Respect Was All That I Have Wanted

"I don't know why

You're blaming me
I think this time you've lost

Your sense of reality"

 

Neuroticfish - Waving Hands

 

 

Having given the devs some weeks to fix the inevitable slew of bugs they'd introduce with their latest DLC, I picked up my Rogue Trader campaign where I'd left off, toward the end of Act 2, breaking into Exemplar levels just as the drow shit the fan. Seems a good moment to take stock of my roleplaying.

I set out with no preconceived path guiding my dialogue choices, though my fundamentally Chaotic Neutral personality asserts itself clearly enough. The Puritan vs. Radical axis slides easily toward the latter. On one topic in particular I prove consistently Dogmatic, and that's the execution of traitors. Otherwise I have no use for the Imperium or the human race writ large, and really wish we'd focused on any of the setting's many more interesting factions.

 

Strangely, though RPGs' more saccharine elements and cheap Disney-grade moralizing normally push me toward the antipodean reaches of the great wheel, 40K's "grimdark" stylings here prod me time and again in compensation to better these locals' sorry lot. Lots of sorry lot. Thus I've spent the first couple of acts bouncing between Heretic and Iconoclast but the lure of forbidden knowledge is gradually tipping those scales. My warpward slide is buffered, if anything, by the childish puppy-kicking pettiness of many of the "evil" options and by the equally childish supplication before masters dark or light. If my actions are to serve the forces of chaos, I would rather they do so... chaotically, and not subserviently. One way or another, in one multiverse or another, seems I'm still headed for Pandemonium.

 

Merely giving it this much thought indicates this game's immersion has hit a steadier stride than either of its two predecessors'. Which puts me in an awkward position having voiced repeated criticism of Owlcat over the years, not least for their writing. At least one of their staff appears to be again deliberately mocking my tirade against weird magic things:

But the old laziness and unevenness I thereby bashed is restricted pointedly to this one location as a raised middle finger. I can live with that. They're also handling their new trinary alignment better than they did Pathfinder's, with fewer choices or character traits feeling forced for the sake of artificial balance and none of the three underdeveloped - so far. Such improvement is visible everywhere. They're refraining from out-of-character asides or feigned nonchalance. There are problems with the pacing of mission/event text, but it is at least uniformly pointed, entertaining, relevant or illustrative. Only one of the NPC companions (J. hey-dearie) made me want to toss her into a volcano as opposed to half of Wrath of the Righteous' roster.

 

Doubly awkward for me to write about such progress being made within the Warhammer setting, which I've repeatedly derided as derivative, campy tween power fantasy not be to be confused with any worthwhile worldbuilding. While it would take a wider effort to raise 40K in my esteem from such depths, Rogue Trader (more than Gladius' few flavor texts) is the first incarnation I've seen <not> insulting its audience's intelligence at every step. It does a pretty good job of both preserving the grandiloquence of the basic power fantasy and also portraying a wide gamut of minor characters across social strata to better illustrate the massive and oppressive power-base your sci-fantasy heroics mandate.

 

The Void Shadows mission chain even surprised me by its quality, not only plumbing the lower decks but the degree to which Imperial piety may be twisted while remaining perfectly consistent with its greater scope of amor fati. Add to that the missions written from Kibble's demented viewpoint, and her later struggle to reconcile the antagonist's life path with her own, and at least this portion of Rogue Trader can stand against the best cRPG writing we've seen to date.

 

Yet that appreciation was immediately marred upon seeing the selfsame chain abruptly sidetrack me into a nonsensical romance subplot with Kibble. Two steps forward, one step back. The same routine was repeated in Lex Imperialis, where from the very first mission your dialogue with Solomorne is written as if you've been corking each other for years and can't live without the carresses of this rando' burly meat shield you've just met - and his little dog too. Then there's Cass' wilting damsel routine, and even Yrliet's lines have some hint that she's expected to debase herself by such an act of bestiality. *Sigh* I'll have to return to the idiocy of RPG romance. For now, along with the cartoonishness of some of your potential Heretical villainy, it's just one more way Rogue Trader's genre conventions, its reluctance to relinquish an ignorant teen audience focus, hold it back from the more nuanced interactions of the field's classics. Don't delve motivations. Gratify.

 

Why?

 

You've got a license to print money. Millions of braindead fanboys will buy anything and everything with the Warhammer logo, which they'll pretend to enjoy to justify their sunk cost of shelves full of $50 plastic toys. So make good art. Stop sexualizing it or homosexualizing it. Don't go meta for a cheap laugh. Don't try to feminize it. Don't try to justify it to focus groups. Don't crank it up to 11 for attention. It need not be a romance or a farce. Stop piling more cheap pandering and instead whittle down the existing pile. Make good on the meaningless haystack of pop culture cliches you've already plagiarized into it over the decades. There may just be a needle of passable SciFi warmongering in there somewhere. Rogue Trader proves that potential, even if it sabotages itself here and there.

 

This may just be what outgrowing Betty Boop looks like. Sure, it's not the only RPG moving on from the genre's goofy beginnings. Though the RPG revival of the mid-2010s was undercut by feminist script rewrites and underfunded over-reach for blockbuster AAA status, and though BG3 stuck to the generic sword&sorcery adventuring of its Infinity Engine precursors, others like Cyberpunk 2077 or Vagrus have struggled to flesh out their worlds and character personalities beyond stock dragonslaying heroics. In particular I've been enjoying the atmosphere in Colony Ship. (You can't enjoy the atmosphere outside it because it's in space.)

Your mid-game revolves around three deadlocked factions, a familiar enough RPG plot backdrop on its face. Yet here, none are the good or bad guys, none are wholesome innocents whose cause you can champion without guilt, none cackling villains, nor are they simple misguided idealists your hero gets to set right by the light of your just cause.

- The militaristic remnants of your mission's original leaders are running a minutely regimented police state, but also prove the only ones capable of maintaining a decent standard of living as your orphanage in the sky breaks down around you.

- The egalitarian rebel faction has turned into a decrepit Russo-Communist state in all but name, complete with round-the-clock state brainwashing and a ruling council of cut-throat self-promoters. On the other hand, they're the only ones who even seem to remember what humanitarian principles sound like.

- The religious faction wastes its efforts on ridiculous monuments while constantly on the edge of schism as every new preacher spins a new yarn the gullible masses are only too happy to turn into a noose. But they're the only ones with any hope for the future (albeit false) and they do raise one of the few valid points in defense of faith: that the big religions are the only form of leadership humanity has ever produced capable of long-term planning.

 

Why is it so hard for other developers to do what Iron Tower does, and look at the flip-side? When T:ToN came out I remarked its alignment system fell too predictably into a traditional consensus of good and evil with id-linked choices (red/silver) viewed as violent and negative while the two superego colors (purple/gold) result in "nice" outcomes like happy orphans. (Kudos once more to Avellone for bucking the trend with a character (Erritis) exemplifying the perversity of superego.) Compare to a beautiful scene in Baldur's Gate 3:

I criticized the spin put on Astarion's quest toward the end, straining a bit to frame the question of vampiric ascension in idiot-friendly good vs. evil terms as either saving or sacrificing lotsa liveses. Thankfully you can indeed take a middle road and simply have Astarion wash his hands of the whole mess, but the text still felt a bit off the mark by my ken. However, the artists and voice actor picked up the slack. On winning the boss fight you're treated to Astarion going absolutely apeshit and very thoroughly murdering his enslaver for the past two centuries past the point of redundancy... then suddenly collapsing into a cathartic wailing puddle at the realization his nightmare's finally over.

