Thanks for Playing!

I tried Team Fortress 2 again recently after some years' absence. Development having altogether ceased when Valve saw Overwatch's release gut its own playerbase, pretty much zero things have changed. "Competitive" mode is still an idiotically shrunken duel/pissing contest abandoning all the game's strengths trying in vain to copy Overwatch's appeal and not worth the bother. But of course casual 12v12 mode is itself utterly poisoned by retarded trash refusing to fight, AFKing, sitting around spamming emotes or just quitting at the first death. Matches are not decided by relative worth but by which team actually has players... y'know... playing the motherfucking game?

 

It's not as though Valve wasn't always aware of this, but their insane excuse for a solution doing more harm than good remains in effect: automatically switching players from the larger to the smaller team. So after I've spent two minutes healing everyone on the control point for an easy victory, I'm forced to take the place of the dickless bitches I made quit and be punished with automatically losing during the third minute for having played too well. Aaand, uninstall again, that's enough of that.

 

But it's not as if I can get my fix of teamwork any better way. I was permanently banned from Warframe a year or two ago for raging against a griefer deliberately running up behind me repeatedly undoing all our team's quest progress step by step by step - but you can bet no action was taken against the griefer himself. Here's a snapshot match history from League of Legends* from... last year I think?

Unless you believe I was the noobiest noob that ever n00bed a noob at the start... then suddenly became an absolute GAMER GOD!!! for ten or fifteen matches straight... only to again switch to N00b!-mode for no particular reason... then again to god-mode... then again to noob-mode... and so on, endlessly, well obviously something other than my quality as a player is deciding match outcomes. The moment Riot's algorithm identifies you as better, it punishes you by giving you worse teammates, and worse, and worse, until tanking your average to its satisfaction.

 

Now, of course it's important to have balanced teams, but that's the whole point of having "leagues" so that teams can be composed of players of the same general aptitude. GENERAL aptitude. INDIVIDUALLY teaming worse players with better ones merely punishes the better and rewards the worse. Moreover, it shows that Riot's datamining can easily determine who the griefers are, and instead of eliminating those guilty of ruining matches keeps them in the playerbase for the express purpose of punishing their betters. 

 

On a completely unrelated topic, once upon a time I was motoring some Podunkian byways, late morning sometime before lunch hour, sun shining, birds singing, lovely day, when I suddenly slam the brakes! Was it a squirrel, a stray cat, a deer? No, it was some pasty guy, shirtless, tattooed up to his neck (pretty sure there was a swastika in there somewhere) stumbling aimlessly in a daze, sporting the stringy, bug-eyed aesthetic of methamphetamine addiction which you learn to spot as a self-preservation mechanism if you ever sojourn in Middle America. And who knows what else he was on. Far from jumping away from near-collision he draws himself up in surprise, still standing in the middle of the street, and draws back his fist as if to punch the hood of my car... then in the next split-second jerks his head up, blinking at the sun, distracted by some noise in the trees, and stumbles off the road again, straight into the bushes. For the record, I don't particularly give a shit what substances you're on, except as an indicator of likely behaviors including stumbling into traffic and punching cars which should by all rights disqualify you from participation in society. We have more traffic laws than anyone can keep track of. They're very good at punishing the otherwise blameless for "speeding" on empty roads. How useful are they at keeping crackheads from denting my grille?

It's gotten almost impossible to get rubbing alcohol at pharmacies these past years, simple ethyl alcohol, forcing a switch to the less digestible isopropyl. Why? I'm not the one getting drunk off the shit. Why am I being punished? Police those actually guilty of abuse. Why did we spend a quarter century taking our shoes off at the airport? And more importantly, for every convenience and dignity we have always been made to surrender in the name of some greater good, call it firearms or marijuana depending on your political affiliation, you have to ask: yes, fine, but what are you doing with the actual guilty parties you catch? Why are murderers not executed? Why is the car-punching good old boy still drunk-walking the streets? You can't seriously tell me it hasn't harmed others before. Conversely, I've committed no harm condemning me to be subjected to, and endangered by, its presence.

 

Game companies claim to fight cheating while openly cheating to enable griefers. Governments claim to promote the public good while deliberately feeding whatever worst demographic will vote for them, be it crackheads in the city or meth-heads in the sticks. Why? Online games have long achieved, by their very nature, the totalitarian mass surveillance and absolute power real-world soldiers and politicians only envision in their sadism. The griefing and cheating yet pervading all such games, the fact the companies themselves, without being asked, take it upon themselves to cheat on behalf of their worst customers and shield them from repercussions, unerringly reveals the truism of every "people's republic": that all their oppression renders life more dangerous, not less, funneling sadists up the ranks of power. Why?

 

Well, partly for sheer profit by numbers, the "for the people" motivation masking weaponized, monetized mob rule, but also because just like Valve, Digital Extremes and Riot refusing to ban potential customers no matter what harm they cause to their betters, just as their algorithms deliberately employ those griefers to harm better players, governments see value in keeping destructive filth threatening others, a ready stock of easily manipulated lynch mobs and a drain on the prosperity of the now vanished middle class. There is no way to improve any society, real or virtual, without exterminating its worst elements, and that is precisely why those elements are never exterminated, being too useful as tools of control over the greater system. Every ruler wants mindless thugs, scabs and strikebreakers, to throw at principled dissenters. Every ruler wants to be able to decree when an underling should lose a match, and to do so via proxy so as to maintain deniability.

 

Want progress? Exterminate the filth. Eh, screw it, never mind, it's about a century too late to avoid collapse anyway.

. 

 

________________________________________________ 

 

* Yeah, I know the game's shit anyway, but it's not like the genre offers better options these days.

Fallout: New Vegas

"There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –"

 

Emily Dickinson

______________________________________ 

Y'know, they had a saying back in the old days:

- but I don't remember it because we don't really remember all that much from back then. Who wants a history of plenty and gleaming safety when you're dodging shivs and stingers around every corner and hoping you haven't inhaled enough radioactive dust to make your skin slough off? But they also say Vegas was a big deal before the war. Still is. Money-pit back then. Still is. Crooked and run by crime families? Well, yeah. And maybe that's what everyone likes about the place. For all the monsters looking to chew our limbs off, for all the poisoned landscape and contaminated water, the xenophobic cults and sadistic tyrants looking to enslave us, for all the world's changes and our own mutations, everyone, and I mean everyone, can look to that idiotic cap-trap burning pointless electricity through every night and feel reassured, yes, reassured in this universal kinship, that we're all still the same dumbfucks that blew up the world in a pissing contest.

