Dodes'ka-den

"Somewhere between the sacred silence and sleep

Disorder, disorder, disorder"

 

System of a Down - Toxicity

 

 

A movie about a retarded kid running in circles.

Before I revenon to our pirate shiip, mentioning trains à propos Snowpiercer reminded myself of a more interesting take on the same themes. While Dodes'ka-den is not technically a postapocalyptic story, its restricted bidonville setting with its breakdown in social norms certainly fits the bill. It also bookends its series of down-and-out slum trash vignettes with the same symbol of industrial society trampling its unqualifiable human resources a.k.a. trains, or in this case a trolley... or rather an adolescent retard making choo-choo noises.

As such, it illustrates the difference between a true classic and a well executed summer blockbuster. For all its stylish set design and camera work, Snowpiercer's a popcorn flick, its comic book characters and plot tailored to the tastes of our brains' primitive common ground. From the inherent sainthood of "salt of the earth" poverty to glorifying emotion above reason, to the plucky upstarts wresting power away from those with alien mannerisms, to the unjustifiably happy ending placing sympathetic characters above objective good.

Dodes'ka-den also portrays industrial decay and anomie circumscribed by fantastic (which is to say, fantasized) engines of industry, but it avoids canonizing its urban poor as Dickensian martyrs. They're a mixed bag, as you'd expect to find in any barrel of monkeys: the thieves and bums, drunks, lunatics, slatterns, drudges, the cowards and the cripples, the selfless or luckless, the shortsighted, the impotent and the innocent. It's a mash-up of human failings and stillborn hopes wallowing in our species' farcical comedic glory, laughing the pain away, civilization's ambulant dross deferring existential despair by one more filthy, ragged day at a time. Though partial to thundering conclusions myself, I'll admit this movie works better with no denouement; life just drags on, piles on, fills in over the land's brim, scrap by scrap, yard by yard, hard betide every schmoe's woe while vile denial idles dull repose purpose.

Trenchantly, it places train sounds in the mouth of the retarded everyman. In addition to the more obvious hopes of inclusion by those society discards by the wayside, it has the added effect (intended or not by either the movie's crew or Shugoro Yamamoto the original author) of emphasizing that it is the microcephalic commoners driving market demand for trolleys, that in their delusional hopes for mansions in the sky, these human dross are the very society which has excluded them.

Lowest Common Denominator, an "exciting" new RPG by MicroBethObsiXile Inc.

InXile, Obsidian, and now Bethesda. Basically, if EA proves willing to sell Bioware, Microsoft will have bought computer role playing games. It will have consumed -- a genre. Think about it. Granted, for the company synonymous with monopoly and murderous capitalism in the modern era, capturing a niche market is still small potatoes, but it bears mentioning we no longer bat an eyelash at our corporate overlords outright buying an entire pre-existing idea. Not just property or copyright or manufacturing power, but an idea, a genre, a mode of expression - dead.

And it is death, make no mistake, regardless of the company figureheads' redacted public statements to the contrary. The larger companies get, the more massive their mass appeal, the less capable they are of creativity. A niche product originally so dependent on thought exercises and novel situations will exude nothing but the most nauseating pablum from under a megacorporation's public relations censorship board. Granted, little of these companies' output in recent years has proven worthy of the products from around Y2K by which their old leaders made their names, but the sheer combined bulk of that increasingly undeserved name recognition, whipped to march by a single marketing interest, will easily steamroll ersatz competitors. They will finish the ongoing process of redefining role-playing to fit the preferences of the braindead filth comprising the majority of this species.

Sure, some slim hope lingers in Europe, but let's face it: Paradox and CD Projekt will not match the clout of Microsoft, and if our last hope for tactical RPGs lies with fly-by-nights like Owlcat, we may as well all start buying football games. The best we can hope for going forward is, here and there, some odd little unpolished indie gem like Dead State or The Age of Decadence.

S'no piercer-er?

"What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing and resistance is being overcome."

-Nietzsche

 

 

Why is there a Snowpiercer TV series? Science Fiction, as the genre of ideas, tends toward "high concept" plots, which is to say gimmicks. Snowpiercer was the end of the world - on a train! Done. Unless you set each new episode in a new train car, weekly re-gimmicking that gimmick won't give anyone much of a kick.

 

Don't get me wrong, the movie did a beautiful job overall. Sure, some of the actors could've used another week or seven of rehearsals and the ending sort of fizzles, but Tilda Swinton really stole the show and the inherently industrial metallic chugging of train mechanisms lends itself readily to Dickensian class struggles. This is a flick so slick it could blaze simple torches into a show-stopping visual, but episodic stagnation will literally stop the show. Where will it go without the rush, the momentum, of advancing car by car to smite one's enemies and see them engine-driven before you? How many times can you reiterate "poverty sucks on a train and the world is still ending" before the audience yawns its way to another channel?

Repetition is but one problem. The headlong rush through social strata also prevented viewers from looking too closely at various scenes' claim to novelty or drama - like "why are we siding with the fat chick when everyone else is starving?" or the nominal villains being in the right about pretty much everything. At which point does even a TV-grade audience's IQ clue in to the wrongness of murdering the world's extant population out of spite? Justified post-facto by an animalistic drive to place one's own offspring above all others? Episode, after episode, after episode...

But mostly, it's a problem of momentum. Once a SciFi plot has made its point, pulled off its "one effect" as Poe might've said, it's done. You don't need a postapocalyptic choo-choo to reiterate truisms about mammals being protective of their young. A moving train is a dramatic plot device. Sitting in a train car week after week... not so much.

Wasteland 3

"Well, I got my wish, I was the best, the only problem is

I'm laying on the cold cement with a bullet in my head"

 

The Dead South - Gunslinger's Glory

 

 

Long story short: it's... decent, but not worth the price of admission. (And yes, spoilers do follow.)

 

Working title: "Wasteland 3 the third" because I had initially intended to continue my play-by-play to the end, but in all honesty this game in its current form is worth neither the money nor the time. In *all* all honesty it's also far from the worst cRPG I've played, but "less of a shit-show than it could've been" can hardly count as anything but damning praise, especially for a company claiming industry seniority and big ticket ambitions.

 

Let's start with the feminist angle before moving to more relevant concerns. For all the plot makes a big deal of schlepping from dusty Arizona to frozen Colorado, it makes its true home in Femtasia, that FEMale chauvINIST wonderland where everything bad is men's fault, no woman is ever wrong except by being forced into sin by a man, where men are born with a karmic debt requiring them to justify their existence and men who express sexual interest in women are losers, rapists, sadists, traitors and mass murderers. To be fair, the pattern is nowhere near as absolute as it was in Deadfire, in that Wasteland 3 does at least include several standalone examples of negatively characterized female minibosses. Nevertheless, aside from one three-line background convo in town about newspaper comics and a running gag about the lovably batty hotel owner calling your HQ with nonsensical concerns, you'll never find any man written into a position of moral or intellectual superiority over a woman. In contrast, you can't take even a few steps without running into a "man bad, woman good" juxtaposition. Leaving aside the more casual male-bashing, some of the more awkwardly shoehorned examples stand out:

- there's Santa's workshop, presided over by an evil man in a Santa suit who's turned it into a drug manufactory. Standard comedic reversal, except (purely by accident) the poor oppressed "elf" who tipped you off just happens to be female.

- or the group of cowboy cannibals who ask you to bring back some of their deserters for dessert. I only got as far as the first, a woman who ran away to avoid an arranged marriage to the chief. Perfectly workable postapocalyptic cannibal angle with a ten gallon twist... but they just had to spin it into a feminist rant

- or the two women, Kym Hie and Yoon Hie, who ran up a monstrous debt gambling, skipped town and had you, the law, murder nine of their pursuers, yet are still painted as innocent, put-upon victims in contrast to the boorish, sputtering, caveman-voiced male pursuing them

- or the bloodthirsty backwoods religious fundamentalist villains you meet in the tutorial, the Dorseys, gutting their victims and letting them bleed to death while they dance in their blood, best described as "hicks with dicks" since every single one you meet just happens to be male - juxtaposed with your companion "The Light" the Mary Sue whose family they kill

- or that the few sympathtic males tend to have their survival justified by being mama's boys or "family men" or "my place is with my daughter"

- or Victory Buchanan, a campy sadist and one of your villains to be deposed. It turns out the man's army was built entirely upon the abilities of a woman named "The Gift"... because of course... and she turns out benign and even helpful, her grand works having only been twisted and perverted by the man who crippled her... while her family (which he's implied to have murdered) consisted of a mother and a sister... and she's also rescued one of your fellow rangers from his clutches... a female ranger...