Glorious.

By the way, Astarion is evil. You're not forgetting that, are you? He is, undeniably, a self-indulgent serial murderer. Whatever's happening in that scene, whatever makes you catch your breath at our companion's every anguished snarl, it's not the triumph of good vs. evil. There are added dimensions, cross-axes in play, some more dignified than others. Figure out which ones (sex appeal? freedom? social climbing? repression? contamination?) and you'll see both potential and its hobbling.

 

I'm just saying, I wish the rest of BG3 had been that good. It's looking like I'll end up a heretic in Rogue Trader, but when I do I doubt quest text will bear out anything resembling my character's real motivations. More likely I'll be treated to yet another shallow "I just hate life" puppy-kicking insult to any player not toeing the line of plains-ape mores. But why is that a harder sell than the complexity of squad management?

 

Any company will tell you they need to sell in order to stay in business, and only the lowest common denominator sells. But to whom? Consensus does not disprove dissent. Here I am: aloof, perverse, cantankerous. Sell me something for the abhuman, not Dating Dramedy 40K. For fifteen years developers refused to make any difficult games... until waves of low-budget titles like FTL proved the market was starved for punishment. And they refused to make turn-based tactics, until kickstarted RPGs proved XCOM was not a one-off. I really do think that if you add complex roleplaying to that list... well, you may not out-sell Call of Duty, but you will find a sizeable niche market as starved for moral challenge as they've proven starved for tactical challenge.

Back Door Shenanigans

(alternate title: "Our Freedooom!" Universalis)

_________________________________

"She ran underneath the table

He could see she was unable

[...] 

So they came in through the out-way

It was Sunday but a black day "

Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal

_________________________________

  

The Marquis of Baltakhand rushes to the defense of his allies! (Mostly because it's good eatin'.)

Now this is how you farm XP

Unsatisfying sieges were one of the original Mount&Blade's biggest flaws. There'd be one ladder up against a castle wall and the attackers would file up it constantly cut down hoping for a defender to get arrowed in the face just as one of them reached the top to secure a foothold. Bannerlord spiced it up with more convoluted walls with multiple access points. But the AI is programmed to instead bank on hitting you before you can muster reinforcements, so it'll rush an assault as soon as its siege weapons are finished, before they have a chance to breach the walls. In this case (wish I'd've written down the fort's name) a snaking road up to the gate gave me time to destroy their battering ram, leaving the AI to send its soldiers to one side of the fort where the only two ladders were close together. It was a perfect storm, especially as I'd equipped a bow instead of my usual crossbow, and found a flanking vantage point near a barrel of infinite arrows.

I ended up personally downing an eighth of the enemy force, 118 kills in one combat. Yeah, no kidding I skilled up six times. (And yet it was still only worth 13 renown! Come on, if this doesn't earn you a ballad in the taverns...) But due to its mix of army management and RP stats, a setup where the player's personal kill count strongly impacts a battle is unusual for Bannerlord.

 

As a rare departure from the norm of multi-pronged combat, such an occurrence makes a memorable story. But for the most part, providing only one way forward yields dull repetitiveness, and even multiple routes can be undercut by clashing with genre conventions.*

 

For instance I've been thoroughly enjoying Cyberpunk 2077's side quests. Multi-level maps with just enough line-of-sight blocking to make you plan your next move, complex without being needlessly convoluted. In fact Night City as a whole makes for some quaint parkour gameplay, almost always providing a dumpster to use as cover, a back-alley you can cut across, a rooftop from which to open a fight with a terrain advantage or a wall you can jump over. Seriously, fortified ankles: best eddies I ever spent. And its cop scanner and gig missions are most often placed on rooftops with alternate access or inside buildings with back doors or skylights if you just circle around casing the joint a bit. But where skill checks come into play, C77's top-notch level design trips into its terrible decision to level-scale the whole damn game.

At character level 33/60, in a zone mid-way from newbietown to the rumored end-game, I reasonably expected a skill level of 17/20 would see me through any gig requirements, especially as (unlike, say, the cyberpsychos) it's not even meant as a difficult mission. But the level-scaling apparently applies to skill checks as well, counterproductively turning alternate routes into demands for min-maxing. Doesn't help that C77 is very obviously an FPS with some minimally-balanced RP-lite elements.

 

I got thinking about this topic last year while playing Baldur's Gate 3, which in contrast to its older cRPG inspirations supplies plenty of diplomacy and especially stealth alternatives, as well as occasional items and spells as solutions or shortcuts. But its propensity for jump-scare event triggers and unadvertised enemy abilities forces inordinate re-loads to find such alternates by trial and error. Morever, as I noted when discussing its strategic side, this often haphazard intersection of options blurred the line between valid strategy and just cheesing enemy AI, and you were more often than not forced to abuse reloads to even discover what an encounter was about.

 

But if you want a counterpoint in strictly regimented options for advancement, try Iron Tower's games. I switched back to C77 from frustration at having to constantly reload in Colony Ship: A Post-Longwinded Roleplaying Title. Though slightly toned down from Age of Decadence's absolute demand for min-maxing, it's still damn near impossible to do anything outside a path you choose from the start. Even by the end of Chapter 1 (of 3) your skill checks require 6/10 points. Nearing the end of Chapter 2 I'm finding fights increasingly impossible, which also makes it impossible to skill up my weapon-handlling for future fights.

Of course, Iron Tower has a somewhat unusual design philosophy for this era. You're meant to run across occasional impossible tasks depending on your skill setup, each quest a do-or-die proposition, with the campaign as a whole using these individual quests and encounters as alternate paths to the ending. On a visceral level as a monkey with a (joy)stick who just wants to break shit, I'll admit it's incredibly frustrating to run up against so much unbreakable shit. Intellectually though, I can appreciate and even applaud a change of pace from the usual video game power fantasy, from The Elder Scrolls' routine of being head of every guild.

 

If we look from RPGs to strategy genres though, such alternate routes and solutions have been the accepted norm for far longer.

Even in a lighthearted, comedic game like Dungeons 3, the enemy alternates attacks through two entrances toward your town hall. Not too hard to prepare contingencies for both, but it does add some flavor according to your preference for traps or guards or nuking. (For instance, since your army can catch enemy squads en route while launching your own attack, you might leave your usual exit (your Black Gate) completely defenseless and stick a Shelob or two by your back door.)

 

Natural barriers and choke points, diplomacy and tech races, strategy was using all such options as selling points for a generation while cRPGs mostly patted themselves on the back if they included even one big diplomacy option (e.g.: NWN:HotU) And it's always more interesting when it doesn't need to be scripted, when you find a risky move growing out of separate game elements.

My last Europa Universalis 4 campaign was an opportunity to try out the colonial system (I'm lukewarm about it, but that's for another time) and since I'd tried Castille and Portugal in EU3 decided on Skawtland Universalis! I did manage to found Nova Scotia (then lost it to the Americans) had greater success in Africa and South America, but naturally the big question was how (or rather when) to deal with England. I grabbed a couple of provinces during a French invasion as part of the Hundred Years' war, but then got stuck in a diplomatic stalemate for a century. It was only when the American colonies seceded that I saw my big chance... and saw also to my dismay that I had zero chance of my monarch growing up in time to declare war. Experiencing a sudden patriotic burst of republicanism I swapped governments just to be able to invade. (I'd already founded the Anglican church on a whim, so why not go for a twofer in shortsightedness?)

 

But it paid off!

