Phoney it in

"So get your ideas, stack your ammo
But don't come unless you come to battle now mount up, jump in the saddle
This is it: it's what you eat, sleep, piss and shit
Live, breathe, your whole existence just consists of this"

 

Eminem - Survival

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"I mean, monkeys and go-karts was fun for a while, then I was like, oh, you know what’d be cool? Hippos in go-karts. And I was like, yo, what about Draculas with jetpacks?"

 

- the idea of fun of a man with brain as smooth as an egg, from The Good Place

____________________________________________________________________

Observation going back to my old Counterstrike/EVE/WoW days: joke name = joke player.

Players drawing names from mythology, a stable personal fable, technical jargon, etc. could be good or bad from case to case. But the ones named after characters from the latest anime/comic, or a throwaway in-joke about game loot, or random schoolyard transgression like "badassfart6452" or worst of all just using their real-life names as online handles, are almost guaranteed to be utter morons. Not that you can't have a sense of humor, but the "too cool for school" attitude generally does not herald a worthy ally. When your very identity consists of refusal to participate, why the hell are you even here?

On a completely unrelated topic, while visiting family a few years ago and waiting to be seated at a restaurant, the welcome desk featured a TV to help you pass the time, tuned to some MTV-like channel. Glancing at the latest pop-tart flavor of the month prancing around and lip-syncing, my mother mumbled one thing she's never been able to stand is a frigid whore. I had to concur. No matter how expensively choreographed her pouting and gyrations, the bimbo in the "music" video really wasn't managing to convey "come hither" any more than she passed off the generic "oooh baby baby I love you baby" lyrics as poetry.

On another completely unrelated topic, I've been struggling to get into Sunless Sea lately, and it really is more of a struggle than it should be. The practical issues I'll address separately, but for a game banking almost entirely on transposing you into a Victorian gothic landscape in the hollow earth, it appears dead-set on snapping you out of your immersion (aquatic pun intended) at every single step. I'd run across its predecessor, the browser game Fallen London, some years past. Didn't grab me. Now I finally realize why. Sunless Sea is more focused on convincing you it could do its job if it wanted to... than on doing its job.

Is "the power of verse" a Lvl V bard spell or a metaphor?

At first I assumed my confusion as to all the terminology stemmed from being dropped "in medias res" then wondered if maybe I'm expected to have memorized all of Fallen London to know exactly what the macguffins and mooks I keep encountering are. Then I realized explanations are considered extraneous. It's just random nonsense. In the worst tradition of the D&D monster manual, monsters have vaguely monstery names and dice-rolled attributes, loot is made to sound valuable via random thesaurus abuse, gods and leaders referenced in abrupt bombast failing to establish their spheres of influence. As flavor text, individual snippets might evoke terror, pity, mystery or the macabre competently enough, but as storytelling or an actual setting? It's a mess.

All your "z" are giving me a case of the zzz-s.

 

Though Zunlezz Zea obviouzly ztirred zome welcome interest in storytelling in a medium increasingly dependent on algorithmic randomization for its content, it's taken a more recent exploration/managerial/RPG to make a good on that promise. I've voiced my complaints about Vagrus: The Riven Realms, from spinning the elfemism treadmill to poor combat to struggling and failing to predict its customers' behavior to misspelling my name in the preorder credits. But I can't fault their dedication to fleshing out the setting.

Sand captain vs zee captain refusing a quest: let's compare.

Aside from smooth descriptiveness, look how many tidbits those three paragraphs integrated into the game world at large: about Thatmas' personality and hints of his existential conflict, about the mechanics of undeath, about the politics and influence of one particular faction, about honor as interpersonal instead of institutional. All that in one in-character quest decision. Compare to "generic mobsters are generic" above.

Age of Wonders serves as in-series example of progress. Even when, after a decade and several iterations, it grew into its tactical focus and strategic aspirations, #3 and Planetfall paid little attention to their setting or mood. The recent AoW4 on the other hand invests due effort into events themed according to alignment or playable classes (a.k.a. affinities)

Rhyming fey, situational humor like conjuring an illusion to play a strategy game against a bad strategist in your place, magic tomes extolling the art of their craft, ruin descriptions hearkening back to creation myths, it may not be Avellone-quality game dialogue but #4's flavor texts now laudably, consciously adhere to their fantasy backdrop instead of merely being cobbled together from random fantasy jargon. Good progress, keep it up.

