On "Difficulty"

Last night I felt like playing a little Pillars of Eternity. I got it last year as a free Amazon Prime/Twitch offer and I put quite a few enjoyable hours into it before I got stuck in a quest cul de sac and stopped.

The Twitch Prime promotions have been considerably more successful in re-introducing me to single-player gaming than my own efforts over the past few years. On the few occasions I've tried to branch out into non-MMO territory on my own I've mostly chosen games that look, feel and play like MMORPGs (Yonder, Tanzia) but don't have anyone in them but me. Unsurprisingly, that leads to feelings of isolation and pointlessness.

Through Twitch Prime I played The Banner Saga. I thought the plot was thin and predictable. I was unimpressed by the writing in general. Perhaps the stellar reviews led me to expect too much. As for gameplay, the combat was labored and the resource management tedious.

Visually, though, it was very striking. The best part of the game was the atmospherics, which kept me interested long enough to finish it. The last video game I can remember actually finishing before that must be Baldur's Gate 2 back around the turn of the century.

I certainly didn't get enough out of The Banner Saga to want to play the second one, which also came free with Twitch Prime. So far the only other freebie on offer that's appealed to me at all has been Pillars of Eternity.

PoE was Kickstarted as the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. From what I've seen so far it pretty much hurdles that very high bar. It looks and feels similar and the questing is all but identical. There are some oddities but on the whole it's a lot more "BioWare" than anything BioWare are known for nowadays.

I ought to love it. I don't. I like it. When I'm in the mood. And I really do have to be in the mood.



The thing is this: Pillars of Eternity is demanding. It requires effort. A lot of effort. There's an inordinate amount of inventory, skill and party management. There's not an awful lot in the way of handholding. Travel, which is frequent and required, takes forever. Combat, when it occurs, goes on and on and on.

Then there's the talking. A lot of NPCs are partly voiced and the voice acting is not bad. I like to listen to the spoken parts but it slows things down. And when the voiceovers stop the conversations carry on. There's a lot of reading.

And choosing. So. Much. Choosing. Choices with consequences, too. I hate that. Always have. I don't mind flavor but I like to know I can't screw things up by making a stupid decision on a whim. The inevitable result is that, whenever I reach any obvious nodal point, I have to go check a wiki to be sure I take the right turning. Which makes everything take even longer.

Last night I fired the game up for the first time in months. It was surprisingly easy to get back into the swing of things. In a few minutes I was questing. Well, I say "questing"...

It took me around an hour to finish a single quest. It took place in two adjacent districts of the same town. It involved no combat whatsoever. All I had to do was talk to a guy, walk to a building, take a thing from a place, take that thing to another guy, talk to a third guy and finally go back to the first guy and talk to him again.

I did that using a walkthrough and it took me an hour. Partly that was because, during all the walking and listening and talking, four members of my party levelled up. Independently, at separate times, for reasons unclear. The time I took to allocate their various points is included in the hour.

When it was over I sat back and thought. That was one, tiny side-quest at around level five. I knew from previous experience that it was entirely typical. If I did nothing else with my free time but play Pillars of Eternity, finishing the game could probably keep me occupied for the rest of the year.

Twenty years ago that would probably have seemed like a positive. Not any more. Or not so much, at least.

Before I fired up PoE I spent a while on EverQuest II's new Time-Limited Expansion server, Kaladim, where similar time-to-entertainment issues were evident. My Dirge there is Level 21. There's plenty she can do solo but none of it appeals.

Transport options are limited. It takes a long time to get anywhere. It's not practical to dart around looking for interesting quests. Leveling alone is excruciatingly slow, despite Kaladim supposedly having accelerated xp for a progression server. It's also not very interesting, consisting mainly of grinding slowly through various native species - bears, snakes, hawks, wolves...

It's hauntingly close to how I remember the game a few months after launch. Among other reasons, it's why I left. Daybreak Games have done a disturbingly good job in recreating the feel of pre-Hartsman EQII although why anyone would want to is another question.

Most mobs that used to be tuned for groups have been returned to that state. Intentionally, everything worth doing, above and below ground, relies on groups. I've been in a few and they weren't horrible but it mostly served to remind me what I felt back in 2005: EQ2 is not a great game for grouping.

The pace and flow of group combat in EQ2 has always felt off to me. As a healer I never felt I had time to adapt to situations the way I did in EverQuest. As a DPS I'm never really sure how much of what I'm doing is effective or required.

I think EQ2 combat absolutely shines in a duo or trio, where there's ample opportunity for tactics, strategy and subtlety. Full groups always seem to devolve into either mincing machines that move through corridors annihilating all in their path or fractious, failing collectives that fall apart on the first bad pull.