Now, swapping governments is not something you'd normally do on a whim. If nothing else, losing the royal marriage diplomacy bonus can cost alliances. But, due to my relative isolation, I spent nearly the entire campaign allied to France, Lubeck and Sweden, in direct contrast to my chaotic Teuton/Uzbek playthrough(s). I got a +2 position bonus to island nation government reform! And though I only took London and formed babbyBritain in 1783 (almost at the end, for the uninitiated) it still yielded a different route than the New World colonial adventure I'd been gunning for at the start.

 

Choosing between divergent approaches works best when it comes with a slew of other factors, gains and losses, triumphs and sacrifices, allowing the player to weigh their value. Take one of Age of Wonders 4's more recent "intrigue" events:

At some point one of the AI players gets dethroned by The Reaper, which then proceeds on a fairly aggressive program of expansion. You have an opportunity to run a quest chain to rescue the idiot who lost a bet with death... but then do you really care? Questing after all costs you time you could spend expanding your own empire, and The Reaper might just declare war on you before you're even done. So there's a time element but not a fixed one, a RP element (an alliance with Death is just all sorts of badass and I happened to be playing a shadow faction this time around) and a practical political element, as the Reaper's new empire has a physical presence on the game map. It may be a thorn in your side or a powerful ally or just a useful third party keeping others busy while you expand.

 

So, given D&D, the grand-daddy of RPGs, itself started as strategy wargame, why is choice so much more meaningful in Strategy than in RPGs, to the point even the roleplaying angle worked its way back into strategy before RPGs expanded strategically? As with stealth, the issue comes down to genre conventions. In this case min-maxing. Lack of nuance appears to have been a core trait of D&D from the very start, passed down to all its descendants. I don't mean just the often criticized good/evil dichotomy. RPGs are supposed to be about establishing a player identity, but that most often just boils down to having one stat higher than anyone else. The DEX dude disarms traps and the WIS bro casts cure wounds. Even when putting up an alternate entrance, it's as an opportunity for a player to prove superior stat allocation in one particular stat, because that's what feels like success and gets the dopamine flowing. 18 tech ability or GTFO. When establishing a party it's just assumed every stat will be maxed on some character. In single-player, single-character affairs, either you let the player max everything (grandmaster of every guild) or you can't lock content behind a stat check the player may not meet.

 

Strategy has no such limitation, because it has no such intrinsic expectation of single-minded simple-mindedness. It doesn't draw munchkins quite the same way - until you get to online actions-per-minute twitchfests like Starcraft which are in fact no longer strategic. In fact it's assumed you'll cover all your bases (offense(STR), defense(CON) exploration/questing(DEX) tech(INT) economy(WIS) culture/diplomacy(CHA)) to varying extents.

 

 

 

________________________________________

 

* This, kids, is called a thesis statement, just like your eighth-grade language teacher taught you. See how it's preceded by a brief, mildly humorous and easily grasped introduction illustrating the point but not belaboring it, how plainly it's stated for intelligibility, how it's slightly offset from larger supporting paragraphs, summarizing to prime the reader for their upcoming evidence to that same point?

Werwolfe am being educational.

 

P.S.: I really wish Iron Tower had a bigger market share. Weirdly, despite their frustrating insistence on min-maxing, they've also proven themselves prone to impose different playthroughs depending on your character's stats, and thus apt to bridge this strategy/RP gap. Unfortunately as what feels like a garage project they blatantly lack the workforce to truly flesh out their games with all necessary options.

 

P.P.S.: Is it just me or does "so they came in through the out-way" combined with constantly asking 'u ok babe?' come across like buttfuckin'? I'm not crazy, right? That's a song about buttfuckin'!

Baldur's Gate 3 - or - My Life as a Drowid, 7

"Just a little too late

Been so long gotta do a double take

Don't remember your face

It's all in the words and the way that we relate

Don't belong, don't believe

Mind in motion makes me weep

Twisting 'til I transmutate"

KMFDM - Get Out of My Head  *

 

"When this is over, I walk on alone" I promised before ending the abomination.

And so I took little joy in the corpse's insistence on reuniting us for one last night. We drink wine, but I am content with water. We are expected to wear finery when I am more at ease in rags. We maimed handful wander beneath a minstrel putting on a show as for a crowded city square. We ape the merrymaking of yokels and guttersnipes, we who contested with gods and worse.

Yet still... not a one of us failed to uncrease our brows at the sight of each other. I hail their ambitions, each freely undertaken, and they freely welcome my lack of same. I have torn friends asunder. I have doomed lands entire. I have toppled the greatest and aided the least. I have not suffered fools. In hindsight, the passions which flared in me at such folderol ebb, and little do I find to celebrate or to mourn. Nor would I thread the path back, for all its infuriating turns, for in the end it has yielded me my reward.

I taste the coming seasons on my tongue. The world's sweep wends beneath my feet. Light and dark mingle.

I am free.

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Several games into their collection, I still cannot stomach Larian's adherence to the childish, goofy storybook aesthetic. My comfort zone stretches to tatters among the bleak, stately, grim, dignified and aloof. And this ain't no Tyranny or Dragonfall, no Torment or Bloodlines. I've tried not to let it spoil better mechanics, but the constant mood discrepancy between the overblown seriousness of its subject matter and the light, casual adventuring tone and high-kicking heroics wore on me all too frequently. The company's simpleminded Diablo-clone hack'n'slash roots are still showing after all these years.

Three observations can demonstrate my attitude toward Baldur's Gate 3.

1) I have written more about it, good and bad, than even about its betters.

2) I have repeatedly lost interest in it, finishing Act 2 by the end of last September and Act 3 mid-April and the boss fight earlier tonight.

3) I feel no impulse to replay it.

We'll get back to that last point later. See previous BG posts for my complaints about blind decision-making, "lolrandom" adventuring, the many fights meant to be automatically lost the first time and replayed once you notice their gimmick (e.g. Grym, twice, once you see he can be taunted and once you see what activates his vulnerability) and especially the characters ruined by idiot-appeal much like Wrath of the Righteous'. What did it get right?

Well, visually it suffers no shortage of detail. If your RPG experience mostly consists of oldies or budget-strangled projects like Age of Decadence or Dragonfall, stepping into the likes of BG3 or KC:D is shocking merely for... well, having stuff to trip over. BG3 is both lushly and studiously detailed. While Act 3 was visibly less fleshed out in so many minutiae, overall the campaign still projects a "they thought of everything" feeling.

What are the odds a druid of that level would be taking his freshly learned cave-cow form for a spin around that NPC's camp? Well, as it turns out, pretty good.

The music, also, while not gloomy or bombastic enough for my tastes, does a good job of expanding on a central theme, with variations for places like the circus or house of hope. Granted, I preferred Tyranny's variations on a theme, but that's as far as I can complain. The pervasive voice acting is honestly more than I need, but again it's consistently professional, with some like Minthara sounding truly outstanding.

BG3 also features some of the best level design I've seen, convoluted yet still intelligible. Unfortunately the four-character party limit also says something about 5e's oversimplification and Larian's further homogenization. Classes overlap so much more now that there are fewer roles to fill. Druids are just shittier clerics, wizards can swap spells out anytime they want, everyone can cast scrolls, everyone's an alchemist, everyone uses crossbows, waypoint teleportation to compensate for making you constantly run back and forth (instead of trimming the back and forth) and in-combat blink, misty step, too easy teleportation combined with Larian's own abuse (everybody superjumps like the incredible hulk) wastes some of that level design's potential.