 

This message brought to you by Cram!

________________________________________

 

After bashing my head against Bannerlord's Artificial Stupidity a couple of posts ago, I decided to switch to some other looting, roving, first-person RPG, and methought instead of Cyberpunkin', it's been a while since I've fallen out. Or in. Next stop: 2010's New Vegas, farmed out to Obsidian as soon as Fallout 3 demonstrated the 3D adaptation could turn a profit, presumably so Bethesda could focus on the then upcoming Skyrim instead. Could it be anything more than a cheesy cash-grab sequel easily tossed aside after a few hundred rat kills?

I initially started an early level play-by-play as I'd kept for #3, but soon realized their shared technology and interaction would force me to repeat myself on too many minor details. Then I kept expecting to suss out some through-line of incompetence in mechanics, atmosphere or writing which I could mock from beginning to end. To my dismay, then delight, I discovered I couldn't. The more I dove in, the more it drew me in. Though hampered a bit by bugs, clunky motion, industry-standard grindy resource stockpiling and a few terrible decisions (e.g. damage threshold, STR as must-have stat, Bethesda-standard terrible inventory timesink interface) overall New Vegas proves an impressively well-executed game.

 

Avoiding abusing the paid cheat items from the DLCs I heft my varmint rifle and stumble my way through the first few levels in my own ass-backward way, hitting Sloan's easier quests and then Primm (leaving the robot in charge, though, truth be tol', I got no time for any man (or bot) named Slim, 'less 'is last name be Pickens) and even the border outpost (where I have the dubious honor of being sent to kill ten rats or six ants, whichever comes first) before returning to newbietown's newbiequest. Then I spin out for some exploration and random violence: geckos, ghouls, goats, scorpions, coyote dens, a cave here, an irradiated valley there, a ridiculous ghoul rocketeer cult jetted off to anywhere-but-here.

 

By the time I sight the solar farm I find myself pausing every once in a while to admire the windblown dust. Something about this game is beginning to feel very... right. After the random nonsense of #s 2 and 3, the atmosphere seems to have found its footing again. The entire wasteland's not immediately crawling with super mutants. Characters stay in character, which doesn't exclude the occasional bit of in-character humor.

Desperate for desperados

Sure, sure, the theft/morality mechanics still make no sense even within the... let's say lax, limits of video game logic. While Powdering that gang at the hoosegow, how the hell is it still stealing to take any of the convicts' junk? I'm their sworn enemy, I've betrayed their trust and doomed them all, declared open war on them and I outright gain karma by hacking them to ribbons with my machete while they wail in agony, but taking a bottle of beer still costs me karma? Then you've got poor Boxcars who will never again kick a tumbleweed. My condolences. And also my morphine. Apparently feeding dope to a murderous bandit counts as a karmic gold mine. Hurray morals. Even the big supposedly two-sided conflict between Republic and Legion is played much too shallowly, but I'll have to revisit Caesar's Legion when I discuss villains.
 

A few little absurd moments had me rolling my eyes right from the opening cinematic. Headshots do not work that way, the couple of times my dialogue read "I'm not a delivery boy" had me wondering how else you define "courier" and I'm hoping the bottlecap quest won't wax Pythonish in its silliness. I've also been skipping any card/gambling minigames in the interest of time. Then you've got the more severe stumbling.

 

The overly-narrow inventory margin forces me into abusing teleportation just as in Fallout 3 despite having piled on three more strength points - sure, I could avoid picking up trash loot but look, I just assume I'll need thirty pounds of dog meat, four hundred empty bottles and fifteen toasters at some point in this campaign; this is an RPG after all. And, if anything, even my thirty years' worth of metagaming experience underestimated old Obsidian's dedication to making you pick up every piece of litter you run across. I've spent half my time checking the wiki for fear a junk item might have some obscure use, which it usually does. With a better interface, this could've been very entertaining. With Bethesda's gigantic linear list-scrolling timesink and zero tooltips, I'm leaning more toward annoyed. On a related note, as in Fallout 3 interior spaces often feel too "realistically" large and repetitive, but I'll spin that off into a separate topic.

 

It also has its share of more technical issues. The mottled dustbowl aesthetic's a mixed blessing. It allowed them to camouflage a large number of tripwires, land mines and other nasty surprises managing to reintegrate trap-disarming as an RPG staple after moving to FPS. On the flip-side it also turns many quests into pixel-hunting nightmares.

I don't care if you're Hawkeye himself, I simply will not believe you hunted those pixels without cheating and looking up the location on a wiki.
 

Also, entirely too many quests or rewards become unavailable if you clear a location before getting the corresponding marching order from some mook you never knew existed. Quest markers glitch out and mislead you, save files refuse to overwrite and the game still crashes and locks up on zone transitions. So I couldn't explain why none of those very real flaws put a dent in my drive to advance through Fallout: New Vegas' world and encounters until I finally set my mind to enter the city proper. I climbed a rise overlooking the Colorado River. Up ahead was a friendly camp. Might meet a giant mutant fly or two on the way. Farther in the distance was the dam. Nice detour on my way north, and a chance to skirt the bandit-infested ruins. My pack was still fairly light, so I might make it all the way to the city and advance the main quest. By a step, just a step. Plenty of mysteries to uncover on the way. Some dangerous, to be avoided. Others tantalizing. Progress to be made, but not an infinite power trip. Wealth to be gained, but not constantly. Colorful characters, but with interesting motivations.

 

Only then did I consciously articulate NewVegas' charm: it's honest work. Not the more cynically pandering, low-brow, condescending fluff like Fallout 3, Wasteland 2 or BG3, not focus-grouped to death; neither is it the self-indulgent posturing of fresh college graduates imagining themselves "disruptors" upending an entire industry by some sophomoric big idea. It neither strains to keep you mindlessly busy with constant action nor denies the necessity for same in moderation. It neither drags you everywhere by your nose-ring like a domesticated beast executing fixed orders, as Skyrim did, nor purposely punishes you with "rocks fall, everybody dies" GM omnipotence abuse. Nor did it outright settle for mediocrity.

It built on its premise.