These two experiences, PoE and Kaladim, contrast sharply with my choice of gameplay for this morning. I ummed and ahhed for a while over what to play before deciding to level my EQ2 Shadowknight on the Antonia Bayle server. He'd just dinged 86 and I'd been taking him through Stonebrunt Highlands, a zone from the Sentinel's Fate expansion of 2010.

Rather than carry on there, I took him to the Chronomancers in Freeport and had them drop his level to 80 so he could start the main quest line from an even older expansion, 2008's The Shadow Odyssey.



In a couple of hours of extremely enjoyable questing my SK did just under two levels. I was never bored, always entertained. I read most of the quest text, even though I've done all these quests before, because much of the writing is amusing and because I had plenty of time to appreciate it.

I was soloing and there was no-one around me (I saw one other player) but I didn't for a moment get that "why am I doing this again?" sensation that comes when you realize you're teetering on the edge of an existential void. Twice I had to turn the general chat channel off, not because of anything offensive (conversations were relaxed and friendly) but because I was enjoying what I was doing too much to countenance distraction.

As usual, I'm not going anywhere with this, or not anywhere specific. I'm recording my thoughts so I can refer back to them later. This is an ongoing project. I do find the way that both my expectations and experiences have changed over a couple of decades fascinating. I'd like to understand those changes better.

I could really use a compulsive, new MMORPG with an old-school approach to benchmark against. Am I becoming less and less interested in "difficulty" (or is it "complexity"?) because my jaded palate needs refreshing from a fresh, pure wellspring? Would all the old love of slow travel and painstaking detail return if prompted by something genuinely inspiring?

Or have I finally matured to the point where I understand that life really is too short for all that. Cut to the chase, get to the point, are we having fun yet?

I guess I'm going to find out if a playable version of Pantheon ever appears. Until then I'll go on running experiments on the limits of my patience and writing up my findings here.

Can I Tempt You To A Little Something?

There was an unusual flurry of interest in accountancy this week as Steam added the ability to tally purchase history by value. Or something. No-one seemed entirely clear about the details.

Isey had a nice post up in which a few people outed themselves as overspenders. I revealed my own Steam Spend in a moment of self-satisfied smugness which, with a singular lack of taste or decorum, I am about to repeat here:

TotalSpend 2018-03-30 20:59:13.053 $57.06

OldSpend 2018-03-30 20:59:13.053 $0.00

PWSpend 2018-03-30 20:59:13.053 $0.00

Time was, I could have demurred entirely, saying even more smugly "I don't do Steam" but those days are long gone. We all fall in the end. Nonetheless, I was a very late adopter, coming to Valve's warehouse of shame long after it ceased to be fashionable, let alone faddish.

By the time I joined even the (in)famous Steam Sales were slipping into self-parody, with blog posts tending towards the jaded or nostalgic as people vied to compete over how little they'd seen to tempt them rather than how full their imaginary bags had been as they exited the store. These days, if anyone even mentions Steam, it's only to bemoan its failings. It's a background hum at best.

Indeed, it's only as I log into Steam to check some things for this post that I find the Steam Summer Sale started two days ago. A few years ago the blogosphere would have been sparking like a summer storm with posts about who'd bought what. This time I haven't seen a single mention.

With no history of wild sale frenzy behind me, I don't have one of those long tail "unplayed games" lists that seem to invoke the weird inverted work ethic that dogs so many bloggers. How it's possible to generate puritanical guilt by not playing video games beats me but for a while it very much seemed to be a thing around here. Even that has faded.

It may be an isotope of Buyer's Remorse, something I don't generally suffer from over anything much, least of all games. Buyer's Irritation, occasionally, when what I get turns out to be not what I wanted, but I think for remorse you need to feel a large degree of responsibility for your actions. I would always rather lay that off on whoever sold the crappy thing to me than take it on myself. I do my research before I buy so I expect to be satisfied.

Still, I have learned rather quickly that money spent on Steam is generally money wasted. Not because of the quality of the product - there may be a vast underbelly of slush but the stuff floating to the top seems quality enough. It's more that it's very hard not to notice that there are a lot of free video games around these days. Why pay for something you can have for nothing?

I do still subscribe somewhat to the old saw that says "you get what you pay for" but I think it's important to factor in a clear consideration of what it is that you wanted in the first place. If it's something substantial, something that's going to look good, play well and keep you fully engaged and entertained for several weeks then yes, you probably do need to pay up front. 