Then you've got that classic D&D dice-rolling frustration.

I had to repeat the 30DC check several times but wound up rolling a natural 20 on the 99DC check on the first try. Go figure. For my own part I ran through "tactician" difficulty refusing to either use tadpoles or change equipped spells on the fly (of all the idiotic crutches) and many reloads were just forced by a bad roll or by nonsensical jump scares. You're walking by a random spot when bam: killer teleport-monkeys!

 

Granted, it was pretty funny when the spellcaster it abducted and silenced turned into a panther and bit its face off, but over-reliance on such utterly random ambushes combined with no need to memorize the right spells every day just underscores the aforementioned "lolrandom" idiot appeal. Don't plan ahead, just react. Compounded by Fifth Edition's own oversimplification, plus the blasphemous abandonment of the alignments and the captivating cosmology which came with them. Don't establish a personal ethos, don't roleplay, just hit shit and make purely emotional decisions on the fly.

 

I keep talking about computer games' need to outgrow their Betty Boop stage, an analogy particularly apt to Larian's habit of making characters wobble in place as an idle animation, just like rubber hose limb cartoon characters (how many times have I reloaded fights because it caused me to mistarget? least it ain't as bad as D:OS1) and I've often said a good virtual world makes you feel small. BG3 drops you into some amazingly lush, convoluted, gigantic environments... but it only puts you yourself into such perspective via the occasional grand vista.

I complained that in WotR, despite the great pains it took to put you in real danger early on instead of giving you freebie levels, those low levels paradoxically didn't feel low because of the overblown enemies and import of your actions. BG3 restricts your level to 12... which would be great if you were undertaking deeds appropriate for such levels, instead of four level 9-10 characters knocking out a divine avatar or level 12s dropping a monster that can enslave multiple realms of reality. (And of course it's not enough that it's an elder brain, it's gotta be a super-duper "evolved" elder brain to boot.) A more restrained plot with more attention to narrative and not just visual detail would've served it better, not to mention the dropped plot threads or nonsensical twists.

I kept wondering when the whole Zariel / Elturel chatter would coalesce into a coherent side story. Based on how much attention it got in act 1 I thought it would be a whole act or at least a zone like the underdark; disappointed when your visit to hell revolves around something completely unrelated. Apparently they're all references to some pen and paper adventure? Then there's your ally's nonsensical panic attack at the end to join the villain, just to artificially balance out the two armies. Or the stand-in hero being apparently omniscient inside his bubble, immediately up to date on current lingo, politics and necessities. Or the rather simplistic resolution of all other conflicts as good guys vs. Absolute. My rather murderous drowid (gave Shadowheart to the Sharrans, killed the druids in Act 1 and therefore also left the Shadowlands shadowed in Act 2, took the middle road with Astarion, condemned the aasimar to existence as a battery, killed Minsc

 

 

etc.

no, really, etc. and I mean that

 

- was still treated to the good ending with little or no mention of my past misdeeds and nothing really warranting mention next to the final boss fight yea/nay. Even NWN2's staggered reveal of multiple big players was more interesting, since they operated at different levels instead of every single one being a divine champion or mythical figure or worlds-ending abomination or ... fucks goddesses, whatever. I did at least enjoy tossing my allies at that dragon in the finale, but still, would've appreciated less DragonballZ one-upmanship in power levels.

I will say that after the past decade's insanity it's nice not having to devote much of an RPG's summation to social justice warrior nonsense (Deadfire, Wasteland 3, etc.) Oh, BG3 warrants a few eye-rolls in that department, like the women being physically stronger than the men or every companion being a hot-bodied ready-and-willing bisexual (and getting chided by the damn corpse for not romancing) or the gaiety from homognomos to random male citizen talking about his husband to the shemale at the circus, but at least it doesn't completely take over the story. Close enough for jazz.

During "early access" the biggest outrage seemed to come from it dropping earlier installments' real-time-with-pause claymation for turn-based mechanics. I was on board with that change before I even heard of it, and the finished product is far more tactically sound for it. In fact I'd have pushed for a hex grid as well. I do notice that particular bitching died down fairly quick after release, so maybe everyone noticed that Larian achieved the most complex mix of weapons, abilities, positioning and environment interaction we've yet seen. For that alone BG3 well deserves its renown. Furthermore, your choices carry through to later encounters and even later acts more thoroughly than most RPGs have even attempted. From companions to NPC availability to random redshirts, those you spared, helped or hindered routinely crop up again, and have something to say about it. The sheer number of quest advancement options outstrips other cRPGs easily.

 

But when it comes to roleplaying, I'm reminded the Baldur's Gate series always tended to lowest-common-denominator. Not only was it a middle ground between Torment's storytelling and IWD's choiceless dungeon crawl, but hinged on a "chosen one" plot, banked more on cutesiness and random goofiness, jumped randomly around in themes, threw in more overpowered loot or class combos and so forth. Much of what is wrong with BG3, what detracts from its otherwise expert approach, simply stems from its continuation as BG's "accessibility" according to munchkin definitions of roleplaying, and Faerun/D&D's own datedness.

Which brings me back to point #3 from above. What would I want to see more of here? The hag's quests were better written than the rest. Astarion and Minthara had their moments. But that's not much. I played Tyranny or Bloodlines four times over. Torment and Tides two-and-spare times each. The first Pillars of Eternity at least thrice. I can see myself replaying Kingmaker, as for all its faults its basic plot was solid and its setting and atmosphere apt. And as for looking for third-party modules, Solasta has a better set of core mechanics to work with.

But after finally working up the interest to finish BG3, I mostly just find myself wondering what the competition's been cooking in the meantime.

 

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* short-circuit detonation (Gale) red comet glare ignite (Lae'zel) not to mention a flying brain is literally a mind in motion... the world's not short on rebellious teenage anthems, but I'd stake a small bet they were listening to this song in particular at Larian during production

"Keeping time time time in a sort of runic rhyme"

"Will you, won't you want me to make you?
I'm coming down fast, but don't let me break you
Tell me, tell me, tell me the answer"

 

The Beatles - Helter Skelter

 

 

Fear tha space wolf, fer he gots apsides on the brain, Mundust in's nostrils an' a non-relativistic clock in's belleh, AaawooOOOO!!

 

On a completely unrelated topic I decided to catch up on my Wadjet Eye backlog with Technobabylon. Barely started before groaning at a tired old gimmick:

I've played enough adventure games to parse "a few hours" as "until the next scene featuring this backdrop" but every time I see a character reference an actual timespan I can't help recalling my thirteen year old self wondering "wait, so can I just leave the game running overnight to get another item?" No. No, young werwolfe, you cannot. Time is not time. Time is scene transitions. Also, don't let that old CRT monitor overheat, even if it does have a snazzy star field screensaver. And ffs wipe down your mouse and keyboard with rubbing alcohol once in a while!

Anyway, just to state this rant's thesis clearly like your high school teacher told you to do:

game designers, be consistent on whether time does or does not matter. When is time time?

 

Granted, in many or even most genres the question doesn't apply. FPS/RTS tend to be solidly real-time by the minute and second and millisecond and dick-measure their actions-per-minute, while turn-based strategy sticks to its turns whether we're talking cards or chess or Civilization. cRPGs though, for emphasizing immersiveness through everything from armor frills to pettable pets to the slant of light on a winter afternoon, routinely end up tripping over themselves when conveying critical or non-critical timeframes. Especially after Morrowind raised the bar on portraying a living, breathing world.