 

Where in, say, Wrath of the Righteous or BG3 most NPC companions outright infuriated me by their infantilism, in this game from a decade prior I couldn't find even one I outright disliked. (Though their idiot combat AI had me gnashing my rotten fangs.) I'm enjoying the added immersion of the survival elements, chugging Nuka-Cola and irradiated water, stocking up on doctor's bags, planning on visiting the Doc for an anti-rad treatment, taking time for a good night's sleep. Persistent but not insistent implementation. Vegetation and resource spawns follow different biomes with smoother gradations than Skyrim. Even more importantly, NV downplays the MMO grind mechanics which plagued TES 4&5 and Fallout 3. It throws out level scaling (aside from a noticeable mid-game bump in mob types) in favor of reasonably tiered challenges, renewing that impression of monomythic escalation and distinct transition between the mundane and mystical which the original Fallout so perfectly captured, and which 2&3 threw out. It even dares to weaken the loot&scoot core loop. In contrast to Fallout 3 or Skyrim, you might spend highly variable durations away from Goodboing (or wherever you keep your stash) and some of the most interesting locations, like Vault 22, might not offer much in the way of loot at all.

 

But most important, it prizes its immersion and does not sell it out for cheap gags. NPCs learn your name and reward your past efforts. The wilds feel spot-on bleak and vaults perversely claustrophobic. Mobs cluster around dens and hideouts and other likely spots, not just interspersed statically over the landscape, and occasionally mount half-hearted attacks on civilization - and civilization responds in kind!

I made a lucrative scavenger trade early on when discovering I could follow caravans around and loot their targets as they defend themselves during travel. (Makes me wonder who's running around after my comitatus in Vagrus.) There's even a coherent sense of marching history to the collapse of tribal/raider culture in the face of larger, organized factions like the NCR and Legion, of civilization very gradually rebuilding after a now long-past nuclear war.

 

But I can't help noting all of NV's best features were Obsidian's departures from Bethesda's strict formula. Slight ones. Working within the series' limits. Eventually you feel that formula dragging you down again. I'd post a screenshot of my character's progress, but by level 31 you probably know how that goes. Most skills already at 80 points, a mountain of loot, a brewery's worth of bottle caps even after maxing out my implant quota. Grandmaster of every guild, as usual. Every quest pushing you toward a golden ending. Simplistic good vs. evil conflicts with obvious correct choices. Not much role to play.

 

Yet still. It's a world you don't want to leave. Boots scraping the sun-baked clay, an objective on the horizon, a glance between the foothills for interposed threats, a chug of sarsaparilla, a nod to your companion. Onward. NV falls into that second tier of classic games. It lacks the real oomph of a trendsetting Fallout 1, Morrowind, Starcraft or Half-Life, the artistic flair of a Bloodlines, Tyranny or Torment to fuel roleplaying memories. But, like Dragon Age: Origins or the first Pillars of Eternity, it stands out as a rare, self-respecting, dedicated project all around.

 

I grudgingly admitted Fallout 3 was less of a shit-show than it could've been. I'm wholeheartedly enjoying New Vegas.

 

 

 

____________________________________

 

P.S.: Kicking tumbleweeds around is weirdly fun...

Bah, NerdLord: From Seonon, an Empire!

"Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren doch
Gewinnen könnt ihr viel"

KMFDM - Hau Ruck

 

Dateline: Calradia, 1091. Beaten, bottled in, batty Battania battens down its bottom bastion!

Stalwart Battania, high-flung Battania, Mother Earth's favored flaxen-tressed daughter, land of a thousand pigs and several little ponies, land of... clay... hath been broughte lowe by its fowes. Yet (as such stories go) in the eleventh hour a hale and determined hero named Werwolfe rides to the gates of Marunath to pledge his service to his homeland; then discovers he can't because king Caladog himself languishes in a Vlandian dungeon and thus cannot accept an oath - though he's probably shouting quite a few.

 

Still you can get a fair bit done as a mere mercenary in Bannerlord, even if it mostly relies on Artificial Stupidity. The computer tends to operate with horse blinders on, so even though it'll run from stronger armies, the Battanian plateau's narrow terrain makes it easy to purposely let an enemy army advance past you then chase it into your other allies. Since all my side's remaining lords were concentrated around a single city, this became depressingly repetitive. The same vulnerability which probably dooms Battania when it's just algorithms against each other makes it easily defensible for a human player. Ath Cafal, the village just SW of Marunath, also happens to lie in a cul-de-sac, so enemies would repeatedly trap themselves either trying to raid it or chasing weaker armies in. Lather, rinse, repeat, and thus passed my first year of Battanian military service. All well and good until the king of the Norhern Empire himself parked a larger army than I could handle right outside the town gates.

Note than even though our combined forces (my 170 plus all the parties in Marunath) would easily have trounced King Lucon, they won't coordinate such an attack unless already in the field, and won't step onto the field because they're each individually programmed to stay safe indoors if outnumbered. Catch-22. Not only that, but even when they do the interface is endlessly vague as to which armies will help you or not based on proximity. Laddies and gentlegamers, I don't mind admitting I cheated my ass off at this point, crashing and reloading the game twenty times over until finally managing to bait Lucon away so my idiots would venture out, then looping back to hit him when enough were in range.

 

This would've been easier if I were a lord and could form armies, I thought, until discovering that even after Caladog's return and lordy-looing myself up, none of my peers can recruit enough troops from our meager remaining population to accept an army invitation. Realizing that if Battania is to have an army I must supply it myself, I spend the next year continuing to trap and imprison Vlandians until after grabbing Llanoc Hen Castle we agree to a hefty tribute for peace in Summer of 1092. Building my own Imperial Legion from the Western Empire and splitting it off to a couple of my own underlings, finally I throw my accumulated influence (in part from surrendering prisoners to my King's dungeon) into a desperate gambit to mass our entire force and recapture Seonon from the Northern Empire. It works!

I even have enough influence left over after the victory to squeak through on a 1% margin and claim it for myself. The politics, kid, that's what'll kill ya. 

Home sweet ramshackle, muddy home.

We manage to fight off the inevitable recapture attempt. By winter, with our raiders descending the plateau eastward into the lands about Epic Scrotea, the Northern Empire agrees to a truce. Thus, with a moment's peace and a homestead secured, a middle-aged man's fancy turns from battle-lust to booty-lust. Cue the romantic bagpipes, we're goin' a-courtin'!

 

Now, I'd originally found myself in a meet-cute with one lady Gawen, saving her a couple of times on the battlefield... but as she turned me down turned out to be a lesbian, I decided meet-cutes are dumb and fixed my eyes on a politically convenient marriage to Corein, daughter of king Caladog.

We look cute together. Regal too.

The real clincher was when I saw the good princess' flawless taste in battle-garb.

I'm in love!