If you're already over-extended on existing games - and anyone still emotionally and intellectually invested in more than one MMORPG is inevitably going to have that problem - then  any yearning for a brief burst of novelty dopamine should be easily satisfied without recourse to a credit card.

Similarly, if you just need to fill a session here and there but you prefer to travel first-class then many full-price games have teasers or intros that can be played for free. In the same way that I find I only need to read the opening paragraphs of most magazine articles or that a couple of pages in the Sunday Supplement of a quality newspaper tells me as much as I want to know about a subject that someone's just written a 300 page book about, I often find those free tasters enough to sate my appetite for a particular game.

Then there's the issue of MMORPG habituation. As many MMO players have found, once you go big you can't go back. Single player games just feel odd. They don't seem real, somehow, which, given the innate irreality of video-gaming, is a disconnect too far for me. I find I can invest much more easily and settle more deeply into a bad MMO than a good single-player these days. I think MMOs have re-wired my neural pathways - and that may not even be as fanciful as it sounds.

Best success for me these days certainly doesn't stem from trying to find offline (or, more likely, online-alone) games that replicate MMO gameplay. I thought that would be a path to self-sufficiency but it's not as the virtual dust and cobwebs obscuring the icons on my desktop leading to Tanzia and Yonder confirm.

I'm coming around to the theory that if I'm to play any non-MMOs I need to focus on games that are short, have a definitive end-point and a clear, linear narrative. I finished and enjoyed Dr Langeskov, The Tiger and the Terribly Cursed Emerald which took about an hour. I finished and wasn't especially impressed by A Raven Monologue, which took half that time.


Doki Doki Literature Club I enjoyed most of all and that took several sessions of an hour or two. It's theoretically quite replayable and plenty of people have replayed it many times to tease out all the narrative possibilities. I'm not so keen on doing that, although I understand the theoretical appeal.

My problem with gaming as a delivery platform for narrative comes down to one of efficiency. I'm not convinced that the pay-off from interactivity is commensurate with the extra time and inconvenience. Having to replay games to see different outcomes strikes me as the equivalent of watching a movie or re-reading a novel a dozen times. Few adults are interested in doing that although it's a common practice in childhood (and academia).

It seems to me that both plain text and the moving image do a better job of creating immersion and involvement with character and story than having to manipulate avatars through activities. It's no co-incidence that the most successful narrative experiences in gaming have earned the pejorative generic of  "walking simulators". The less the player has to do, the more the narrative can shine.

Maybe this will change when virtual reality sheds its gadgetry and goes mainstream. I still tend to doubt it. There's a big difference between the Secret Cinema experience or Puzzle Rooms and just watching a movie or reading a thriller. Most people are lazy. I know I am.

All the same, when it comes to playing non-MMOs I am thinking of focusing my attention in that direction. I still have £10 credit on Steam from the IntPiPoMo prize last year and I might spend £3.99 of it on Life Is Strange 1-5, currently on sale at 75% off. Or I might just buy another MMO - The Division is 80% off at £8.39.

Neither of those games is new, of course. The big advantage of falling behind is that there's a lot to fall on. Despite all this talk of Steam, however, it was my Amazon Prime membership that got me out of the MMO groove this last week.

Just after I got back from holiday, someone in my Feedly (shamefully I can't recall who it was and can't now find the post) alerted me to the addition of a monthly gaming offer on Amazon Prime. It actually began a month or two back and the games change from month to month.

This month there were two that interested me - The Banner Saga and The Banner Saga 2. These are both titles I knew about and have occasionally pondered playing. The combination of "free but only for a month" was sufficient to trigger me and I downloaded them both.

I've played the first for several hours and its...okay. It certainly looks good, the plot is moderately involving and I like some of the characters. The combat seems both intrusive and awkward. Mechanically it keeps reminding me of Pirate 101, which works in a very similar way but is far more exciting. Structurally, the fights just get in the way of the narrative.

I was going at it quite hard, playing an hour or two each evening after I'd finished my GW2 dailies, but I missed one night and since then I haven't logged in again. The story isn't that interesting, the much-vaunted writing isn't always as fluid or convincing as it could be and the voice acting is a little off-putting on the sporadic occasions it occurs. I think accents are best avoided, by and large, unless it's comedy value you're after.

I probably will finish it eventually, if only because I've read that the sequel is an improvement in most respects so I'd like to try that. If not, well, it was free and there'll be something else on Prime in a couple of weeks.

Spoilt for choice I guess. Or just spoiled. That's the real problem here and Steam has a lot to answer for or so it's often said.

Still, we wouldn't want to be without it, eh? Would we?