Games dumbed down from better formulae for mass appeal frequently feature the passage of time as shallowly as everything else.

Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption, despite emphatically warning you vamps don't tan, featured a grand total of what, one(?) mission where you sidestepped some windows? Otherwise nights never ended. At least Bloodlines was a bit more honest about everything happening at night and just flatly ignored the issue.*

Greedfall would occasionally tell you to wait for night. So you did exactly that. Hit the "wait for night" button at your hideout, and that's all there is to it. They didn't even bother with an in-game clock.

Mechwarrior 5, as I already complained, has a timeline you just fast-forward until the next event.

Such one-to-one relationships are meant for imbeciles incapable of holding more than one thought in their heads at a time.

Time as mechanic needs many more factors feeding into it, with some of the best examples being suvival-themed games where bonuses rapidly decay, monsters patrol or everything revolves around day/night cycles. I may have trashed Don't Starve for forcing mindless restarts (and stand by that) but I did enjoy it making you fear the dark and stock up on protective light. Frostpunk and its meal/hunt larder management and outpost deliveries, Miasmata's pitch-black nights making you depend on your paltry lighter, Banished, Dawn of Man or Northgard staving off winter starvation, such adventures greatly benefit from their cycles.

My favorites let you set the cycle.

Mount&Blade made a name for itself as a hack'n'slash physics simulation, but as that market filled up became more noteworthy for its tactical or managerial sides. Even when your army is standing still during a siege it's doing many things at once. It takes time to build siege engines, time to knock down walls, time for other bands to trickle in as reinforcements, during which both attackers and defenders are eating into their supply of food, wounds are healing, morale drops, etc. Though I was disappointed at Bannerlord dropping food spoilage as a management concern, on the flip-side it enlarged the map allowing for longer and more diverse trade runs, buying low and selling high from desert to tundra and shore to steppe as territories shift ownership around you. Caravan management in fact makes an excellent premise for a game based on scheduling.

 

Vagrus: the Riven Realms is turn-based, with your actions per in-game day limited by action points as you shift goods across the desolate postmagipocalyptic landscape, but there's quite a bit of fine-tuning involved in keeping your comitatus' mood above threshold while occasionally driving them to exhaustion rushing to the next town by day's end, buying as little food as possible (to leave more room for saleable goods) while avoiding starvation, chopping the odd horse up for burgers, weighing the amount of food passengers might eat versus how quickly you can cash them in at their destinations, foraging chances along your route, food prices at your future stops, and so on and on. What a bother, and what a joy to be bothered!

But here we're already getting into some issues. While Vagrus's design remains consistent for basic managerial mechanics, its questing side is a bit hit-or-miss in that regard. Most quests have no limits. Some give you fairly clear deadlines but might drop them on you unexpectedly (Finndurarth) while others just get huffy if you passed some limit you were never informed of (the Ashkulites with the stolen corpse) and still others blatantly lie (wind shamans tell you to wait a week but according to forums it's just a couple of days) and for a more manageable but frequent nuisance the companion attitude minigame places cooldown timers on gifts but doesn't auto-track when you gave the last one.

 

Those copying The Elder Scrolls' formula tend to be both best and worst at this. KCD for instance puts a great deal of detail into NPCs' daily routines, whether it's Father Godwin preferring to eat breakfast outside before he takes a bit of time to mend his fence

or, since the 1400s are a benighted superstitious times, pausing for prayer by those great

 and small

or managing to fill your 24hrs despite most characters being uninteractable at night

 

I arrived at a camp in the woods some hours too early to question the locals about bandits. I could "wait until morning" but since this is a better game I instead filled my time with a bit of honest robbery (lots of low-level sound sleepers with no guards around) then read a book until they woke up. You can also fill that supposed dead time at night with travel or poaching or alchemy or bounty-hunting. Quests involving hunting/poaching for instance tend to be some of the most challenging/frustrating as you must both luck out finding game and get the meat back before it spoils - during daytime! Night has its own activities, making it feel - imagine this - different from day!

 

Unfortunately once again many quests don't warn you they'll be timed or don't tell you the timer, or don't tell you they'll keep you involved for some period of time. One of the most important pieces of information: you can put off the main quest indefinitely at the step requiring you to meet Lordy FuckFace for a hunting trip, even if it says in the "morning" while other times "morning" does indeed mean next morning, like Johanka getting pissy if you don't escort her to preach in the woods.

When is time time?

Your guess is as good as mine.

And those are hardly the only examples

Pathfinder: Kingmaker's barony management became rather infamous for blindsiding you with timed events you couldn't schedule properly.

That piece of crap GameDec had its third act "action" timer, where little indicated what counts or does not count as an action.

In Tides of Numenera it was crumbling houses and serial killings.

In BG3 Lae'Zel rushes you to meet her people in Act 1 but it doesn't seem to care when you do it. But later, merely talking to the newspaper owner automatically kicks off a timed quest. The prison break round timer doesn't care how fast you reach the boats, because you're expected to just abandon the prison breakers and rush out the door. Some events are set off by the number of rests you take... but moving between maps also counts as a full rest. Does that eat into my timers? Does it eat into my food supply? Best head for the wiki and forums, 'cause nothing actually tells you when time is really time.

Even the original Fallout rather infamously had to drop its campaign time limit for running against the game's main charm of exploring all the settlements.

 

In fact, while adventure games or city sims will occasionally run into this issue, you can look at most any cRPG over the past thirty years and find players infuriated by being forced to reload old saves upon discovering they've been on some invisible timer or weren't informed they'd be setting off a timer just by walking into a room. And that's all it does: force reloads, unless you know the campaign beforehand.

 

It's always been a running gag that what sounds urgent in video games (like the world about to explode) moves only at the speed of the plot, so take your time. Introducing more deadlines can be generously interpreted as an attempt to cure that lassitude or the well-worn cRPG pattern of sweeping all side-quests in order of challenge rating between main quest steps. I'm especially fond of "per day" or "per rest" advancement mechanics and encouraged such when discussing daily rests and inns/taverns. Yes, as long as you properly notify me what I'm getting into. Being surprised with a timed quest when I have ten others on my plate doesn't make me reschedule the ten to prioritize that one. It just makes me reload to avoid the starter pistol. Discovering that exactly two of my fifteen "do it by tomorrow" quests actually fail if not done by tomorrow... when it's already tomorrow... tests neither my priorities nor my time management skills, but only my willingness to cheat and read about every quest before talking to NPCs. If you're gonna do it, do it right. Gratuitously forced wiki binging OR DIE is not a feature I've ever been interested in buying. It's a bug.

 

I'm sorry, I must've lost track of time and got sidetracked... what was I talking about?

Oh, right, Kerbal Space Program!

Do you notice how in that first screenshot I have alarms set up for when my launches hit critical points, and precise to-the-second estimates for my vessels' orbital positions and target intercepts?

Why is that so hard for cRPGs to do?

When is time time?

Either your game's timed or it's not. If yes, notify me when a task is indefinite. If not, notify me of any exceptions before I undertake them and track the timer through the interface. But I should not have to play a constant guessing game over whether the pill you labelled "morning after" actually works the morning after!

And, yes, yes, I hear you scream that interface record-keeping breaks that devil-may-care adventuring spirit of immersion, sure, sure. But you know what else breaks immersion? Gratuitous reloads so companies can pad their "hours played" marketing fad.

_____________________________________________________

 

* I wonder whether Bloodlines 2 will... no, I will not seek hype, I will not seek hype...