 

and are you picking up on the SUBTLE SUBTEXT here?

 

- or the machine commune, the one place you'd think they'd give the "man bad, woman good" crap a rest, being all clunky retro-futuristic tinkertoys, except for the cheerful and helpful young robot VICI who declares itself female and emancipates itself from an oppressive and callous dad-bot Vivisecto... to the tune of a female vocalist version of Genesis' lyric "too many men making too many problems" - do they need to lay the gratuitous man-bashing on any thicker or ARE YOU CATCHING THE VERY SUBTLE SUBTEXT HERE?!?

 

Best not even get into the main plot, which revolves around you overthrowing "The Patriarch" with the help of a rebellious female ranger from the previous games, presumably someone the fanbase already idolizes. Though the Patriarch's three children are described as main threats, the two males are routinely derided as "human garbage" and not as smart as he thinks he is or "Tweedle-Dumb" a.k.a. "that psycho sonovabitch" while their tyrannical sister is constantly described in terms of her superhuman leadership qualities.

Again, not nearly as fanatically anti-male as Deadfire (you can still get a good ending by siding with Saul; bad endings include both a male and female option) but there's no escaping the "man bad, woman good" juxtapositions or the constant push toward the canonical path of siding with a woman against "he was a man" Saul Buchanan "The Patriarch" hint-hint-hint.

 

*** 

 

But alright. Enough of that. How does Wasteland 3 stack up in terms of gameplay?

Poorly.

For one thing, it's rather easy. Investing no points in barter, I still wound up with a pile of cash by the end. You have no inventory limits in either slots or weight, no action point costs for swapping equipment, no time limits so you can always return to base to heal up for free instead of using your gigantic free pile of looted consumables, can farm exp by running around aimlessly to get ambushed, and if you ever need to let a drug crash debuff wear off you can just minimize for lunch. On 2/4 "wastelander" difficulty I was able to run a very squishy team with token weapon skills with no problems, dying only when I suicidally charged in.

 

The few more interesting fights can be cheesed, as in the case of the Scorpitron, an optional boss with its multiple deadly attacks per round, tactical nuke launch and horde of allies.

You want anticlimactic? Endgame encounter neutralized via a $66, first-act consumable.

 

I'm trying very hard to make allowance for InXile finishing the project under COVID-19 lockdown, so let's assume the largely empty overland map might get populated by more as-yet unfinished encounters at some point. I also won't complain about the obvious uneven use of animated NPCs in dialogues - to tell the truth I would've been perfectly happy with static portraits, text and occasional voiceovers in the spirit of Pillars of Eternity. Further bells and whistles are nice but a waste of money.

 

I'll also concede a welcome absence of major bugs. No crashes (one crash) or lock-ups, no quests stuck in unfinishable states, no disappearing items, none of the bullshit we've come to expect from half-finished releases.

 

Minor bugs on the other hand: WTF is this? Blocked by what?

Yup, this here's a AAA-ambitious, Microsoft-bankrolled tactical RPG extravaganza alright.

For an encore, it also bugged out to my melee after she already took a swing at it.

As a matter of fact, line of sight problems abound, from inability to see through open doors to opaque walls becoming permeable to gunfire, especially near corners.
Characters occasionally become unable to interact for a round, forcing you to waste their remaining AP, and there are several problems with items being officially "equipped" or not, like a rocket launcher's speed debuff being negatively applied as a buff, stalled animations, quickslot items unslotting themselves or items switching from one hand to the other of their own accord, etc.

Don't get me started on the lack of a pause button or the straightjacketed camera angles. And, given given most of these issues seem like they should've been perfectly testable from social isolation, I'm not particularly inclined to excuse them all.

In the same vein, for a game relying so heavily on shooting from behind cover, this is a constant problem:

 

I shotted that screen while playing Wasteland 2 years ago yet never got around to complaining about it. You can take cover behind scenery, yet it was almost impossible to discern before a fight what would or would not officially count as cover... even in the case of obvious choices like sandbags. Sandbags! - which have been stacked for a couple of centuries by infantry as cover and are even arranged such in this very image. (Place sure as hell doesn't need flood protection.)

Wasteland 3 has been a great deal more consistent, yet still:

Look, ma, no cover! Either full or partial! Come on, you went to the trouble of staging wild west saloon gunfights. Dodging behind the bar (or in this case maybe a welcome desk?) is a staple of such scenes, all the more galling as this is supposed to count as your hard-earned flanking position.

It's not all bad.

The setting is a lot grittier than the company's previous blunted, softened take on Tides of Numenera, with plenty of unavoidable bad outcomes and opportunities to make evil choices.

Love the expanded use of leftover action points and saving up "strike" attacks between fights for a rainy day.

Noncombat skills like Mechanics and Lockpicking do see routine use in setting up positioning or depriving enemies of turret support, a lesson InXile learned well from Tides of Numenera. On the minus side, most fights resolve to pulling enemies into ambushes at a choke point, and support abilities beyond plain-Jane healing are tied into either grenades or weapons fire, severely limiting your role options. Justified to some extent because gun-smoking cowboysgirls and "head 'em off at the pass" tie into Wasteland's central space western aesthetic, but it does get old.

 

Wasteland 3 does also improve on its predecessor's lack of weapon / status effect functionality (at last energy weapons seem to actually work this time around) though compared to contemporary tactical RPGs it still plays very much like a "point and click" game.

Your tank support was also quite well handled; I was pleasantly surprised to see it fully incorporated into the final mission instead of left by the roadside as an extraneous gimmick.

On the plus side again, sound design deserves special mention. Though background music seems deliberately omitted in favor of ambient noise, what's there is expertly done, from wind and engine vroom-vroom to warning klaxons to the various ironic song covers of everything from Wang Chung to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I dare you not to chuckle a bit at the "Santa's Brew" jingle. Sound crew? Laudable work.

On the other hand, voice acting, with the exception of a few central players, tends to tank. Though played off as campy, deliberate faux amateur theater, this rapidly reveals itself a double bluff for intern-quality filler - which serves as a nice segue into Wasteland 3's main problem: terrible pacing played off as intentional levity. In both storytelling complexity and gameplay, the campaign peaks somewhere around The Bizarre or Denver (depending on your pattern of leveling) then gradually fizzles to a pointless repetitive chore until the admittedly enjoyable finale. Though less of a joke than Wasteland 2, it still clings too desperately to the worst facets of '80s/'90s game culture, when the sheer thrill of flickering pixels and pop culture references made us all too willing to overlook a lack of narrative or interactive quality for the joy of mashing buttons.

 

Take the Dorseys, who fill the entire introduction but then vanish inexplicably until you randomly stumble upon their cabin in the woods and wipe them out in two fights with barely a paragraph of context.

 

Or the major factions like the Gippers / Godfishers or Payasos / Monster Army treated as episodic encounters; run through their zone once and you'll have no reason to return. In fact, the entire faction reputation system seems aborted a single trimester in, having no discernable effect beyond access to some trivial shops in the wilderness.

 

Combat encounters also lack escalation. Instead of being gradually introduced to the monster classes or enemy factions, ramping up to epic showdowns, you instead fight repetitive groups of the same enemies whenever you meet a particular faction.

Or take the "companion" NPCs, of which you'll need two, exactly two of which are available in the first act, with six others appearing much too late for you to fit their skillsets into your group - two in fact are only available from the end of what would logically be your penultimate major mission onwards... what the hell is the point?

 

Skill checks are quite steep, forcing you to min-max early on, but given that you're fed skill books for your tenth out of ten skill levels, you can easily max each character's primary noncombat skill by mid-game then spend the rest of the campaign clicking through guaranteed irrelevant interactions. Worst of both worlds.

 

By the same token, after fleshing out each character's core attributes you'll likely find yourself stacking your Luck into end-game, meaning you rely more instead of less on the randomizer as you go. Especially as lucky dodges seem to work even after enemies' sky-high ToHit bonuses obviate normal dodging, and lucky crits can be truly massive - for my sniper it made a difference anywhere from 300 to 7000 damage, and no I did not add an extra zero. Works for your enemies too. It doesn't seem to matter how much armor and health you stack, a lucky crit will one-shot your team's tank.