We can borrow each other's wardrobe and wolf-whistle in both directions. Though during the war she'd turned me down as beneath her station, after the capture of Seonon it wasn't long before (a quick reload during a failed dialogue aside) she approved her father's approval of my approval of her fine lupine ass.

One wife, please. An' make 'er shaggy.

Technically she only rates 8295 denars, but what the hell, keep the fiver old man, my treat. *wink*

 

While courting and then while we busy ourselves cranking out a couple of heirs, I convince my incipient father-in-law to re-open hostilities with our Vlandian oppressors, having maxed out my underlings' armies until I start to lose money on upkeep. The war drags slowly over the next few years, with gradual, hard-won victories in castle sieges, and a welcome alliance with the Western Empire, the Vlandians' other major enemy. The biggest stroke of luck comes after the recapture of Pen Cannoc, Dunglanys having rebelled against Vlandian rule. Not only does it split their armies for easy field skirmishes, but sets up easy, predictable ambushes when they try to siege it.

Then, when they do retake it, a quick pounce to grab it on the rebound. Thus, seven and a half years after Battania's near-defeat, the latest peace treaty leaves us with far more hopeful borders.

Tho' Car Banseth yet languishes under accursed Vlandian misrule, much of our ancestral realm has now been reclaimed. We set our eyes beyond our borders, where glory and riches (surely) await.

 

So, how was this for an RPG plot? A wealthy merchant returns to save his homeland, outmaneuvers his foes by devious military tactics, seduces a princess (while wearing the same outfit as her (hey, some chicks are into it!)) and claims a title and fiefdom by hiring foreign legionnaires. It's got a plucky underdog angle, patriotic last stands and glorious marches, a courtroom drama scene, the comic relief that your new city's a little bit boggy, one town's heroic rebellion to join its free brethren, and even a love triangle! I've said before (and I'm far from the only one) that Bannerlord has suffered by losing the companion dialogue and small-party adventuring of M&B: Warband, lost some of its monomythic escalation, and sadly, that remains true. Nevertheless it remains a prime example of computer games' potential as creative medium.

 

When the topic is discussed, it's almost always in terms of writing quality, visuals, moral/sociopolitical themes or a really bangin' soundtrack. But all that, while certainly relevant, is unfair if it only treats a game as if it were a movie or a storybook. It's supposed to be interactive, this new electronic medium of the past half-century, it's supposed to be about what you, the player, can actually do. Lay out your own story. An often touted ideal, rarely achieved, yet still the medium's great claim to validity. This? Some AI incompetence aside, this was good roleplaying and good gaming.

 

Health and long life to The Swain of Seonon!

Bah, NerdLord: Of falx and flax

Always we return to Calradia.

The sun sets over Lageta's faded glories.

More than any other game, the two Mount&Blades have supplied me with an alternate universe. Sure, I've gone long stretches, even years, without diving back in, but from the very first single-town beta version a couple of decades ago I never doubted that I would be playing again, every time. And every time I have. Though any individual feature has been done better by others, nothing else has quite matched this particular mix of visual, aural and thematic immersion, long-term plans and tiny surprises, hack'n'slash and economics, in short: a world. Still, let's not get stuck in a moment you can't get out of.

As the War Sails expansion forced starting new campaigns, I decided to play a Battanian hill-man this time around. But aside from trading my crossbow in for some throwing axes and yurts for roundhouses -

- I find myself too easily falling into old patterns. Spawn outside Marunath, pick up a few soldiers, win my first looter fight, then thanks to a price tip in town, sell some iron and tools at a 400-1000% mark-up in Lageta. While M&B1 started from a D&D wandering adventurer band precept (albeit without magic) and only later skewed in favor of running your own fiefdom, my biggest complaint about the sequel has been that it refocused so heavily on kingdom management and massive sieges as to elide small-party adventuring or remaining independent. Objectively, it was a marketing-savvy way to avoid getting lumped in with all the 2010s' Skyrim clones, but it does make it too easy to get caught up in the trade good and army XP numbers game while ignoring the actual locations you visit.

 

So I had intended to spend more time in a small band, doing odd jobs and getting to know the neighbours. But the money to be made from trading was just too tempting. And to carry goods you need a mule train. And to run the mules you need a larger party. And if you're slowing yourself down to almost minimum speed anyway, you may as well stay at minimum speed (since you can infinitely overload yourself after that) and swell your party as fast as you can so you don't have to worry about bandits, and then you realize you've spent your first couple of in-game years doing nothing but running around in circles amassing cash. It were the flax wut done me in!

phear muh phork

As an added twist of your arm, when starting a new campaign and seeing those pristine low-low prices before towns start trading hands and losing productivity, the urge to take advantage of !!flax at 2 denars, OMG!! becomes irresistible. So I actually took very little notice of the new content (Nords and sailing) at first. Most map changes that came with the expansion seem to have made trade circuits less obviously direct, with more options, but Battania being arranged around a mountain lake invites a local circuit every time before setting off. Easy money. That low-brow town/village questing was nice for a bit:

Gangs of Old York.

- but the efficiency of delegating quests to companions is, again, too financially inviting to refuse, especially for an experienced player. The new text events are quaint: 

- but again, since they don't require you to actually interact with the villages/villagers in question, they maintain M&B's old split between playing and sightseeing. I hit up the arena in various towns to swash some buckles, but it's not quite the same. Granted, when battles do come, they turn out to be real nailbiters, with my Celtic archers skinning their teeth on two-soldier margins. But I rarely need to fight. When I do finally get out to sea, I cheat my way out of one impossible battle by crashing the game. Otherwise there's nothing to do with or on a boat. It's your party by another figurine. The availability of ports makes for some interesting logistic shifts, but I can't help thinking War Sails isn't quite the content mix Bannerlord needed to flesh out its gameplay.

 

When the desert (and desert faction) was added to Warband, its content actually connected into the existing map with new terrain (heavily favouring cavalry) new trade goods (fleshing out the somewhat limited existing gamut) and a welcome increase in map size raising supply/quest timer challenges. But Bannerlord's map was already satisfyingly sized, its trade good variety quite ample, mariner infantry come across as pointless bloat, and the Sturgians already included Nordic themes. Installment #2 had different needs from #1, which are not being met by the same additions. Bannerlord would benefit more from more ways to connect to the little people, to take breaks from kingdom-building, to enjoy the towns and villages as more than sight-seeing.

 

Not bad, but not particularly inspired either. Perhaps I can be faulted on my own cupidity limiting my adventures to trade screen ventures.

So next time I'll be making more of an effort at personally running quests. But come on, timber at 5 denars?!? Who can resist, I ask ya!