Flay Pretty

"Watch your head spin
Like a mesocyclone
Bouncing off the walls
Now there's nowhere to run"

 

Shiny Toy Guns - Ricochet

___________________________________

 

"These are the prisons, these are the crimes
Teaching life in a violent new way

For who can bear to be forgotten?"

 

David Bowie - Ricochet

___________________________________

 

"Drugs are for losers, and hypnosis is for losers with big weird eyebrows"

Futurama S03E14 (2001-2002)

___________________________________

 

 

Baldur's Gate 3 has its good points, but I've never liked Larian's attitude that "adventure = random shit" or their nonexistent worldbuilding and infantile pandering characters. I've particularly hated their handling of the illithids and more broadly the question of telepathy, to the point I flat-out refused to participate in that facet of gameplay altogether.

I reached the end of the campaign without ever using a single tadpole (also avoiding mind reading / control spells while at it, much as I could) and if the boss fight requires me to have done so, this is a hill my drowid will gladly die on.

Telepathy is wrong.

When setting out on this rant I was sorely tempted to get up on my pre-millennial high horse and pull a "kids these days" routine, but the truth is we've always been shaky on the morality here (return to why later) as exemplified by the Trois on ST:TNG thirty years ago. Prof. X is a... hero... right? At least that's what I find myself thinking all of a sudden when he scratches his magic cue-ball. Not to mention D&D always threw charm spells and other mental enchantment casually into the magical mix; in their defense, the folklore they indirectly drew from also does so. But I would contend I'm seeing more blithe, unquestioning acceptance of mind reading and mind control as generic tropes recently.

 

Drive's latest chapter kicked off this train of thought. I've long said that telepathy is a dead end for science fiction in particular. Drive's driving phlebotinum is, ostensibly, the titular interstellar drive accompanied by a requisite smatter of space opera laser guns and antigravity, quirky aliens and navy jargon. As soon as the space squirrel's sixth sense turned out to double as "mind-speaking" I cringed in anticipation of what has now happened: singlehandedly weaponizing it to instantly disable an entire fleet and receiving galaxy-shaking military intel via seance. A.k.a. invalidate any/all of the setting's technology, weaponry or strategic planning or... y'know... the plot. (Or backgrounds, is your setting gonna just be a telepathic blank void from now on, Kellett you lazy hack?) Who gives a shit if the enemy outnumbers, outguns and outpositions you if you can just nuke all their brains and call it a day? So long dramatic tension. Other stories may throw in some kind of "forgetfullness curse" to patch up plot holes like why hasn't anyone addressed some obvious threat until the hero notices it (hint: it's to make the audience feel smart for NOTICE THING) or to fast-forward intimacy or skip language barriers or any other number of lazy plot shortcuts.

Which leads me to my first sub-point: if telepathy is now so casually accepted that brain-zapping draws no more attention than zombies or a generic zap gun, the very least we could say is that telepathy's kinda played out.

Second, my original focus was on SF, because telepathy's mere inclusion in such a setting undercuts the technological precept of the entire genre. But more and more its rampant abuse as crutch for incongruous writing has grown detrimental in horror or fantasy as well. This became apparent while playing one of the few video games without supernatural elements, Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Its main quest's middle portion revolves around tracking down groups of bandits, with an interlude as medical detective's apprentice. (Cholera! It was cholera! 'Poisoned water'... why-I-oughta microscope yas *mumble-mumble*)

 

Playing gumshoe in the age of clogs made me realize how much more interested I felt in each witness' actual testimony as opposed to being automatically informed a character is good or bad via notarized brain fax. But aside from it being a cheap cop-out for actual plotting and character development, let's return to the inherent creepiness of mind invasion.

Unsounded remains one of the best webcomics out there. Among other details, I appreciate Cope fairly consistently portraying mind-reading as an invasive or destructive/deconstructive process, despite leaning on it a bit heavily as plot crutch herself. Bonus points for the Etalarche curse, which condemns the victim to be hunted down by all its countrymen in a murderous rage... specifically for thinking the repercussions through and showing how devastatingly such a curse upon the minds of an entire country may be subverted by the first invading enemy with a megaphone to cause the equivalent of a suicidal rout among your most hardened soldiers.

I'm less impressed by the SF comic Forward, which established from the start that its entire populace have electronics hardwired into their brains from birth, but only recently admitted the logical downside: the implants are NOT one-way. The user is part of the machine, and can be reprogrammed as such. Except it's not treated as a downside. It's very casually dropped into the conversation that your perception can even be altered in real time to censor anything you have chosen not to perceive... or which you are considered mentally incompetent to perceive... or to freeze you in place unable to even speak for yourself because you triggered a subroutine labeling you a threat to others. Now, having read Tailsteak's previous two comics and then some, I'm trying very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's going somewhere with this (maybe to the Futurological Congress) other than just a quirky little risque comedy of errors for our hero, his beefy love interest and his bestest robo-buddy.

 

If it's foreshadowing for a dystopian reveal, then grats Tailsteak, you've earned your keep. But otherwise, you can't drop brain editing into the conversation without the wider totalitarian applications being painfully obvious. Plot, conflict, affection, enmity, strategy, goals, perspicacity, means, motive and opportunity, none of it matters once mental invasion is in play. "Nuke their brains" is the ultimate cheat code. The ultimate absolutism. Thought, independent, personal thought is existence itself. Cogito ergo sum, the foundation of reason.* By effacing individuals as independent actors, telepathy erases personhood, erases being itself more thoroughly than Big Brother's recording devices and torture ever could.

We used to know that. Or at least suspect it.

While telepaths have always popped up in pop culture, Vulcan mind-melding at least shared the stage with acknowledgements of destructive potential. George R.R. Martin, before hopelessly wedding his name to "tits and dragons" had quite a few deservedly famous short to novella length tales to his name, among them A Song for Lya, which skillfully juxtaposed the fear of death with the night-mare Life-in-Death via the logical end-game of telepathy. The Man from Mars' corrective mechanism is not a brainwashing spree; it's a killing spree. The rest is up to earthlings. It used to be accepted that being made a cog in a clockwork orange is unacceptable, no matter the perpetrator's crimes, that execution would be preferable. Transcendence in Alpha Centauri was a desperate compromise short of complete annihilation of all sapience before Planet's presapient omnipotence. Even the Matrix, mass-market action flick that it was, at least stuck by two critical precepts: "ignorance is bliss" is a villain's line, and make-believe cannot substitute for reality. Even up to Dragon Age: Origins, it was understood that mind control is inherently wrong if not unforgivable, something demons do, the darkest school of magic. But by Tides of Numenera, it was chiefly Avellone's character Erritis that acknowledged such tuning of others' minds as inherently self-interested and destructive, with most writers encouraging you to rewrite others to suit yourself and even featuring "psychic warriors" as young adult novel heroes. The moral question of manipulating the "tides" themselves is barely scratched, and left up to a villain to pose.

 

I was disgusted in BG3 when by the third act I found even picking up a brain parasite automatically adds it to your "collection" a.k.a. shoved it into your brain, as if they couldn't imagine I might not want to. Forced me to do some container juggling to capture each one to my camp chest instead, so I could screenshot my whole refusal to partake above for a hearty "go fuck y'self Larian" now.

Go fuck y'self, Larian. There is no such thing as beneficent mind control.