Even in the final speedway zone, you're still being introduced to bit player minibosses, picking up scrap and fighting the same-sized packs of the same enemies you've been hacking apart all game long, except with higher stats.

 

Throughout it all, the farcical atmosphere discourages you from taking too deep an interest. Although the dramedy occasionally hits its mark (e.g. Flab or the Children of the Cabbage scene) it comes across as more of a cop-out for failing to adequately structure the campaign or manage dramatic tension. Feels like some jackass clapping you on the shoulder constantly telling you to relax, you stupid piece of shit, and not think about it too hard. Which is a pity, because the basic story of an aging, devoted yet morally compromised monarch securing his land's future against the aggression of his own offspring amidst the disintegration of human civilization is memorable (yes, yes, King Lear) and would've made a welcome addition to cRPGs' repertoire if more thoughtfully handled. The factions are a lot more memorable and distinct from each other when compared to other games' elves and goblins or space elves and space goblins. Too bad they never develop or interact beyond their introductions.

 

This brings us back to the "man bad, woman good" propaganda. While InXile showed heavy tendencies in Tides of Numenera (plus, much of your main quest consisted of rescuing innocent women from a father's folly) these remained muted. I doubt ramping up the anti-male bigotry here serves as more than a cynical bid for uncritical praise. In my final summation of Deadfire's version of such stupidity I said "Fanaticism is, among other things, a refuge for the incompetent. [...] unskilled hacks shielding themselves from criticism behind the unbending bulwark of constantly repeated politically correct mantras. My crap promotes people of the correct skin color or sex, so if you call my crap crap then you're a sexist, racist, child-molesting nazi pig." Wasteland 3 is a passable game which, instead of admitting its limitations and playing its strengths, over-reaches for blockbuster status then tries to cover up its threadbare nature by facetious pandering and adolescent feigned nonchalance.

 

And that... is that. Although tempted to bemoan Obsidian and InXile's purchase by Microsoft (a condemnation to lowest-common-denominator pablum) both companies have demonstrated by their last releases that their best years were already behind them. Look elsewhere for RPGs.

Since I Found Serenity

"She walks the waters like a thing of life,
And seems to dare the elements to strife"

Lord Byron - The Corsair

In the course of suffering through Wasteland 3 I put a few miles on their "kodiak" vehicle used for overland map travel, a.k.a. the Canyonero. It ranks one of the game's better gimmicks due to a set of upgrades you acquire at various points in the story (weapons, armor) yet still falls short of its potential, providing me as good an excuse as any to evaluate such plot device devices.

Providing players with a base of operations is a staple of cRPGs, but usually limited to a bed next to a treasure chest in a 10x10 room. Crossroad Keep in Neverwinter Nights 2 made quite a fuss about the ability to purchase more or less utilitarian upgrades, and later stepchildren of the series like Pillars of Eternity or Dragon Age: Origins also pointedly centered your adventures on a familiar yet expandable home base in the form of Caed Nua or your campsite. Such a location provides a much needed thread of continuity to the murder-hobo lifestyle, and as I remarked in the case of Skyrim it works wonders when deliberately built up via player effort and providing utility in return. The otherwise very thoughtful Tyranny, for instance, could've gotten even more mileage out of its iconic spires by letting you play favorites and build one of them up, like say, the one at Vendrien's Well, as your sanctum sanctorum with added functionality to fit its narrative importance.

 

Note the Dragon Age campsite also acknowledges the mobility inherent to a classic hero's journey. Staking out a plot of land works fine if you manage to emphasize the intersection with city building and playing mayor, as Pathfinder: Kingmaker did somewhat successfully, but generally speaking, a mobile base of operations better suits RPGs, especially the more story-tethered ones where it can offset your changing locales with a stable foothold.

Ships are an obvious choice, but I have yet to see it done truly well.

PoE2: Deadfire failed by encouraging you to switch vessels, undermining the basic use of a central thread.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 lent its version more stability and personality, but lacked upgrades and customization to get the player invested in the Lady Vengeance's well-being.

 

In Wasteland 3's case, the Canyonero checks most requirements. It's customizable via resource investment (ammunition and upgrades) and many fights (especially random encounters) are built around its significant armored cover and supporting fire capability. However, the game instead ties most of your progress to your refurbished air base Ranger HQ. That's where new items become available for purchase and where NPCs show up for quest hooks or recruitment. Thus your attention is once again split instead of focused on a single powerful symbol of your progress.

The nature of the vehicle doesn't particularly matter. It could be a spaceship, train, submarine or dirigible (Castle Wulfenbach from Girl Genius would qualify, from Klaus' point of view) or a massive, upgradeable scrap pile on tank treads. A mobile version of Dead State's apocalypse-proofed schoolhouse would be ideal, with its myriad interconnections with resource requirements and manufacturing, various characters' abilites and demands, quest hooks and foray scheduling. Yet that doesn't quite provide a concise enough visual, so take a look at this:

Frostpunk is not an RPG, but a brilliant gem of a post-apocalyptic city sim. At a single glance you can discern the focal point of your struggle for survival, affixed to the center of a polar grid, towering above other structures, spewing its infernal challenge against encroaching infinity. Your lifeline, your gluttonous and unforgiving master, the sun to which your flowering facades all turn, the apex of your hopes and the nadir of your anxieties: The Generator. The greatest resource sink and prime mover of your endeavors, site of worshipful processions, public executions and noble sacrifices.

This mentality should permeate a cRPG's mobile base of operations as well: a single focus, an anchor in the aether as the solid world burns down around you, as you careen between rising action and underworlds, tethered to as many plotlines as possible but a delocalized center unto itself, an extended phenotype of your own character pulsing in tune with your successes and failures, the axes to your plot diagram, a framework for a moving frame of reference.

I was reading something from 2017 and apropos of nothing, is it just my impression or did the term "humblebrag" have an unusually short shelf life?

Figures from the past, stand tall!

"Conquistadors who took their share
They keep calling me"

NIN - Dead Souls

______________________________________________

"According to this portrayal, those were times of animality and barbaric, uncontrolled procreation, of catastrophe both economic and military, and the undeniable achievements of past civilization were presented as an expression of the strength and determination that permitted people to overcome the benightedness and the cruelty of the period: those achievements, then, came about as it were in spite of the prevailing tendency to live at the cost of others. What once took untold effort, they said, and was attainable only by a few, the road to it bristling with danger and the necessity for sacrifice, compromise - material success purchased only by moral defeat - was now common, easy, and certain.
[...]
afterward, in the natural course of things, came oblivion and indifference; children marveled when they learned of the romantic period of astronautics, and possibly felt even a little fear toward their ancestors, who were as strange to them and as incomprehensible as the ancestors who engaged in wars of plunder and voyages for gold. It was the indifference that appalled me the most, far more than the condemnation -- our life's work had become wrapped in silence, buried, and forgotten."
 
Stanislaw Lem - Return from the Stars
(cosmonauts return after over a relativistically-dilated century to a forcibly pacifist future)
_______________________________________________

"Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio Buendía ventured a murmur:
"It’s the largest diamond in the world."
"No" the gypsy countered. "It’s ice."
José Arcadio Buendía, without understanding, stretched out his hand toward the cake, but the giant moved it away."Five reales more to touch it" he said. José Arcadio Buendía paid them and put his hand on the ice and held it there for several minutes as his heart filled with fear and jubilation at the contact with mystery."

Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
(fun geographact: Colombia's on the Equator)
______________________________________________

"It was a hard age, and some might consider it a cruel age. Manners were refined, but passions ran unchecked. The most exquisite punctilio was observed; but death by torture was the common lot of most. It was an age in which six out of seven women died in childbirth; in which infant mortality was a shocking 87 per cent: in which the average life-expectancy was no more than 12.3 years; in which the Plague yearly ravaged the central city, carrying away an estimated two-thirds of the population; in which continual religious warfare halved the able-bodied male population every year - to the point where some regiments were forced to use blind men as gunnery officers.
And yet, it could not be considered an unhappy age. Despite difficulties, the population soared to new heights every year, and men aspired to fresh extremes of audacity. If life was uncertain, it was at least interesting. Machinery had not bred individual initiative out of the race as yet. And though there were shocking class differences and feudal privilege reigned supreme, checked only by the dubious power of the king and the baleful presence of the clergy, still it could fairly be called a democratic age and a time of individual opportunity."