Game as Service Outage

"She takes a litle time

In making up her mind

She doesn't want to fight against the tide"

 

Garbage - The Trick Is to Keep Breathing

 

 

Let's see, where were we? Night City? 

Nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I've been jumping in every so often this past year, as one does in these big open world games, but find myself unmotivated to advance in any way. At least in Skyrim, despite putting the main quests off for... almost forever, I could get momentarily jazzed by exploring a new dungeon, crafting new weapons, potions and enchantments, building up my homestead. Cyberpunk 2077's level scaling sours both the combat and crafting, its apartments can't be customized (and once I found the delightfully shabby Northside one I lost interest in others) plus I already got the only car I want.

Quit snickering, it gets three million pixels to the gallon!

The high point so far have been the side-quests, which not only display some nice, professional level design but contain just enough flavor text to each paint an entertaining vignette of life in the city. But as I've been clearing those off board after board, I've been gradually losing interest in mercenary work altogether and launching the game for ten or twenty minutes at a time to just wander around and take in the numerous slices of Night City life, like kids playing virtual hopscotch.

Oh come on, a piece of chalk must cost, like, a fraction of an implant, economize ya lil' shits! Anyway, overall, a modern setting offers less room for the more involved delving of a single, unitary "dungeon" so there's no real feeling of escalation to any of it. Escalation takes more planning.

 

I never did get around to trying Vagrus' new zone. When I left off, I'd just finished a massive inspiraling sweep of the map, polishing off Finndurarth, Nedir and Harvek's companion quests at the same time as cashing in a lot of smaller contracts, battles and investments.

Excess livestock: the best problem.

Gotta appreciate those 400 silver wallet bumps. But knowing I'll need to devote a fair bit of focus to my next twenty-step plan to avoid forgetting crucial details, I parked my comitatus back at newbietown with an empty inventory and clear ledger, and there it's been awaiting my triumphant scheming return for half a year. I'll be saddlin' up some giant ant mounts next time! If there is a next time...

 

There are many issues with the DLC-spam business model as a subset of the game-as-service, microtransaction mentality writ large. Its popularity spread with multiplayer games which ensured almost universal playerbase buy-in. Everyone else is buying the new expansion. Do or get left behind. But single-player lacks that social network addiction as a crutch, leaving only the game's quality as incentive for the next buy-in. How sure are you of your appeal?

 

Then of course there's the issue of demanding your customers pay full price for the bare skeleton of a product, which is why I bought Europa Universalis 4 a decade after its release.

 

Then there's the diminishing returns angle, as latter DLCs get more and more sparse to keep bleeding a supposedly addicted audience with the least effort, which is why I haven't bought the last few years' worth of Stellaris DLCs.

 

At the conjunction of the previous two points you find the limitation of tacking extra features onto a basic system not made for them. I've addressed at some length D&D's problem trying to sell extra classes, modules and settings, when what it so obviously needs is to break down the primitive min-maxing, over-randomized fighter/wizard/thief setup from half a century ago - but the fanboys would never stand for it. Age of Wonders 4 has been scraping that limit with its latter expansions, deftly interspersing yet not touching the core limitations of its six magic affinities.

 

Worse (here we reach my eventual point) you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, because in electronic-land, a full revamp will probably not be playable with older content. These days, that's a problem. Last year when I joked about needing spreadsheets to keep track of various options I've used (or not) as I jump between games every few months, I started by complaining Frostpunk 2 had killed my last city with its heat management patch. Now that seems to be ramping up into a trend. Low Magic Age (one of those perpetually "in beta" types) has barred my level 13-ish party from continuing. Darkest Dungeon 2 wiped my existing "confession" (a.k.a. campaign) at some point. Worst of all, my excitement at a new Mount&Blade expansion (Bannerlord's got vikings now - on boats!) was severely dampened when it forced me to retire the Marquis of Baltakhand, aged though he now be. Even porn games are starting to nuke old saves, and if you think an RPG party wipe is anti-climactic, try getting caught mid-thrust! 

 

While I don't deny the financial necessity for start-ups or fringe developers to literally buy themselves more development time with piecemeal content, add nuking players' saves as further evidence of post-launch content's limited tenability, no matter how well it worked for No Man's Sky. This is especially true as strategy/RPG campaigns have stretched longer and longer. A Frostpunk city represents a couple days' worth of gameplay. Bad enough. But the likes of Rogue Trader or Baldur's Gate 3 boast 200-hour campaigns. Not an option for them. If the basic idea is that such expansions will come after players have had a year or three to get bored of their existing characters, I refer you to my Vagrus example. Some concepts are playable only by extended, devoted effort, after which you might let the experience marinate for a bit before jumping in again. Not because you're bored, but because you're savoring it... or maybe precisely because you tell yourself you'll play once the next DLC comes out, not realizing it'll murderize yer marquis.

 

So, two or three main issues:

 

1) Micro-doses of content can much more easily be added to dumbed-down gamplay where you just end up wandering aimlessly about, as in Cyberpunk. I don't know if those hopscotch brats were there from launch, and I don't have to care. Even if they did anything it wouldn't affect my trade run... because there is no trade run. No planning. Just mindless twitch-FPS dust-ups. But if I saw a DLC drop for Vagrus when my character was mid-circuit, I would deliberately delay buying it, possibly by months (and it went on sale) until I was safe in town with no outstanding warrants and able to accommodate any landscape changes.

 

2) One of the big problems with post-launch content has been training your customers to refuse buying anything at launch pricing on the assumption they'd only be missing out on later stuff 'n junk anyway. Now pile that on with conditioning them to actively dread expansions killing their characters. Bad enough to market a pig in a poke, but when the revealed cat claws your face off...

("Lately, I'm not the only one

I say never trust anyone") 

 

3) As the entire industry is presumably re-tooling to fill games with spammed, dirt-cheap AI slop as content, the artsier fringe must at long last bite the bullet and start marketing itself not as low-budget small-time indie side-show attractions, but as more expensive, artisanal interactive media. Go organic. Advertise your Amish hand-crafting. Charge more. Take more time to develop. Put out singular, coherently-crafted campaigns from start to finish. Move on to the next and hope your work was good enough to earn you name brand trust. Low prices and DLC spam will soon be synonymous with The Slop.