Most aggravating, the game's writers played off the issue as if they can't even discern any moral objection but only childish fear of ookiness, as the undesirability of illithidness is played every time in terms of face tentacles and floating, and not the existential horror of erasing personal existence by one's very nature. You skip merrily through the idea that you should be building up your psychic powers to invade and delete others' very selves. That's all cool. The game only and at long last plays your illithidity as "problematic" when your next mind-raping powerup might give you the physical features of one as well.

"Puerile attachment to my material form" - ? What? I play a freakin' shapeshifter! No, you idiots, my objection to mind flayers is the flaying of minds! And that attitude, of openly touting it's fine to rape minds so long as you don't look ugly doing it, does further show notable degeneration in modern pop culture, the depths to which two decades of "reality" TV voyeurism have dragged us.

Finally, let's note this was probably inevitable. The Enlightenment and scientific progress were a brief blip of rationality in the million-year life and death of an intrinsically irrational breed of apes. The 20th century's short outbursts of rationality were themselves coextant with and sandwiched between long decades of dominant thought-erasing fascism, spiritualism, cloying sentimentality, romance, advertising and religious revivals. As the old scorpion parable goes, it's in your animal nature.

Any creature that wants some magic sky-daddy reading its mind is not mentally competent, regardless whether it sports face tentacles.

____________________________________________

 

* Even if Descartes did undercut his own stroke of brilliance half a page later by reaffirming his devotion to idiotic caveman superstitions. Not that he'd be given much choice in the 1600s with the whole continent torturing witches to death left and right.

 

P.S.: The only time BG3 voices a flat, concise repudiation of make-believe it's via the teachings of a canonically evil D&D species.

 

I'd be tempted to call that juxtaposition wry commentary on human morality, but given the pervasive infantilism of the rest of Larian's writing I find myself unwilling to extend them that credit.

My Life as a Drowid, 6: Pap, Sap and Dunce Caps

"a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial"

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit

_________________________________________

(some BG3 spoilers included)

_________________________________________

 

The voice is struck dumb. The invader, the deceiver, the manipulator, the spy, the liar, the presumptuous filth claiming beneficence while trampling the boundaries of self has retreated to take its place by its erstwhile master. I only regret that I shall have to end its miserable well-deserved punishment of a life in absolute slavery. In its place, we have birthed an arguably greater monstrosity from the chained heir. This one at least claims it will submit in turn after our enemy's fall. Should it forget this request, I shall forcibly remind it. Now, only the last battle remains.

Behind me stretch scattered aftershocks of an ambling and oft discordant adventure: great foes felled, lairs laid waste whether in forest, fortress, temple or beneath the waves. Yet now I find my mind turning to the multitudes passed by in every town, to the captives and predators, to the aides and collaborators, and no less to my own companions and allies. Were any among them worthy of respect? Or even of attention?

Child of darkness, did not (by your own admission) your own sins in service to Shar bind you to your sordid little cult far more securely than your convenient change of heart? I let you make your own choice beneath the Shadowlands, and it was yours and no more than that. And your life's course for years before was yours and no more than that.

Should I in turn see any value in a pompous pigeon but the heritage she herself struts and boasts at every turn? Be your immortal blood your sole quality, aasimar, let it serve loftier ambitions than baring your flesh beneath the diluting light of the moon's dull gaze.

I'd held hope for the gith when she spurned her corpse-goddess, only to hear her reiterate her worship of a new overlord. Does your knee even un-bend, planeswalker, or does it merely pivot?

I tore down down the mummified master of a horde of rotting abominations hungry for the flesh of innocents. What use, then, to leave the horde in place?

A singing devil. Now I've seen everything.

Should I have spared the musclebrained Rashemi lummox? One does not bring a butter-knife to a battle of razor wits.

Child after child toddles across my path, each with a new complaint more tedious than the last. Am I shirking my druidic caretaker duties on this campaign merely that I might play nursemaid to domesticated monkeys? Has the overworld no labor to which nimble little hands may attend, if only to keep nimble little feet out from under my foot?

Rabble, babble and rotted brains. I have zombies a-plenty without imitators to clutter the ranks.

When this is over, I walk on alone.

_____________________________________________

Personally I'm big on world-building but let's admit I'm weird, only quasi-human, a wer-wolfe. Ask most fans of plot-heavy, story-based cRPGs about their favorite memories in the genre and they'll cite characters instead. And hey, I'll gladly join in. My favorites like Planescape: Torment, V:tM-Bloodlines or Tyranny all feature some very memorable NPCs or companions in addition to large casts of believable extras and bit players properly fitted into well-defined social milieus. Even Baldur's Gate 2, which set the heretofore standard, was rightly applauded for the individual traits displayed by its large roster, even if they weren't all very thoroughly fleshed out. T:ToN, NWN2 and especially MotB, Kingmaker and Path of the Righteous, DA:O, AoD or Colony Ship, Vagrus, KC:D, the first PoE, even lower-quality writing like V:tM- Redemption, I could go on and on (have in fact gone on and on) about RPGs which, aside from their other faults or strengths, manage to convey something memorable either by character arcs or cultural development.

So for now let's skip "what" and ask: who or where is worth remembering from BG3?

 

Astarion for his snarking and his story's climax, maybe Minthara for wasted potential, and the hag, certainly, as a good old-fashioned cackling villain owning her cruelty in a myriad ways, developing the mindset, yeah, whoever wrote her did well. The Shadowlands, mildly, if only it had dwelled more on its inhabitants' adaptations to the curse and less on sapphic saviors with no other personality traits.

Aside from that, can you tell me the difference between Balduran culture vs. Elturan as portrayed in your 200+ hours of adventuring? Between a small village and the big city? Between tieflings and dwarves? Between merchants and mystics? Between adorable Shadowheart's sad, needy little girl mannerisms with her ingratiating voicing and any other sadistic thug trying to pull a last-minute redemption and blame the system for everything?

You can skip either individual characterization or world-building but not both, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I can barely name any character or location in any of Larian's games I've ever given a shit about. It was, in fact, one of my earliest complaints, back when I'd only played two of their titles partway, that the company appears incapable of anything but the most overused, lowest common denominator, generic fairytale/RPG filler material, jumbled together with no attention to constancy or consistency. I ask again as I did before: "tell me how anyone thinks they can build an immersive interactive experience around crap like this:"

 

Many adventures I'd hoped I might pursue in a fantasy world, but taking orders from Dumbo ain't one. I'd never really considered the dividing line between "whimsical" and "goofy" but surely it sits only a few pixels away from the line between telling a joke and being a joke. Does anything ruin a story's charm quite like the feel that the writers themselves don't give a shit and are just tacking on random gimmicks in hopes of looking creative to the uninformed and unimaginative via "LOLrandom" filler? One or two such digressions are usually cute, even necessary. Hell, I'd be the first to complain if we went back to nothing but box-filled warehouses and hippie elves. But when you're constantly jumping from ogres to fairies to dragons to dungeons to box-filled warehouses to talking cows to steambots to steamboats to curses to mad scientists to hippie elves to devils to talking pigeons to sex scenes to cauldrons to peasants to kings to talking cats to fuck-it-all-let's-throw-in-a-circus, you've created less a rich tapestry than a nonsensical jumble of loose threads on the floor which you're hoping I'll mistake for a rug. And then fall through into a vast pit of indifference.* I do understand a game this size cannot all remain interconnected, but you could've at least attempted thematic coherence beyond adolescent rebellion. Even Dragon Age managed that, despite being fundamentally at least as trite a pile of cliches as D&D.