Robert Sheckley - Mindswap
(in case you missed the joke, this was from a parody of histerical adventure stories)
_____________________________________________
 


Betimes of yore, itinerant performers might be witnessed wending their way about the countryside, offering the uneducated masses news, trendy songs, brief glimpses of modernity and modern gadgets and the mysteries of the far corners of the world. Then we acquired a postal system, telegraph, radio, television, and teh internets. Fairs, carnivals and circuses persist, but as a performance artist's impression of performance art, acting the role of honored traditions and cozy low-frills socialization complete with forced laughter.
We no longer need big tops and gypsy caravans to bring samples and images of the latest technological marvels; those marvels' manufacturers will gladly spam us with video ads.
We no longer need them to recount Pulcinello's latest witticisms; they're on PBS (and nobody watches it anyway.)
We no longer need them to show us what Indian elephants look like; our neighbours keep a statue of one in their living room.
We can no longer be shocked by their freak shows; we hold presidential elections.
One wonders when the lingering appeal of greasy food, musical fiberglass ponies, clowns on unicycles and the centrifugal vomitorium will at last wear off as well.

One of my previous few posts here touched on Renaissance faires, the new kid on the village green, which increasingly cuts into the already dwindling entertainment market share of previous eras' communal spectacles. Yet they differ, crucially, in that past centuries' faires looked to the future or the wider world, dealt in hope (often false) and mystery and novelty, while the RenFaire mentality obsesses over a simpler, more ignorant and brutal past.

However, living in the past can also entail a desperation for moral superiority, a self-serving conceit toward those who have passed beyond defending themselves. Instead of seeking the wonders out there, somewhere, beyond one's parochial upbringings, cling to the righteousness of denouncing the mote in a famous figure's eye. Every braindead schlub who accuses Napoleon of short man syndrome can feel like having bested Napoleon himself. This sort of sadistic freak show spectator attitude toward history seems to be increasing and not diminishing with historical factoids being vastly more readily available than in previous decades.

In other news, Wikipedia wants you to know that George Washington Was a Slaveowner!!! (dun-dun-duuuUUUNNN!!!)

This was the headline Wikipedia chose to run to egg on the rioters back when they started a couple of months ago, to foment vandalism and violence by legitimizing the opportunistic filth using George Floyd's murder as pretext to assault their neighbours. How's that for a center ring act? In that same spirit, allow me to volunteer the sideshow attraction Cab Calloway Was a Filthy Sexist Pig because he called Minnie a "moocher" and a "frail" and that is how he should be remembered, as a Filthy Sexist Pig, not as the black band leader who broke the musical mold and went platinum half a century before it was even invented.

Fanatics of every stripe will impose their favorite litmus test on others. It's like getting into heaven or hell based on how many frogs you've run over with your car in your life. Not ducks or chipmunks or ants or cats. Just frogs. And stepping on them is fine. Just don't run them over with your car.
But you're not obligated to agree with the fanatics. You can call bullshit on overusing the single-variable frog-squishing metric to judge human worth.

This puts me in an awkward position. I've always despised hero worship as slavish, especially in the case of primarily military figures like Washington, but much like singlemindedly labeling him a father of democracy, the motivation in labeling him a slaveowner is too disingenuous to ignore. There is a world of difference betwen not actively hero-worshipping historic figures, admitting their flaws, and going out of your way to demonize them for an arbitrary sample set of failings. The petty vandals indulging in such revisionism delight to point out that he only agreed to manumit his slaves after his own death. Well, ok, what was the socially accepted time to release one's slaves among others of his generation and upbringing in that society? Might the prevailing answer have been... never? Because I'm pretty sure Georgey boy still placed slightly ahead of the curve. More importantly, the precepts of equality of the government he helped establish, however laughably incomplete or dishonest, did more to skew the balance of human society toward balance than the lives of a thousand other perfectly mundane whip-cracking plantation owners put together. But hey, it's not enough that he was better than others, because he wasn't better enough.

More importantly, the phrase "he was a man of his time" should not even need to be spoken. There are a million details of all our lives which we have not determined, extended phenotypes we inherit as surely as skin color. We remember historic figures not for their commonplace, banal features (did Michelangelo eat bread? with his hands? and shit in a pot?) but for their few actions which rose above commonality. There were a million other Italians who all shat in pots, but they didn't paint Sistine Chapels. There were a million other murderous greedy racist sailors like Christopher Columbus, but they didn't bother finding new lands from which to take captives. They just assaulted their neighbours. But hey, we obviously can't give Shakespeare his due because he was born the wrong sex and the wrong skin color and never wrote plays about animal rights, and Marie Curie's name should be stricken from the history books because when accused of being Jewish, she didn't drop everything to devote her life to combating anti-Semitism.

One thing we should remember about the past: while it glorified and demonized its own past, it also still looked to the future, to the mysteries and wonders of the universe, a feature utterly lacking in the carnival antics of current self-styled "progressives" obsessed with attacking a deformed caricature of history to justify their own bigotry. This is not social reform. This is the mentality of a decaying empire, which has ceased processing new information and set to the final lurid spectacle of cannibalizing itself.

Wasteland 3 up from 11

"Never really knowing why, they wont understand
As you hang from that tree with that look of despair"

The Dead South - Gunslinger's Glory


We now return you to The Bizarre, part Scooby Doo joke, part pigsty, part food court, part live parody porn show, part monument to indiscriminate killing. Home to, in decades past, an army of hooligans who decided to ape the disproportionate violence of B-grade horror flicks, were after spanked into submission by daddy Saul and now peddle trinkets out of a disaffected mall. Features the third museum in the game, this time a museum of geekdom promising us a copy of Wasteland 4. Oooh, I can hardly wait until it lands in the clearance bin.

In the mall's former toddler prison holds court the Monster Army's leader, Flab the Inhaler, who though he looks like a mall Santa at first glance is upon closer inspection straining the seams of a Dracula costume.
It would be remiss not to remark here on the missed opportunity to actually work the Claus costume in as sinister leader of the Monster Army. Sure, the evil Santa schtick's been done before, but this "supernatural monster among monsters" setup was just begging for it: handing out giftwrapped grenades as mission rewards out of a splotchy blood-colored bag, his lurid wheezing voice trickling over the loudspeakers, reminding his followers he knows when they are sleeping.

Still, old Flab holds the most potential yet, playing the psychotic impoverished aristocrat with all the juxtaposed macabre squalor and dignity a Dracula role entails: "I am calm because I must be, friend, so is the burden of leadership."

Interesting.
Apparently the Monster Army is an official faction with their own reputation bar. Here I thought it would be difficult to choose a side in this story. It's decided, rangers: we're doing the monster mash.


Level 12
For now, it's time to polish off this starter quest chain and return to the city. Finding the mechanic's kid sister turned demented cannibal, while potentially a dramatic moment, falls flat in execution. At least it gave me a chance to snack on a finger. Though, to be honest, the finger food was tastier in Divinity: Original Sin 2.

The refugee smugglers looked positively terrifying at first in their reinforced position, but their AI doesn't leash to said reinforced position, so they're trivially easy to split off onto the bridge. Basically an extended tutorial in pulling mobs, but we really should be past that stage of the game by now.

Canines were in scarce supply around The Bizarre, so Patches 2.1 was of the long-eared, long-incisor, cottontailed variety, and died valiantly drop-kicking mutant porculverines. Patches 2.5 also came with some bugs in the form of horns instead of fangs and unusual howls that sound almost like bleating. He acquits himself well in the fight against the smugglers, but it's just not the same, y'know? Lucky the Hoon family homestead which I failed to rescue from mass murder and arson is now over-run with waste wolves, so Patches 3.0 is live and all was well in the land (unless you got mass-murdered and arsoned.)

A quick romp through the wastelands reveals them to be mostly wasted land; random encounters make my underlings look better than me.

Shadow the armorless little knife-happy ninja's evasion stack's already in the 40s, and that's after three attacks per round or dashing across an entire battlefield with maxed out speed, or opening a fight with a rocket AoE before closing the distance. The even littler Pokey's been cashing in his action point bonus with some regularity for a second high-damage, max-range sniper shot per round. As for me, my INT/CHA build's not yet yielding the wide array of support abilities I prefer. The potential for rapid-fire energy weapons to stack armor-destroying "strikes" is there alright, but not quite gelling yet, the extra healing is all overflow and debuffing enemies' offense tends to take a back seat to trying to pierce their armor and drop them faster.