This distinction between perfunctory random filler and actual coherent writing did by no means just recently crop up, as game "writers" tend to slap pop culture references together with a bunch of old-timey thees and thous (or lasers and warp drives) and meta call it a meta day. In fact it used to be worse.

Et tu, Avellone?

Much as I loved the first game twice over, I've never been able to motivate myself to finish Fallout 2. I've tried three times over the decades, repeatedly quitting when I hit a ghost or talking corn stalk or my character snarking out of character at the shaman in my starting village. My most recent campaign lost steam around Vault 15, aaand... I'm done. Uninstall. This will be the first Black Isle title I've filed under the Bozo tag instead of Laurel or Hardy. It's not just frustration. I've finished the Icewind Dales, Penumbra, Arcanum, Gabriel Knight, and a host of other infuriating oldies despite their flaws. But the adolescent feigned nonchalance rubs off on you. Jokes about graphics cards, random space aliens and Star Trek shuttles and the bridge scene from Holy Grail, the rando' bullcrap just never slackens.

 

 

If the game's creators keep insisting they're just going through the motions and can't be bothered to give a shit, why should I? In retrospect unsurprisingly given the two series' cross-pollination, the problem was reiterated with Wasteland 2 a decade later.

 

While it is occasionally possible to own such nonsense, provided it's played lightly enough, even inattentive use of stock phrases can wreck immersion. Consider one of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' more gruesome quests involving the terrifying ecorches and their victims.

If you don't like the view, try my hobbit's angle

"Ow the pain"? Is that supposed to be some obscure blurb or did you just give up on doing your jobs? Even if you were trying to lighten the inherently grim mood of FLAYING PEOPLE ALIVE, the whiplash induced by going from Dante's Inferno to Bugs Bunny in two phrases flat, mid-scene, robs the event of any impact, be it macabre, frightening, compassionate or humorous. It's out of character and out of the world you're paid to create for us.

Here's one of the many differences between tabletop roleplaying / GM-ing / bullshitting with your friends around a pizza, and publishing something for public consumption: to us, you are manifest in your work. You can't play off it; you are it. You can't act above it all; you are it all. Nonchalance is just laziness and incompetence. This is an important step in moving past the Betty Boop stage of a creative field: start seeing disparate elements as a coherent whole.

 

And if you can't do that, if you're just slapping 3D models, loot icons and copy/pasted genre jargon together and calling it a game, if you're playing the "too cool for school" card to cover up being a dunce but still expecting high scores, well, don't complain if rumours start labeling you a frigid whore.

"Discern the Twin Shadows of Selfishness and of Fickleness"

"Shoot myself to love you

If I loved myself I'd be shooting you"

 

Marilyn Manson - Fundamentally Loathsome

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"Of course! Greek and Hebrew are mere play to a heroine; Sanscrit is no more than a b c to her; and she can talk with perfect correctness in any language, except English. She is a polking polyglot, a Creuzer in crinoline. Poor men. There are so few of you who know even Hebrew; you think it something to boast of if, like Bolingbroke, you only “understand that sort of learning and what is writ about it” and you are perhaps adoring women who can think slightingly of you in all the Semitic languages successively."

 

George Eliot - Silly Novels by Lady Novelists (1856)

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"Does she know my film isn't a musical?"

"She has this theory that deep down, every film is a musical."

 

Ozy and Millie - 2007-02-02

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(Note: Spoilers should be minor except for Blade Runner 2049.)

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On a lazy, sunny spring Sunday, methought instead of... okay, in addition to playing games, let's watch a movie. Being a sucker for space colonization, let's try The Colony. That would be The Colony from 2021, not The Colony from 2015... or The Colony from 2013... or the one from 2007... or 1996, or 1995 or y'know, hang on a sec:

"plantation, outpost, territory, camp, protectorate, habitation, diaspora, dependency, possession, post, mandate, exclave" - and that's just from Merriam Webster's online thesaurus. What'cha got against "exclave"? "The Exclave" would make an amazing movie title!