Metro 2033

a.k.a. "On a Rail" literally and redux*

 

Hmm, let's see, I did some city sims, a SF RPG, some adventure surviving before that, a big science fantasy RPG this past spring, a couple of Age of Wonders campaigns in between for a dose of high fantasy, what do I want next? Not fantasy... a first-person shooter might hit the spot (as long as my hand doesn't shake) but instead of returning to C77, maybe the next Fallout in line? Or, better yet, Fallout's postapocalyptic FPS competition, from some of Stalker's creators.

 

Oops. As soon as I installed Metro 2033 it became clear it's not quite what I signed up for.

Problems:

1) The stupid logo-spamming menu transition cutscene you're put through every time you start the game.

2) No manual saves. Official save points only. One of the great all-time video game timesinks.

3) The stupid 30-second postcard cutscene I'm forced to sit through when reloading from the next checkpoint lying in bed.

4) Psychic bullcrap right from the start, in a SciFi story. (At least Stalker held off until mid-game.)

5) The tutorial and first chapter is half an hour of cutscenes with a couple skeet-shooting sequences thrown in to remind you you're supposed to be playing a game.

6) Chapter 2 at least lets me move around on my own for a bit, albeit with no jumping allowed. (It upsets the pigs, I guess?) (Turns out to apply to every noncombat area.)

7) Menu system designed to minimize the amount of information on screen, so as not to confuse its core FPS twitch-gamer cretin audience. Weapon keybinds for example are buried five layers deep. Results in a lot of time-wasting clicking back and forth through menu tiers. Shop windows aren't much better. 

8) By zone 3, all I've done aside from scripted skeet-shooting scenes is scrounge around for loose ammo shells and trade them in for other varieties. I'm finally doing a thing on my own like a big gamer boi! 

9) Monsters so far come in standard generic monster shape: hulking goblin-ish things with big jaws and big claws. Oh, and also a generic flying demon-bat thing. No need for screenshots. You know the type.

10) No status feedback. What's my HP? How poisoned am I? Why the hell does my character just keel over and die here?

And how the hell was I supposed to know you can run in what looks like yet another cutscene? And how the hell am I supposed to know later on that you can only burn cobwebs, not cut them? And that simply walking forward after doing so kills you instantly?

 

So, as it turns out, Metro 2033 is (perhaps intentionally, to avoid competing with Fallout 3 which had just come out a year prior) explicitly not an open world alternative to Fallout, but (ironically as I just went through this with Colony Ship) an old-school series of mission maps with scripted events. So, so damn many scripted events! What we have here is another symptom of late-2000s Hollywood envy, when (among other issues) game designers imagining themselves movie directors got so enamoured of cutscenes as to leave very little for the actual player to play. You spend the first few maps walking between endless theater skits and wondering when the action will start.

 

Now, that being said... the cutscenes are pretty good. I don't know about the original, but Metro's "redux" version boasts excellent production values for that time period. Lovingly detailed environments eschew cartoonishness. Dialogues reinforce the bleak setting while not sounding too whiny about it. The underground is dark enough to make you squint a bit and use your flashlight but not stumble blindly everywhere like, say, Doom 3 or Amnesia: Rebirth. Level design, when it at long last comes into play, proves intricate without devolving to unworkable mazes, and even offers enough nooks and crannies to reward a bit of exploration. Navigate some above-ground ruins, shoot up a bandit lair, good times. Monsters are a bit passive when not scripted (in contrast to Stalker's noteworthy improvements in mob tactics) but, eh, it was 2010. So in itself, a linear progression can make an alright game... until... you start climbing from trolley to trolley, so you can be treated to moving cutscenes. And then:

After a level which consisted of nothing but one noncombat chase and some light shopping therapy, you get thrown into a fucking six minute cutscene where your character is hiding prone under a trolley with nothing to look at except some shameless product placement, listening to inane chatter from the army grunts above as you grind along the rails on automatic... at which point I had to take a day off to keep myself from punching my monitor.

 

I'm not entirely sorry I came back to it, because the next zone turned out to be a satisfying stealth-based adventure through a warzone, with some laudable 3D level design to boot.

But immediately after that: more trolleys! Your FPS turns into a rail shooter for no discernible reason, making you man a turret through an entire map, rat-a-tat-tatting soldiers behind sandbags and other rail cars with their own machine guns and more soldiers and more sandbags and more trolleys, and then finally the level ends... and you move on to the next... and you're

still!

on!

the!

mother.fucking!

TROLLEY!!

 

Okay, no.

I'm done, sorry. A linear series of FPS maps would be one thing. Even if you're interspersing a walking simulator with simplistic action scenes where generic goblins just jump out of the walls to be mowed down, eh, it'd be dumb but at least I'm advancing my own adventure. But I seem to be a little over halfway through the campaign and I've spent a third of my time either unable to move my character or with no choice as to where I walk just because I have to follow the next NPC through the next cutscene (Khaaaaaaaan!) I could be watching Black Mirror right now instead of pretending to play a video game.

 

Maybe I'll return to Metro when I get bored next month. I considered skipping to the sequel, Last Light, which came in the same bundle, but broke out laughing as soon as it booted and turned it off again, seeing as even the title screen puts you on another damn trolley!

Oh, fffuck all the way off!
 

 

 

__________________________________________

 

* It occurs to me that many nowadays may not have played the original Half-Life, where On a Rail was a chapter named ironically for centering on electric tram tracks, but which did not literally force you to stay on said rail.

 

P.S.: One good thing to come out of this mess: in looking up a walkthrough when stuck on knife-proof cobwebs I landed on Almar's Guides, which proved exactly the type of straightforward, informative, text with minimal illustrations walkthrough archive I only wish we still kept in the era of infuriatingly time-wasting "Let'sPlays"

While it doesn't cover the genres I normally play, lovely work nonetheless.

Mankind Odiously and the Dungeon Tree

"Gjev kraft til rota"

Wardruna - Rotlaust Tre Fell - translation

 

I picked up Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey a couple of years ago as one of those games having failed hard enough to sit in a nigh-perpetual 75%-off "sale" for more than it's worth anyway. What can I say, I was in the mood for a rare video game without fantasy elements that not sports-related. Slim pickins. And hey, I liked Quest for Fire well enough, so how bad could it be?

 

The politically correct title's a turn-off in its own right. Of course they could've called it "The Human Odyssey" or "Humanity's Odyssey" or "The Hominid Odyssey" (with a bonus id-od echo effect to boot!) etc. if you're that desperate to avoid the "man" slur, but SJWs just had to go one step further off the cliffs of insanity and beat the dead horse with a rocket launcher. Fine, whatever.