Fucking hell.
As I was writing this, I died and lost fifteen minutes' worth of gameplay for exiting that mutant random encounter into a cloud of radiation because this game with its AAA ambitions LACKS PAUSING for some unfathomable unreason, including on zone transitions. Not to mention the radiation clouds are so vague you'll never discern their edges (but you'll take full DoT no matter how shallowly you edge through.)
Le sigh.
Anyway:


Level 13
Ah, the denouement of the refugees mission. A sympathetic old mother of several was sneaking the invading superfluous simians into town with no regard for the ecosystem's carrying capacity or the welfare of its existing inhabitants, instead of taking the more logical route of dispersing the burden to more settlements, so let's haul the self-righteous bitch off to jail. (Where she's still given the last word, because prosocial shortsightedness is all the rage soft cooing reassurance.)

Aaaaaand, yup, called it, the blatantly obvious main plot "twist" begins to unfold.
The notably female Angela Deth radios you to tell you the man in charge is evil, evil, evil, then sends you to rescue a hostage to "help you with Liberty" - that being of course The Patriarch's female offspring. Woman good, man bad, other woman... redeemable to good? (ugh, I just had a sickening thought - in the spirit of Dragon Age: Origins, what if they intend to put your party member Lucia (being a member of the nobility) in Saul's place?)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I've gone ten levels without finding any "companion" NPCs (you need 2+ of them in your group of 6) meaning the developers are apparently forcing your hand to bring along both the starter mook Kwon (who's fairly bland) and much worse their bereaved pistoleer prodigy Lucia. Unsurprising for a Mary Sue, given one of their main traits is monopolizing screen time.
Now, finally, Scotchmo from Wasteland 2 shows up, but as his small arms, sneaking and lockpicking are already covered by my own characters I'll likely be replacing him as soon as I find an ass-kissing brawler / heavy gunner. Had this exact problem in Wasteland 2: as building more than one specialist per group rarely offers any benefit (doubling up on animal tamers or robot wranglers might help) the only way not to wind up with redundant, wasted skills is to cheat and look up companions' specialties online before ever starting your campaign.
Still, I'll take a piss-soaked, vomiting drunkard for a neighbour over a feminist mouthpiece anyday.

La Perla, the slaver foreshadowed as the sinister "smiling lady" in previous dialogues, wants me to trick a refugee into capture. As this would involve both dishonesty and restricting freedom for no particular reason, I'd rather tip off the victim. Run along, ya sweet lil' thang. *butt pat*
(It is unusual, however, that they made the slaver female.)

Got my Canyonero tricked out with a rad clown head and some rad resistance, so it's time to go a-venturin'.

Northwards! Oh, hey, some friendly cannibal cowboys. Why of course I'll track down your targets for you, pahdnahs! Have to say I'm enjoying the slow tempo renditions of old songs, but are these out of copyright, licensed, legitimate parodies, or does Microsoft own all rights to the wanging of chungs?
Seems a bit cheap driving around in circles with no time limit, waiting to be ambushed for EXP points. Thought single player RPGs left that sort of stupidity to "action" games over the past decades.
Southwards! At least in all these random encounters and the Monster Army bunker, with all the nasty armor-plated robot fights, my investment in energy weapons starts paying off.
Back at The Bizarre the parody porn theatre mistress is willing to accept Scotchmo as a star for her next production. Not that you have more than two choices. Of course, if you really wanted to be edgy, it would've been Lucia walking back out bowlegged and shellshocked.


Level 14
Time to defend monsters from mobsters, for the glory of rubber masks everywhere! A formation preset or two would be nice, to prevent my melee and SMG from winding up in the back. Also, while "pulling" is an integral part of cRPG mechanics, it does get a bit repetitive to back behind the nearest choke point every single fight. Most games will endlessly aggravate you by locking you in tiny arenas with no cover or forcing you to bullrush a reinforced position; Wasteland 3 edges slightly in the other direction, prodding you too obviously to constantly bait the idiot AI around corners. I'll still take option 2 over option 1, but some more 1.5 might be nice.

Guess it's on to Denver now.
-with a quick stopover to save innocent women from evil men, because of course. It's a more interesting fight, against well-armed mercenaries who outnumber and out-position you, but easily cheesed with mechanic consumables and a liberal dose of support fire from your country-fried truck endorsed by a clown('s head.)

After tearing through the mercs, it turns out one of the women borrowed a lifetime's worth of money and lost it all gambling. Her religious sister helped her skip town. You can pay off their ludicrously high debt, pass a skill check to let them pay in installments or take the evil options of killing or placing them in indentured servitude for seven years to pay off their debt. Throughout all this, their male creditor is given a harumphing, grunting, grating, low-class voice, sputtering insults at the women (and at Jesus for not being good at staying alive) while the two females demonstrate care for each other, are given clear, earnest, heartfelt, put-upon voices with words like "innocent women" worked into your own lines even after they confess the debt.

Granted, at least they gave the debtor one line about being a fuck-up who just wanted to spend the money on dumb shit (made to sound like redeeming repentance) but let's put the situation to the usual test: reverse the polarity. A male borrows from a woman, loses a fortune gambling, his fundamentalist brother helps him skip town and their radio distress call weaponizes one of the legal authorities in the area, the rangers, to kill nine people (did everyone forget about the mercenaries?) ((They're not dead, they're just pining for the fjords.)) Would the writing and voice acting paint the two fugitive men as innocent, harried victims and their pursuer as a drooling, cackling, sadistic bitch? Would the religious angle be painted as salt-of-the-earth lovingkindness or as self-serving or bloodthirsty fanaticism? Could we draw a parallel to another example of debt in this game, like, say, the indebted male drug dealer at the nightclub whose stash you recover, painted as a whiny, pathetic, jittery, drug-addled lowlife, beneath contempt and beyond redemption? Would anything sell this little plot as morally upright, absent the limitless conceit of female entitlement? Am I asking rhetorical questions?

For bonus intersectional purity test points, the women were endowed with far-east names while the man's name is "Moss." Good night, everybody!


Level 15
What else we got? An "act stupid for your reward" encounter at the abandoned well, a free stash of loot guarded by a badger (throwback to Wasteland 2) and a random encounter with yet another crazy religious sect, the Godfishers. Oh noes! Hang on Patches 3.0! Daddy (and his 53 max HP) is a-comin' ta save ya!

Recruited Fishlips the road warrior cannibal, once again 3/4 skills wasted for redundancy or insult (I refuse to invest in "toaster repair") and therefore useless to my team. Is there any reason not to move with the times and let players build up these "companions" (with some defining bonuses/weaknesses) from level 1 to current party/leader/location level at the moment of recruitment? Or am I meant to reroll new ranger characters whenever I find a new companion?

Also, limited quickslots are pointless if it doesn't cost AP to shuffle items in and out of them.


Level 17
(that doesn't sound right - bug or did I gloss over a level? no matter)

A minor villainess? Color me surprised. That's two counting La Perla the slaver. They beat Deadfire's grand total of one!
Wait... why does equipping my rocket launcher boost my speed up to 11 instead of decreasing it by 0.5 as advertised?

Did I just stumble into counter-Counterstrike? Run with your nukes out? (edit: Not that the penalty makes sense in the first place if you can ignore it by simply switching weapon-hands with no AP cost)

 
I'd hit the Hard Heads' hideout in the first place in response to a distress call from a "government agent" who will obviously turn out to be some kind of android or robot or Cochise beta version. Yes, we get it. Your hints are not subtle. *sigh* You can write entertainment fit for mass-market IQs, or you can try to sound clever, but you can't do both at the same time.
A-yup, it's... Ronald Reagan's unborn talking nuclear urban combat car secret admirer.
Alright, I'll concede I did not see all of that coming.

Schleppin' on over to the tellurium mine...
Gotta say, Wasteland 3's atmosphere and storytelling looked half promising at first, but while less nonsensical than its predecessor, it's still gotten bogged down in forced, telegraphed gimmicks. Ok, so Trudy's a dog. Why belabor the point? Null Stack's talk of robots finding religion's a bit fresher, but still weak compared to Horatio Nullbuilt the Man-worshiper or "oy this guy" from Futurama. Nothing much seems to be happening all through the middle game. We're learning nothing new about the world, no new companions are showing up, the main factions aren't interacting with each other and "episodic" would be too long a word to describe map encounters. (Of course, I did also follow cRPG standard operating procedure in clearing side quests before main quests, instead of obeying InXile's mission level guidelines.)

