing looting the dead before accepting her offer.

And now I'm on a boat. I was really hoping to get off the island and into something approximating an open world setting but no such luck.

Doing some research while also trying to avoid spoilers I see that the game as a whole is very unbalanced in terms of length of chapters. Some estimates suggest I'm already more than two-thirds of the way through the main storyline. I had been thinking of dropping the whole thing - I really couldn't face another two chapters like the last couple - but if the rest is a lot shorter I guess I'll press on to the end.

Anyway, that's what I've been up to and what I'm likely to go on being up to for the rest of the week and quite possibly next week. I suppose I ought to take a look at Brew Day in EverQuest II at some point. I didn't realize it had started but according to the Wiki Brell threw the doors open last week. I wondered why my pack pony was offering me holiday harvests.

There's a Brew Day Overseer questline, apparently, so I guess I'd better crack on with that. Sloppy on my part. I'm quite annoyed with myself now. Fortunately it's a long holiday (just like mine might turn out to be) with nine days still to go.

I'd better get on with it.

Funny How Time Slips Away

I said I wasn't going to post much about Divinity: Original Sin 2 and I intend to stick to that but since it's the game I'm playing most right now it would be a tad arch not to post about it at all...

To say it's the game I'm playing most tends to suggest it would also be the one I was most enjoying but that wouldn't be entirely true. The main reason I'm playing more D:OS2 than anything else is that D:OS2 takes longer to play than anything else. So. Much. Longer.

Everything about the game seems to be drawn out to take just about as long as a reasonably patient person could be expected to stand. Conversations go on and on and there are hundreds and hundreds of them. There are manifold containers to be opened, often containing books and letters to be read, although these are mercifully short.

Travel takes place at a gentle dog-trot across maps that are, by intent, hard to navigate. Direction-finding is wilfully obtuse. There appears to be an extensive and convoluted crafting system, which would no doubt provide yet another deep well of lost time. So far I have avoided falling into it.

Upgrading characters takes an inordinate amount of attention. There are many, many "meaningful" choices to be made, although what the precise meaning might be is often unclear. Gear is varied and has to be considered carefully. It's not a game where a single glance will tell you whether something is worth keeping or discarding.

Combat takes forever. Even the smallest battle is a major tactical event. When the big red "FIGHT!" warning fills the screen you know you're in for half an hour or so of analytical thinking and if it all goes horribly wrong you may well be reprising that soon afterwards.

Steam tells me I've played twenty hours of D:OS2 so far. It seems longer. It feels longer. This game eats time. I start playing and three or four hours vanish.

There was a time when I would have seen that as a mark in the game's favor. Not any more. My time is more valuable to me these days. If I'm going to fritter it away I'd at least like to feel its passing as it slips through my hands, not to wake up as if from a dream, hours lost and nothing much to show for it.

It's all too easy to lose yourself in this game. The process of playing is innately absorbing. It's immersive in the psychological rather than the aesthetic sense. At no point so far have I ever felt I was "in" the world but I am almost constantly in the game in that I am never not accutely aware that I'm playing.

The whole thing is about mechanics. Playing D: OS2 gives a very similar sensation to the one I get when I'm putting together an item of flat-pack furniture. The difference is that at the end of a session I don't have a finished table or bookcase I can use. I just have the memory of of having constructed something that no longer has any function.

Although it has a large number of superficial similarities, this is all very different from playing an MMORPG. They may both involve building up virtual power in imaginary environments but the open-ended nature of the MMO form means that the power you have accrued and refined can be used for new projects within that setting. I'm acutely conscious at the end of each D:OS2 session that whatever I've achieved is moving me ever near to the point where what I've achieved will be nullified by an ending.

No different from reading a book or watching a movie, then. Except that in the time it's likely to take to finish D:OS2 I could probably read a dozen books or watch fifty movies. More significantly, I could read a dozen books that were far better written and far more memorable and watch fifty movies that were far better acted and which would live far longer in my imagination.

Divinity:Original Sin 2 is well-written and well acted by genre standards. It is nonetheless somewhat bland and generic. After twenty hours I have yet to discern a plot that intrigues me. There are hints of something that might become interesting at some future time but other narrative media would have needed to take and hold my attention in a fraction of the time.

What keeps me plugging away isn't any compulsion to see how the story turns out. As yet I'm still not clear what the main plot might be and I certainly don't care whether I ever find out. None of the characters I've met is particularly engaging and neither are their backstories. I could drop any of them at any time and never look back.

I was briefly excited when I found I could, after all, take the Pet Pal talent but sadly every animal I've spoken to so far sounds much the same as the rest of the NPCs, talking in long-winded, self-important, full sentences about arcane or metaphysical concerns. Some effort has been made to present them as different species with non-bipedal perspectives but they mostly express themselves in the same, portentous fashion as every other fantasy race. By and large they aren't even cute or endearing although I strongly suspect whoever wrote the dialog imagined they would be.

The voice acting, like the writing, tends towards the competent. I'm not sure that competency is ever much of a selling-point although it would seem to have the edge over its opposite. There's a very impressive range of regional accents on display, most of which sound to be either originals or skilled copies and yet even as I admire their accuracy I find myself questioning their authenticity.

The sheer variety of accents is also distracting in itself. I get that the location is a prison island to which prisoners, guards and administrators have been brought from all over the place but it's still disorienting to hear a seemingly random collection of voices ranging from Devon to Dumfries, let alone the occasional transatlantic tourist.

The actors delivering lines in extremely plummy upper-class, educated British elite accents seem to get closer to the text than those giving their their line readings a strong local flavor. I've yet to hear any that are outright bad but there are quite a few that sound as though there was either too much rehearsal or too little. I could definitely take a little more scenery-chewing just to get some emotional heft in there.

All in all I'm finding it quite difficult to work out whether or not I'm enjoying myself. My favorite part of the game, without any doubt whatsoever, is the combat. It may be a major commitment in time and mental energy but it's extremely engaging and absorbing. I very much like the way initiative is decided on an individual basis. I'm sorry to hear that won't be the case in Baldur's Gate 3, although I'm sure that deciding tactics for the team as a whole will bring its own rigors and delights.

I wonder, though, whether I wouldn't enjoy a game more if it had only the fights, dispensing with the both peripatetic seeking and searching and the tendentious plot. It seems odd to say it, given my explorer sensibilities, but I find those largely crushed by the execrable camera, the dreadful movement controls and the ant farm perspective.

It's next to impossible either to see anything at sufficiently close range to enjoy the excellent graphic design or to take screenshots that look anything but muddled and confused. I looked into mods to improve the look and feel of the game but the ones I found didn't seem much of an improvement.

So, in conclusion, I'm playing a lot but I feel I might be wasting my time. That's a feeling I have almost never had in twenty years of playing MMORPGs, even though the hobby has consumed a huge portion of my waking life (strangely I almost never dream about gaming in any form).

For now I'll carry on because I do really like the set piece fights. I'm also reasonably determined to finish the first part and get off the island just to see if the game opens up or changes after that. If it goes on to be more of the same, though, I might have to bow out. As the banker in East Freeport often says, I have better things to do with my time.

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.