But don't imagine you'll cease groaning at bad choices once it boots up. Somewhere in the middle of the self-indulgently overextended opening sequence informing me repeatedly it's "inspired by true events" and the like, I couldn't help but laugh at an unexpected revelation: ah, crap, the developers' names are all French. (French-Canadian as it turns out?) Well, that means I can expect artistic panache (hey, now I get it!) with terrible or nonexistent game mechanics.

 

True enough, user reviews do warn but cannot convey the extent to which the control scheme is needlessly convoluted or just flat-out broken. Biggest problem?

I need an adult!

Though Ancestors handles through a workable enough third-person-slasher interface, you cannot attack or move normally once combat starts. Instead, all conflict is handled as quick-time events. Bad enough in itself except your command does not even register most of the time! And while we're at it, what hillbilly design school let you graduate without learning not to slap "helpful" pop-ups center-screen, obscuring the action in the middle of an unpausable action sequence!?!

On the plus side the primitive social life stuff (like mutual grooming) can feel quite charming and the jungle does look great, and though the gigantic tangled tree branches are a bit... Lothlorienish, at times, it's fun enough trying to chart a safe course through the treetops. Only wish I could fling poop at the frustrated crocodiles and angry warthogs down below. But you may notice I'm giving examples only from the jungle, not the savanna. That's because I simply cannot manage to advance past the first chapter. Like Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Elex or other FPS from the 2010s struggling to keep the formula fresh, Ancestors over-engineered basic movement or interaction mechanics until they're basically unusable. Aside from the aforementioned dodge dodginess, your hominid keeps latching onto random objects and the snap-targeting is customarily incompetent in separating out nearby objects. They do try to separate out social and environmental commands through the interface, but it takes a while to build up a gratuitous amount of muscle memory. (No I did not want to start grooming my elder's hairy ass, I wanted to eat his ass - I mean eat his berries - I mean eat the berries! The berries he's standing next to! The berries!) Good luck switching two tree branches at a 90-degree angle without jumping and possibly falling to your death. And just like other such misdesigned wrecks, the scripted interactions will actively cancel out your own input, with your character stopping dead or rubberbanding back to be hit by an attack you had in fact evaded. Naturally it also features the increasingly common flaw of keybindings only applying to some of that command's context-sensitive functions, e.g. standing up during sensing.

 

Then there's the greater interface itself, needlessly convoluted for the sake of faking more complexity that the game actually offers. Like combining run and jump commands into a single button. Or conversely splitting investigation mode into scent/hearing/intelligence instead of simply using different icons in the same overlay. Or again conflating your survival sim food/water/sleep status bars into a single concentric status icon that tells you little or nothing.

 

If you excuse all of that, you're still left with a fundamental design priority toward needless obfuscation.

You level up your homininnies like in any skill progression RPG (think Skyrim) by skilling up through repeated use until you can grab feats and move up through the various skill trees. Calling skills "neuronals" is slightly weird, but can be justified as immersion. On the other hand, giving you zero info on how much "neuronal energy" you currently have or need to buy a feat is, like the lack of numeric values for hunger and the like, just a pointless limitation.

One of your first tasks is building a sleep spot. Knowing how apes in general do it I looked for a bush or treetop I could modify, bending it down into a nest shape. Even after seeing the tutorial tip about stockpiling resources, I gave up after throwing three leaves on the ground because nothing was happening and sought other solutions until grinding my teeth in frustration I hit the wiki... to discover you need four leaves.

My first ape-man bled to death because I'd seen a broken bone heals with time and figured a bleed would be the same. My second bled to death because it was easy enough to figure out I need to staunch the bleeding with leaves, but nothing tells you that ONLY kapok or horsetail fibers will do, or that these objects have useful "modification" interactions when swapped to your left hand (unlike say, crushing an egg, which did nothing) and even then I didn't know why it kept failing and it turns out to be another QTE timer issue.

At one point I expanded my clan's territory. How? Hell if I know.

 

So on and on. One can spot glimmers of charming human evolution roleplaying buried under that gigantic pile of interface and interaction mistakes, but I can't in all honesty recommend wasting $10 to drive yourself insane trying to dig those few needles out the crapstack. However, I will note the irony of sabotaging your story about primitive humans by pretending to reinvent the wheel.

 

Which brings us to my second point, because playing Ancestors made me realize I've contradicted myself over the years on what constitutes good adventuring. One of my big complaints about Baldur's Gate 3 for example was its abuse of contrived or "lolrandom" surprises which for the most part merely force gratuitous reloads. But I was tickled pink when Skyrim randomly killed my character. As I detailed for TBS games, the distinction lies between an unexpected challenge or outcome growing naturally out of simpler elements, and game designers trying to force or fake such an experience, hobbling the player to strain at surprise or challenge.

 

In counterpoint to Ancestors let me offer the Dungeons games. Their main claim to fame is doubling down on being Dungeon Keeper knockoffs by parodying fantasy RTS in general. As such, their basic mechanics are... very, very basic. You've got a handful of workers and even fewer military units, all of standard goblin/zombie/demon types.

 

In fact, given its Warcraft-ish aesthetic it recalls Heroes of the Storm, a MOBA cross-promoting Blizzard's extant IPs, with one effect being highlighting just how repetitive their gimmicks had been over the previous two decades. You had two big fat guys with cleavers, elves and space elves, two races of giant spiny bugs, two kinds of paladins, etc. Yet from such trite redundancy HotS also built up true creativity like Deathwing, Murky, Abathur or The Lost Vikings all breaking the mold of such games' expected hero roles and development.

 

In Dungeons 3 I was blindsided by a new secondary resource called "evilness" which can only be harvested outside your own domain, by taking over surface locations. I was initially annoyed at yet another game throwing a wrench into my preferred turtling mindset. Interestingly though, evilness is used for research... which means a quick rush can in fact support a turtle strat instead.

 

Sparse as it may be, I'll take that sort of build-up, branching meaningfully from a simplistic interpretation of its root genre, over a bunch of pretentious artistes haplessly breaking functional genre conventions for no reason other than feigning creativity. Stick that shit alongside blank canvases sold as paintings and black-and-white movies with ten-minute scenes of some rando' eating soup.

Trying to work out a functional town layout or a tactic to defeat a new monster type is adventure.

Trying to guess the number of leaves you consider a bunch?

No.

Menzoberranzanothanks

I only caught Strategic Simulations during its years of decline in the late '90s. In the early '90s my attention was mostly captured by my Sega Genesis, with few PC forays into Prince of Persia, The Oregon Trail, Doom, Dune (yes, the original and not the sequel) or later on MW2: Mercs, C&C: RA or Warcraft 2. So SSI's repertoire of D&D games was not, strictly speaking, before my time, but it would also have counted beneath my twelve-year-old self's contempt. I, good sirs, was a super-soldier or generalissimo, not some frou-frou "adventurer" in Errol Flynn tights. Quite.