Finally made it to Denver and the Reagan-worshippers, a group I'll have no problem pissing off. The Book of Bonzo finally got a chuckle out of me after the pervasive dead air of the past few levels; love that the oil-money Reaganauts are led by a bunch'a "Nancies" - in addition to the deserved slap in the face to macho patriotism, along with The Wyman's dialogue it makes up for a bit of the feminist pandering.
"Why don't you marry it" - heh, classic.
Getting tired of hearing yuppies try to fake downhome upstate backwoods accents though. Would it have killed you to toss your country cousins a few bucks for a recording session?


Level 18
Godfisher fights: feel suspiciously like filler, but I do like the continued integration of noncombat skills and alternate angles of attack. Too bad the lack of pausing makes reaching alternate angles more a matter of luck and repetition than planning.

Machine commune: re: last comment under level 6 in previous post:

Fine, so you beat me to the punch-line. Well played, sirs. I tip my ears to you.
The airport has obviously benefited from both more work hours and more inspiration than other zones. I'd start listing each robot's campy yet still hilarious gimmicks, but I'm pleasantly impressed with the workmanship here all around.
Unpleasantly impressed by the fembot emancipating herself from her oppressive parental manbot, accompanied by a female vocalizing Genesis' Land of Confusion - emphasis on the line "there's too many men, too many people making too many problems" - for fuck's sake, you just had to put a feminist spin on the damn tinkertoy brigade?


Back to the Gippers. Cash in my free medical reward, blow up a talking statue, all in a day's work. The ensuing swarm of mutants... yeeesh, had to reload my save. One of the few challenging encounters in this game (along the Payasos' big top finale) plus it gave me a chance to do this:

Today is a good day to 'doze.
Unfortunately this was a defensive fight and my pet Leeroyed in to die as soon as it started. Patches 3.0 had a pretty good run, but it's time for an upgrade. We added some improvements to Patches 3.5: lower center of gravity, stockier frame, spikes on his back. Truly an exemplar of wolfdom.


Level 19 (and a half, that last fight was a big one)
(If this game caps your advancement at 20 I'm gonna be pissed.)
More mutants.
Aaaaaand more mutants.
And even more mutants.

Time to buy some ammo from the Gippers and then Iran their Contras like the commie bastard I am. No subterfuge. Make my demands and shoot my way out.
My reward? The Party Pal, a chipper young disco bot. Blech. It is way too late in the campaign for that sort of cutesy bullcrap. I'll do without the extra healing. Go 'way, kid, ya bother me.

I'd been hoping the main story would pick up once I start meeting the Buchanan youth, but Valor seems to lack any personality aside from a sniveling nebbish as per the ironic naming scheme. Hell, even his captor Mother Nancy the walking political farce had better dialogue.


Level 20
Lo, I am unto a GOD!

Yep. Werwolfe the shepherd.

I really should be playing this on a higher difficulty. Even with my distaste for optimizing combat builds I've found little trouble so far. I'm looting more consumables than I can consume, amassing enough cash even with no barterer in the group, and I've only had to buy ammo twice so far. Hell, I don't think I even needed to reload my guns until the Bizarre. Lack of melee engagement and sparse status effects make trying to control the field a wash. Just pop 'em as they close in. My melee speed demon Shadow sneaks up and opens fights, then pulls mobs into the others' ambush at a choke point. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Is this game actually going anywhere?

-and on that note I'll see you next whenever for the exciting conclusion.

__________________________________________________

P.S.: The rather dull conclusion.

Hey, what do archers say before a duel?

"Draw yew, varmint!"

Wasteland 3 up to 11

"Creep and crawl until you fall
Into that old dark room
Where you left your sins and all of your friends
Staring back the old man's lies as he watched you drown"

The Dead South - Gunslinger's Glory


Just before discovering that Microsoft has bestowed its kiss of creative death on both Obsidian and InXile, roughly halving our chances at interesting big-budget RPGs for the foreseeable future, I had already preordered InXile's Wasteland 3. My take on Wasteland 2 a couple of years ago was that it fell on the wrong side of the line between telling a joke and being a joke, sacrificing any effort at immersion by countless sardonic stage whispers and pop culture references and losing narrative steam by its second half. Their later Torment: Tides of Numenera cohered much better, with excellent writing and noncombat playstyle integration, but also an insufficiently developed or tested combat system, over-reliance on telepathy as a cop-out for character interactions, and an overly sanitized moral landscape by which it fell short of its namesake's legacy.

So, for better or worse, I'm installing Wasteland 3 on release day. After dying a couple of times in the very tutorial, realizing I wanted to tweak my characters and re-rolling, I decided to chronicle this, much as I did my run through Arcanum's early levels. Think of it as a "Let's Play" except without having to listen to some smarmy YouTube superstar wheeze his way through feigned drama and the day's trending Reddit humor.

Let there be ranging.

Level 0
Seriously? You had to slap an "events depicted herein are fictitious" disclaimer on a damn video game? Yeah, the giant robots were a slight giveaway, but thanks for clearing that up, I guess.

Our tale begins in Colorado. Actually, no, our tale begins at character selection. I'll be running this on difficulty 2/4, normal damage (I hate it when the computer cheats) but with friendly fire enabled.

Nice intro cinematic, but the stat system already provides my first gripe: they slapped an experience bonus on Charisma. In practical terms, no stat should come with an EXP bonus, as leveling up tends to over-ride other considerations. Thematically, Intelligence would be the obvious choice if you're going to do it at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they also removed the "smart ass" persuasion option, meaning that in dialogues I'll now likely be limited to roleplaying either a brainless thug or a brainless schmoozer. Mass appeal all the way: logic is evil, social manipulation is good.

But oh well, I suppose I should choke down this upswell of bile at the thought of playing a social butterfly and for once make my main character a leader instead of the antisocial nerd lurking in shadow at the back of the convoy. For Wasteland 2 I'd specialized in fists and heavy weapons so this time... let's do pistols and "weird science" - I assume I'll stumble across a dual requirement laser pistol somewhere in postapocalyptic Colorado.

For my second in command, since this game's stat system seems to discourage light melee (no stealth/invisibility; health, armor requirements and melee damage all increase off strength) I might as well hit up another archetype I don't cotton to under normal conditions: a backstabbing rogue.

To be precise, a backstabbing rogue with low hit points who can't even wear armor. Why? Because I hate myself, that's why. She'll probably eat some dirt every single fight and cost me a fortune in wound curing. Come, my Shadow: the game is afoot!


Level 1
InXile must've read my complaints about T:ToN lacking "visceral immediacy" because Wasteland 3's tutorial looks immediately visceral. Literally. Wall to wall corpses with their viscera ripped out. Including my heroic female leader with a non-Anglophone name. Apocalypse cowboys are so multicultural.
Why, howdy thar, easily-hated bloodthirsty male redneck villain! Guessing these "Dorsey" mooks were specifically designed to give me some human victims I won't feel guilty for butchering.
Tutorial fight doubles as ironic musical interlude. Wolfman approves.
Also impressed by being given two separate options to put my mortally wounded superior out of her misery. Beats clutching at the sky bellowing "do not want"
Ah, well. Onwards and upwards, just me, aaand my Shaaa-dow...
Huh. I feared my animal whispering skill would prove as useless as in Wasteland 2 but they included it in the tutorial: free pussy.


Level 2
Can't say I'm a fan of the infinite inventory space. As much of a chore as it can be, inventory management is intrinsic to the adventuring lifestyle. If you want to make it less of a chore, decrease redundancy and trash loot, don't eliminate selection.

Welcome to Colorado Springs, where hope springs occasionally, which still beats the spread a century and more after a nuclear war. Ruled by Saul The Patriarch, a man of mighty muscles and mightier public relations, beset by no less than several rebellions, three of them by his children, which he hires you to quell (addendum: none of which action takes place before level 11.) For now, the town was attacked by religious fanatics screaming about a deluge of blood, the Dorseys. Hop to it.

Voice acting a bit uneven. Saul's spot-on, as are most of the lengthier NPC dialogues, but the bit players wouldn't pass muster in a high school drama club. Are these the AAA-quality bells and whistles you bought by selling your souls to Microsoft?