But even taken individually, most encounters skew decisively toward infantile moralism. Pretty and nice things are good. Ugly and unpleasant things are bad. The power of friendship trumps any objective considerations. If nothing else, giving Raphael his very own Disney villain theme song should clue you into this M-rated game gunning for customers with a mental age of twelve, and please don't try to pretend that infantilism doesn't also extend to your RP choice in there. Saving the nice little woman from the big mean man is also the strategically sound option to gain a quite powerful healbot on your way out - which is to say you're being bribed to pad your ego by playing the hero instead of being made to choose.

 

On that note, nothing says infantilism like actual infants. Where most games avoid children to avoid making extra character models, BG3 both capitalizes on that lack and tries to get its money's worth with a sizeable passel of Artful Dodgers, Oliver Twists and Baker Street Irregulars. I actually liked quite a few: the wannabe resurrector whom you can coach into zombifying her brother's corpse by mistake, the bored son of a comedian, or the little goblin whom you can taunt about its parents deserving to die only for it to reply "Well, yeah - they was nasty old geezers - wanted to cut 'em a raggedy new smile myself some days." I'll even put in a special good word for Vanra, the little girl you pull out of the hag's belly:

Until that point, it works per the usual fairytale motif: beat up some ugly monster, rescue the pretty young damsel, then if you're not in a rush wait until she hits puberty before fucking her. I was pleasantly surprised though to pass by her mother's house later and hear a few lines of dialogue between the two, struggling to re-acclimate to mundane life an understandably shellshocked kid unable to form sentences and afraid to even go outside. It instantly brought to mind Picard's breather episode after ST:TNG's famous Borg two-parter, a welcome logical follow-up, an unusual hint of awareness from purveyors of mass entertainment that dramatic/traumatic/destructive events are not neatly fixed by an episodic reset or a happily ever after.

Plus, yes, heartwarming to boot. I wish those two the best.

 

But, again, whoever wrote the hag-related quests was rather more insightful or inspired than the rest. For the most part, the kneebiters in BG3 look cute and draw audience sympathy as they would in any sitcom or action movie. And that's about all they do. Some game designers have derided D&D's LCGE alignments as too limiting and simplistic, but Larian evidently dodged even such basic questions for a far more primitive, simpleminded metric of favor and disfavor: cuteness.

- unless it's masculinity in service to a woman, then it's "alpha"

Some juxtapositions are quite blatant (grumbling, bearded old necromancer vs. his cooing young healer daughter, giant-nosed hag vs. curly young mother-to-be, etc.) but various gradations of neoteny play into most of your quests. Even in a rare gender-flipped example such as animal cruelty at the kennels, the good male had to be a beardless halfling to look childlike next to the mean girl:

Shadowheart supplies the most consistent example. I'm normally a sucker for the broken little girl routine, but she over-played it even by my tastes. Her dialogues so single-mindedly pushed the idea of her being a victim (while ignoring what by her own admission were her own numerous victims) that by Act 2 I'd lost interest in her personal quest, and the fact that she defaults to "good" if left up to her own devices when faced with the Nightsong made me despair of her providing any cogent assessment of Sharran worship, instead rehashing some trite little fable about purity of heart. By that point Minthara was replacing her in my line-up anyway, so when her quest came up again in Act 3 I surrendered her to her fellow cultists.

An evil action to have taken, sure. I mean, I assume they'll torture her to death. Or, since I know for a fact from my BG2 Diviner's companion roster that Viconia already owns a Vest of Human Flesh +5, maybe she needs the shorts of half-elf flesh to go with it. *shrug*

But what I did not expect was "disapproves" penalties from every one of my companions**, including Minthara of all people! Because how could a drow matriarch possibly approve of my own drow sacrificing one of our hated half-breed surface cousins to yet a third drow?!?

The real kicker's that if you do hand Shadowheart over, the Daughter of Darkness quest bugs out and doesn't even complete properly. The devs apparently thought it unthinkable that anyone would side against adorable, emo little Shadowheart, who's guilty as sin of more than her share of standard Sharran crimes anyway, including my own tilted windmill of brainwashing. Her against Viconia. Against dignified, stalwart Viconia. Who soloed Jon Irenicus for me with two casts of a third-level spell. And, in-character, I'm surrendering one cleric to get a whole cult on my side?

Take her! Do you want fries with that?

 

At least Astarion fucking owns his evil nature.

 

Another recurring issue is the perennial anti-intellectualism of pop-culture, and to bridge the two, let's bring up this bitch:

 

"A tower full of trinkets" is the accusation hurled by every superstitious, inbred hick in history at ivory towers, ignorant of the nuanced analysis and systematic contextualization necessary to construct and utilize those "trinkets" - plus, Highlander Urkel over there has a throne made out of books! You seriously expect me to side against a guy with a book throne? Not to mention she's twice the pompous twit he is. So yeah, sure as Shadowheart's now a pair of lederhosen, Aylin's a nine volt battery. Distasteful her enslavement may be, but centuries of personal and public intellectual pursuit (foppish, but still) where that idiot jock would only spend her time dancing naked on moonlit hilltops... well, the juxtaposition greatly helps settle my conscience. (edit: yet of course the choice between them is presented as starkly as any cartoon mad scientist strapping a beautiful young damsel to a laser table; no thanks)

While I did not pursue Gale's quest past the meeting with the goddess, I saw much the same attitude in the ensuing dialogue at camp, where most dialogue options push you to talk Gale out of his ambitions, argue to remain slaves to the gods (or remain passive) even though he is absolutely right:

And, what, no dialogue option for a Lolth-sworn drow, despite Lolth's whole schtick being overthrowing at least part of the reigning pantheon? I should be high-fiving Gale by this point.

Extra point deduction for the line about "our time together" somehow presented as counter-argument to his ambitions - especially as I never romanced him.

 

For a more down to earth example try Mystic Carrion's quest. As he wasn't actually advancing knowledge but only playing spirit medium to a few rich clients, I did halfheartedly decide to end his saprophytic existence. At which point I'd assumed the rest of his undead would either join and die in the fight or somehow drop re-dead... not that his operation would just be taken over by some random street-trash ghoul, leaving a mansion full of ravening flesh-eaters to continue plaguing the city. How is this a good ending, when you've only eliminated the intellectual side of the problem? Well, you can't go wrong with beating up a nerd, I guess.

 

In summary: spoon-fed morality, cuteness, romance and beating up nerds. Themes thoroughly tailored to the mass market, which is to say to overemotional, instinct-driven, cretinous apes, whether typified by the cliched giant brain antagonist or by the fixation on mating rituals.

It was annoying enough finding persistent romance dialogues in every companion's scripts, even indulged in a couple of sex scenes, but I had not expected to be taken to task for not settling down by a damn corpse. Unsurprisingly Larian did not include the reply I would actually voice to such a question: that love is an evolutionary adaptation by which individuals are induced toward surrendering labor and self-sacrifice via emotional manipulation, that it is a form of mental control, brainwashing, slavery, and especially in this campaign we've already got more than enough of that going around.

 

And perhaps the saddest part? Larian really is better than this. Hints flit here and there that the writers knew damn well what tedious platitudes they were spewing.

But such moments, sad to say, come sparingly.

 

 

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* -and given this blog's meandering nature and lack of audience, I should know.

** Easily cheated btw; just leave your other companions at camp when you hand Shadowheart over. There's no fighting involved anyway. Also, in retrospect, given I jokingly blamed Viconia (and Korgan) for my chaotic neutral diviner falling into chaotic evil by the end of BG2... and now Viconia's tempted yet another of my characters to evil acts... maaayybe she really is a bad influence?