 

Nevertheless, after my drowid playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, I fancied a stroll through drow-ville, and Menzoberranzan has already sat unplayed in my collection for eight years now. So let's roll up a couple of standard iterations of me and my shadow, with somewhat inflated stats to make this less painful.

Let us boldly go. Queue up a couple of walkthroughs in case I get lost: brief and detailed versions.

 

1) Aaarrgh! Oh sweet holy hell, this character creation intro's painfully bad! The state-of-the-art 3FPS polygon transformations, ye merrie olde 1990s English, the delays before every action so you can marvel at pixels in motion!

 

2) I really, really hope this thing's turn-based, 'cause if this turns into a repeat of Arena, it's gonna be a very shallow dive from me. Oh shit it's not, it's not turn based, horrendous '90s real-time twitchiness incoming!

 

3) Alright, alright, after some fumbling I finally managed to cast armor on myself and click to death a bunch of blobby spastic brown things that might've been either drow swordselves or the cast of Stomp. I've got three hit points left and finally realized I need to put my bracers and ring onto my paper doll even though it lacks slots, and more painstakingly discovered I need to place buckets in my characters' hands to activate them like weapons... and the town is saved! I DID A THING! Guess I need a fighter so I'll recruit Baldassar L. Jackson.

 

4) Aaah, bugbears! Honestly, this wouldn't be nearly as bad in higher resolution. I had a devil of a time finding the well just because it didn't look like anything in particular until you're on top of it, and even inventory items are hard to discern. Moreover, nobody back then knew how to design a game interface. Not only do all interactions take an extra click, but it's confusingly unresponsive. I didn't even realize my character had died until I looked down a fight later. *Sigh* reload.

 

5) I've played plenty of games with bad pathing, but it's been decades since I've played one with zero pathing. Getting a mob stuck behind any object lets you just kill it effortlessly, since shortswords apparently have three-meter reach. I'm gradually learning the fine art of spamming-clicks-then-backing-a-step-away. I try to talk to a gnoll but it attacks anyway, same with a bugbear... so what was the point of that? Find the wounded drow. More gnolls. More bugbears. Random magic scrolls lying in random spots on the ground. Graphics and interface aside, this actually plays remarkably like grindy "action RPG" dross from 10-15yrs later. Took a loooong time for cRPGs to outgrow Gauntlet, didn't it? On the other hand it already featured some mainstays like combat music, the map is quite useful for its day, and my elf had a race-specific dialogue with the drow. Talk to Mr. Wizard aaand apparently the whole campaign's gonna be about Drizzt. Just flippin' wonderful.

 

6) Oh hey I can scribe my scroll collection. Gave Shadow a bow but the clunky lack of inventory automation (arrows don't get automatically re-added to her quiver when I pick them off the ground) makes an otherwise good resource-conscious system a chore. More gnolls... and more gnolls... and even more gnolls... and now verbeeg damage sponges. I'm just getting one-shotted at random intervals and sick of reloading, but damnit, I paid a whole dollar for this entertainment product and I'll at least make it to the Underdark even if it kills me (a hundred more times than it already has.) Hilariously though, even one of my own Stinking Clouds counts as an obstacle completely freezing enemy movement.

7) Drizzt's hideout: pixel-hunting for random beige buttons on random beige walls. Blech... but at least they're relatively easy to see compared to some contemporary examples. (Also, how many damn cooking pots does this guy need?) Apparently I can just rest infinitely like in the NWN games, so I just start spamming fireballs. Leucrotta caves: giant stinkin' pile of dead ends. Also apparently exactly one of each monster type is going to talk to me, for the sole purpose of telling me it'll kill me, including the giant cat-monster thing with hooves. Sure, why the hell not. Also, the automap is detailed for its time, except for one crucial detail: not marking zone transitions!

 

8) Alright, got all four macguffins. Nuke verbeeg, rest, nuke verbeeg, rest, nuke verbeeg, rest, nuk- ah, shit, it's Drizzt, and his cheesy Harlequin Romance origin story... which he'll apparently start spinning to any passer-by who'll sit still long enough to get ear-fucked.  Am I supposed to take this idiot along? I suppose for another chapter or two until I hit the Underdark, I can suffer him. I must admit though that despite the horrendous intro and generally sparse plot, the little writing I do see in this game is actually less annoying than some later cRPGs, which strained too hard at comic relief (e.g. NWN:SOU) or really ladled on the thees and thous (e.g. V:tM-Redemption) etc. Anyway, Mr. Wizard gives me my field trip passes and offers me the scrolls he has lying around... like I wasn't supposed to have already robbed him blind? What kind of n00b crusading hero do you take me for?!

 

9) Check the walkthrough because I have no freakin' clue where to go next, and the next zone is full of goddamn bats. Of course. No cRPG would be complete without. And the Random Ground Scroll Fairy's been busy here too. Also, I've been collecting trash loot all this time but have not run across a single merchant, and just now I realize I don't see any kind of currency. Soooo... yeah? No? No buying or selling whatsoever. A short dive down a mine cart later, I've finally reached the... not the Underdark, just the descent into same, which is yet another nonsensical maze of dead ends filled with swarms of trash mobs, in this case some kind of little demon pigs. Osquips. Yes, fine, whatever, sure, fascinating. Not like they do anything different from bugbears or gnolls or verbeeg or leucrottas or bats or cats or slats (I dare you to prove that's not a D&D monster) except for having different sprites.

Okay, I think we're done here. I apparently leveled a couple of times, not that it mattered. Let's call that "close enough" and say I've gotten my one dollah's worth of sucky-sucky.

 

Conclusions?

To be fair, not as sucky as it could've been. Pretty standard early-'90s point-and-click routine, with the added bonus that your characters have stats and they exposit a few sentences here and there. The monotonous maps and scarce decorations were just standard for the time (and would be reiterated ten years later when the Aurora Engine strained for three-dimensionality at the expense of detail) as were the target practice mobs with no special abilities and random placement in bland mazes. In '94 you were still supposed to revel in the act of playing something electronic in an electronic fashion, in being on the cutting edge of entertainment, in the sheer thrill of *clicking* itself. The simple fact that arrows landed on the ground to be picked up for further use and a quiver went on my character's shoulder would've blown my mind back then.