Slight plot hole: apparently the Patriarch's crew has to rely on oil imports for energy, but has no problem keeping your electronics-riddled military base perpetualy active, along with its horde of (admittedly funny) servitor bots? Plus open-air gas heaters? And no-one in postapocalyptic Colorado builds homes underground for insulation?
The boss' female offspring has "more brains and cunning than both her brothers put together" - pander much?
Also, with a title like The Patriarch, is there any chance he won't turn out to be a horrendously sadistic monster per feminist dogma?
Let me take a wild stab at the politically correct ending here: the female will turn out to be the reasonable one. She'll be guilty of some nominal misdeeds but they'll be justified by juxtaposition with the greater evil of all the men around her. After uncovering her brothers' and father's crimes (including some explicitly sexual, because of course) you'll side with her, replacing the nefarious old guard manocentric maleocracy with a glorious new femtastic future.


Level 3
Alright, so the usual RPG setup: story mission chain plus side quests, and I've got a base of operations to fix up. Filled out my roster with the premade NPC Devlin for equipment modding and eventually computers, plus my own custom dwarf sniper Pokey for mechanics and lockpicking. Wish I could predict better, but without knowing whether I'll get any extra skill points, I'm just guessing at how many skills I can max out. (20 levels X 3 points / 28 points to max = just over 2 skills per character, INT and other bonuses notwithstanding; call it 3)

Let the refugees stay and set loose the shit-shroom-farming dudebro from his prison cell. Not because I think it's a good idea... just funny.

Onwards to the city hub. A saintly mother grieving for her bumbling son, a saintly female refugee with a backstory about attempted rape looking to be reunited with her mother, a wife browbeating her husband for his recklessness (in defending their livelihood) a hearthless supercilious male magistrate contrasted to a hypercompetent, overworked and gruff but well-intentioned female sheriff and her equally saintly female assistant, plus a budding young Annie Oakley impersonator named The Light (introduced as "a prodigy" - of course) ... shit, this whole game's going to reiterate "man bad, woman good" from start to finish like Deadfire isn't it? Or, having thrice recited the fundamentalist mantra of female supremacy and chastised our sinful male flesh, can we now move on to more interesting characters?
At least the doctor and mechanic weren't written as bumbling, sadistic or heartless morons to contrast with some idealized female standing next to them, but then of course they're working under the Native American moral umbrella, provisionally exonerated of their masculine genetic infirmity by being born of a superior race.

Anyway, got my marching orders from the She-riff, so that quest advancement gets me to:


Level 4

Damnit, why are the camera angles and zoom so limited? You can barely see one side of one building at a time. Keep having to flip the map on and off to get my bearings.

Just realized Major Tomcat must be a legitimzed cheat from my preorder package (thrice my hit points and does more damage than me) so out he goes along with all the golden guns. For the love of fuck you idiots, you don't need to bribe me with undeserved victories to buy your games; provide interesting content!
A stray mutt off the streets of Colorado Springs is good enough for me, thanks.
I'm'a call'im Patches.

The Museum of Blatantly Revisionist History's pretty funny, but its "he was a man" chorus does sort of support my suspicion that The Patriarch exists solely to be deposed as genetically inferior to female perfection. Oh, and Marshal Lupinsky has to moderate his language in the presence of a young lady like Lucia the prodigy gun nut. So there. Take that, Patriarchy!

Save a shop from robbers, heal some patients, turn on a microwave (to earn your Stouffer's product placement) - good clean monetizable fun. Looks like this is one of those games that love to shower you with freebie consumables like Baldur's Gate 2 and its endless wands of everything. I've accumulated a baker's dozen of medipacks before encountering any real fights. First couple of scrapes in the garden seem easy. Patches got a kill! Good boy. Then I stepped on a land mine because an event trigger wrested control of the interface from me but my group kept running. Bad programmer. Bad! No Stouffer's for you!

Reload.

Aaaaaand of course the Dorsey attackers were let into town by a treacherous male named Isaac Reed who calls our heroine Lucia "baby" because we all know how stupid and evil men are. Especially men who want women. Men who want women are always treacherous mass murderers. We all know "baby" is really guy-code for "I want to sneak bloodthirsty cultists into town to butcher your family" 'cause that's how men roll. Baby.

I'm tempted to keep Lucia "Smith&Wesson" on my roster just to observe the ramping up of her feminist contrivances, but so help me, I cannot put up with a Mary Sue today. Sorry, dear readers. You'll have to suffer her presence yourselves if you want more of her antics. Oh, but of course she "will seek justice" on her own for the deaths of her family.
Good luck with that.
No, really, I don't doubt she will by divine edict make more headway than I do in chasing the Dorseys and she'll pop up again as a shining heroine at some point, sure as Wesley Crusher kept teleporting back to the Enterprise on vacation.
Until then, fuck off, oh little light of mine.


Level 5
Surprisingly involved plot recap song from the traveling busker. This feature really should crop up more regularly in long campaigns or series, hearing your past deeds made folklore recounted more or less faithfully (preferably less; funnier that way)

Aaaaand of course the former museum curator, unjustly fired for asking uncomfortable questions about The Patriarch's history, is a chipper young non-European female. Guess that doesn't bode well for me applying as a game writer after pointing out all this uncomfortable chauvinistic propaganda. How 'bout it, InXile? Got a spot on your writing team? Will work for Microsoft Kibble(TM)

She-riff Daisy sends me off to deal with yet another villain at the local nightclub. (Yes, we get it, the kingpin Faran Brygo, Brian Fargo, quite droll... moving on.) I'm also supposed to save a - a male! Shock and amazement! Men deserve to be rescued? At least we're explicitly and repeatedly told he's a "family man" (just like the mama's boy you rescue from the pillory) just so we know how he earned the right to live, him and his heathen Y-chromosome.

My base has been remodeled in my absence, removing some possible interactions... would've been nice to know that would happen before I set out or recruited the NPCs triggering each change. At least the parody of a radio drama seems quaint. Nice touch with the Museum of Quest Completion too, in the same vein as the busker, and the security / personnel logs make for good, low-key flavoring. Reminds me of Dead State.

The obligatory nightclub / brothel mission plays out by rote almost until the end. Lots of purportedly edgy, demonstrably dull double entendres and ridicule of men (and only men) for impotence, drunkenness, vanity, perversion, drug addiction, etc. At least the follow-up fight in the machine shop is lightened up by the very "Mac" Mactavish - whoever wrote this guy balanced out the karma for at least three other bad dialogues.
Burned out car indeed... pure gold.
Tha Gangsta's Guide ta Dick-shun answers the other question of where dese mooks is gettin' deys aksents a century after the cultures in question ceased to exist. I was going to give InXile shit over that, but... alright. Close enough for jazz.

Was not expecting a big faction alignment decision so early in the game, but the fight capping the nightclub run makes me feel like the action's finally starting.

The Irvs mission... nice voicing, less pre-judgmental male/female dynamic, delightful weirdness if a bit on the "magic" side of SciFi / Fantasy, fully solvable via sneaking / skill checks in several steps.
Nice work.


Level 6
Awwww, She-riff Daisy don't like me no' mo', for offin' her mook. Boy, you just don't expect your actions to have consequences in these games, do you? I just now decided to look at the reputation window. Apparently the downtrodden refugees now like me and the hard-ass Marshals dislike me. Did I stumble into nice guy status despite my worst efforts? Mostly I think I pissed off the Marshals for capturing prisoners myself instead of handing them over to their custody, but that was a strategic decision, not a moral one. I just didn't want them destroying potentially useful evidence.

Merc leader named Wolfe wants me to rob a bot. Well now, I can't refuse a fellow Wolfe, can I? Nice little bit of puzzle solving here, having you compare several haystacks' hay content - solvable by straightforward logic without appealing to specialized knowledge, and able to be brute-forced in a pinch. Now, if the android in question had simply spoken to me in a reasonable, calm manner and presented objective evidence as to its harmlessness, I might have let it go. However, since
A) They're all electronic plague rats spreading omnicidal computer code regardless of their intentions
and
B) It tried to emotionally manipulate me using a childish voice and innocent babbling
- then off with its head! Vengeance for Rose!
Now I've got a hit list of three more blades to runner. Sweeeet. Sweet like tears in rain. Turtle on its back, you beta-tested bitches, let's hear it.


Level 7
Time to schmooze some fatcats. Shadow, Pokey, Patches, me droogs, let us to the Moor of Broads. Let us hoist shoulders with the rubby toities, as the kids say.

I'm noticing an unexpected sea-change in gender relations after the introduction, away from the initial pattern of repetitive male bashing. After you clear the first main quest step or two, the chatter around town now includes one convo where it's the man who wanted to have a meaningful conversation about a newspaper story, but his female companion only reads the funnies.
Daisy gets mad at you for killing her male underling (in direct contrast to, say, the pirate queen from Deadfire who immediately washed her hands of Benweth) and she herself is obliquely criticized for her harsh policing by another woman.
That being your prison warden who praises you for sparing Lucia's misguided admirer Isaac and his rebellious teenage friends to give them a future chance at redemption.
Gideon Reyes wants you to stop the inflow of refugees but he has a damn good reason (mass starvation) instead of being painted as merely a mean old man.
Miriam Knox asks you to save her husband, surprisingly without taking the opportunity to call him a worthless loser.
The necking teens are both into it instead of the girl rebuffing and demeaning the boy as would be expected.
Weird.

Anyway, who the hell designed this overland map?

You set off between cities in your very own triple decker tank with hot flashing turrets. Too bad that's all you can look at. Camera angles in town were bad enough, but a fully locked camera? Granted it looks good with the animations, but what is this game's obsession with limiting your view? Overland you've got no scrolling, no turning, no zooming, it's like something out of the '90s.
(Oh, but yes, you can totally splatter that deer.) (She's a squirrel-squashin', deer-smackin' drivin' machine! Canyoneeeeroooo? Caaaannyoneeroooooo!)

A familiar choice between two quests early on. Don't want to get into more hot water with the Marshals this early in the game (and they sound like they're carrying better loot) so I guess I'll rescue the Arapaho caravan.

Whoa... major noncombat skill integration.

With a few lockpicking / mechanics / perception checks, instead of running up to your enemies on the open road you can surround them and place your melee in immediate striking distance, position a sniper at those upper story windows, disable their turrets and deny them cover by flanking them with your Canyonero.
I am grudgingly impressed.
Less impressed by the cartoonish "bomb thrall" character model, but still, this is great stuff for the tactically inclined among us.


Level 8
I'd forgotten how much experience lockpicking gives in Wasteland. Pokey the pint-size pickin' sniper's already outleveling me.
Hitting the Clown Museum. Heh. Alright, killer Mexican clowns combined with talk of turning away refugees might answer the perceived need for that disclaimer at the start, given the previous exactly-four-years' news. Quaint little ballerina puzzle though, again mixing skill checks with common sense.

Picked up a "phase blaster" and other energy weapons, finally (besides the ferret launcher - Sluggy Freelance fans?) so maybe I can start inflicting some pain.

The Canyonero seems overpowered, but maybe it's an early-game crutch and won't scale well.
The big top fight on the other hand proved exceedingly difficult. This location was probably higher level and I was meant to skip it, only killing the ten rats I was told to, like a good little terrier.
It did however bring up some weaknesses in the combat system:
1) Enemies don't take their current position into consideration before dropping smoke, meaning they'll pop a defensive cloud then immediately run out of it.
2) The AI also appears to prioritize targets by hit chance, so ironically my squishtastic Shadow drops less often than the others... because nobody bothers targeting her at 37% evasion.
3) Turrets are so overpowered that I really shouldn't be allowed to deploy more than one at a time.
4) Avoiding detection ranges is meaningless for encounters with scripted dialogue intros. Only trial and error will tell where you can and can't sneak.
5) Clown cars are less amusing when they're the size of a house. Why not shrink the enemy Canyonero down to 6.5 tons instead of 65? It wouldn't break your minimal immersion any more than the party-buffing creepy dolls, cyborg chickens or insta-heal hot dogs.

Random encounter: I've never been a Grand Theft Auto fan, yet somehow in a turn-based RPG, running mooks over with the Canyonero feels... perfect. For its rarity, bulldozing becomes a perfect counterpoint to the usual tangled web of lines of fire.


Level 9
The Bizarre's outer reaches exacerbate this game's weirdest detail yet: you can bind a pause button, but currently it won't do anything. Wasteland 3 is missing a pause feature at launch. It will not pause, ever, either willingly, or during inventory management or character advancement or while escaped to the menu or even during combat (meaning patrols will continue pathing into you while the seconds tick away in turn-based combat) and among other things this makes the already rudimentary sneaking system useless for positioning my little rogue for ambushes, trying to unsheathe and click on a moving homonculus.
No pause button. This is a bush-league flaw. Not to mention shooting through walls at corners, no tooltip descriptions of status effects on enemies, quickslots swapping back and forth of their own accord, etc. Again, is this the oh-so-shiny polish you supposedly bought by selling your souls to the evil empire, InXile?

Heh. Amend my previous observation to "killer Mexican cannibal clowns" - disclaimer! DisclaimerDisclaimerDisclaimeerrrrr! (please don't sue us)
Also, surprisingly, the cannibal interlude plays out over the radio between two voices, one male the other female. He brings home the long pig, she chops it up and fries it in a pan. No feminist moral high ground. Weird.

The Children of the Cabbage encounter deserves special mention.

After clearing a greenhouse of some mutant... somethings, you discover it planted with creepy dolls in a literal cabbage patch. Just another goofy, immersion-breaking digression, right? Then you find the log and audiotape of the farmer's mental decline, his quiet, heartbroken consternation with his stillborn crop. In seconds, the drama switch flips to find yourself in the shoes of this pathetic old coot consumed from within by his lunacy.
Pathos can be cheap. Pick an automatic trigger (breakups and bereavement being perennial favorites) afflicting an accepted sympathetic figure (children, women, housepets, crying indians) preferably accompanied by wistful strings and you're in business.
Making you feel for the ludicrous, the losers, the abrasive, the unlovable, on the other hand is a more impressive feat. One wonders if the farmer found his puppet Celephais in the end.

Speaking of cheap pathos, the Payaso dentist's crew killed Patches 😢 🎻mostly because there's no way to control tamed animals, so they'll likely run in and die in the first fight that requires you to hold position. At least Shadow got a badass hook on a stick out of it.
Luckily in Colorado it's cold... and there are wolves. So Patches 2 is a go.


Level 10
Gotta find some more recruits. For the past several levels I've been stuck with Kwon the starter mook and... Lucia if I wanted to. Don't want to.

Min-maxed like it's spring weather. My group's hardly combat-optimized, these fights with the Payasos are getting harder and 5/6 party size may not remain viable much longer, even with these stupidly overpowered turret consumables and outleveling everything.

Fights are still decent, if on the easy side. Choke points, armor debuffs and focused fire, cutting line of sight, exploding barrels, exploding... pigs. Yeah, let's talk about the exploding pigs. Exploding mooks are a staple of video games, but as noted in the case of Divnity:Original Sin, also a frequent critical fail in the aesthetic / narrative/ immersion department. The hot hogs here are one example of a halfway believable in-universe justification.
They're fielded by a faction that worships bad jokes - who also fuck the pigs, just in case you were curious on that point. We live to inform here at the Werwolfe's Den. (So yeah, killer Mexican cannibal pig-fucking clowns - please don't sue us!)
They're not super pigs, or magic pigs or superintelligent mutant pigs, but just pigs trained as one would train any animal, and in fact animal bombs have been designed in real life more times than you'd think. Pig bombs aren't half as insane as bat bombs.
You actually run across some Payasos training the pigs. Turns out they only captured the pig farm and aren't raising them for this purpose, addressing the economic angle of wasted effort.
They drop bacon. I don't know why, but that just makes them so much more believable, doesn't it?

Damnit, they killed Patches 2!
Exploding Pigs 1 : Wolf 0
- or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll - *BLAOW!*

Or as The Provost might say "si vit porkum, para blowum"


Level 11
Made it into the Bizarre ("it's like C.H.U.D. in real life" - also a mall) and my stalwart heroes are about to speak to the fat man in charge. I wonder if he'd like to join up? My team could use an... obstacle. In any case, what will the future bring?
Will the refugee situation be treated sanely or as a moral absolute?
Will fights continue to be suspiciously easy or will I be given more cause to use up my consumables?
Will Shadow go full Matrix with her dodges?
Will my investment in EXP bonuses pay off?
Will Pokey discover a sniper slingshot and one-shot a boss named Goliath at some point?
Will Patches 3.0 fare better than his predecessors?
Will Lucia the shining one return to put more men in their place?
Will The Patriarch, ummm, archive his patter... or something?
I dunno, I'm spitballing here. I don't even know how much longer this campaign will run or whether I'll keep on with the play-by-play, but so far I'm having fun.

Until next time, rangers.

 

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P.S.

Though the game did show some promise initially, ultimately it did not live up to its potential. Not the worst thing on the market, but mediocre still.