Anyhoo, "Tides" as it's also known looks decent if disjointed for its first few minutes. A space colony space crew consisting of a male, a female and a male corpse crashland on a desolated Earth in the future among storm-wracked mud flats. Striking sparse scenery.

Hope you enjoyed the movie.

Then they're captured by natives and the remaining, injured male cyanides himself so as not to slow the woman down. Yeah. You can probably tell where this is going, and you've seen this musical a thousand times before. The heroine displays superiority over the first new man she meets, is spared from death by a little girl who is then kidnapped by evil men. Then the heroine teams up with another heroine (the little girl's mother) against an evil man and his evil male second in command, summarily seduce and kill the second, find the main heroine's useless failure of a father, shoot, stab and beat up various male redshirts and vanquish The Man! All rendered in state of the art, dimly lit, fog machined, foot fetishist jittercam montages. For the most concise synopsis of the whole mess, try the cusp of the story, a woman's line "he made us into his family" delivered with the same emotive heft and vector as "in space no-one can hear you scream" and conveying every expectation that the audience should view this as the ultimate condemnation of villainy.

If expecting a primitivist angle to match the feminist, Tides shan't disappoint. See, the space colony can't have the space babies 'cuz space rays. The natives can breed but have fallen back on bronze age / Thunderdome tech. The colonists' return is treated as unthinkably calamitous and to be prevented at all costs, despite representing the only realistic chance at rebuilding civilization. Naturally anyone who thinks the star trekking keepers of the sum of human knowledge would run a better mud flat than a gaggle of utterly ignorant, rapidly degenerating simian dregs must be a space-nazi kidnapping little girls as sex slaves. There is no middle ground!

Not like those nubile young maidens would ever want central heating or food that's not laden with nematodes.

Or an epidural.

 

Somethin' off about all that. Was it the mud flats? Well then switch to ice flats.

 

(Two) Against the Ice is an adaptation of the real-life account of a ca.1910 Greenland expedition. As the title indicates, it boasts no less than two main men and lots of ice. Not the best executed flick, as it presents episodic events journal-style,  consistently failing to build up or exploit each happening's practical or emotional impact. Nevertheless it plays well enough on the sourdough and greenhorn's conflicting personalities and their resilience in some of the direst straits on the planet. The two men pass the time mooning after a picture of the graduating class of Schoolmarm U., brave privation, loneliness, the pitiless elements, wild peril and despair to earn their happy ending. For the finale, a historic love interest welcomes them back to civilization. The men greet her with choked, heartfelt anticipation and respectively respectful acquaintanceship.

 

Still, not satisfying. I mean, aside from passively obstructive Danish bureaucracy it even lacks villains. Let's see, villains, villains, where can we find some more villains... I know, demons!

While Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous improved noticeably in writing quality over its predecessor, Kingmaker, it still stumbled in its interpretation of alignments and twisted its characterization in knots struggling to pander to snowflake idiocy, most visibly in its infuriating roster of NPC companions. Take Ember, a cloyingly cutesy little brat gifted of such charisma as to be able to turn bad people to the side of good by no more erudite or structured an argument than telling them to be good. This includes creatures that are literally evil incarnate, like demons. It even includes one of the multiverse's greatest forces of evil, Nocticula, who also happens to be female. We're even explicitly told Nocticula's male peers Deskari and Baphomet fail where she succeeds, just to drive that point home. Just to drive that point homier, on your way to convert the demon queen you meet some lesser demons. The ones with tits see the light and turn to good. Those beyond redemption just happen to be male.

ARE YOU GETTING THE VERY SUBTLE MESSAGE HERE!?!

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

The spoken or implied rationale behind such overt misandry runs something like balancing the cosmic karma. We must, simply must bash men at every turn to counterbalance all that abuse of women from older works. ORLY? quoth the wolfe, nose to ancient trails. What warrants such retribution in our power fantasies? Is it because Rodney Dangerfield complained his wife (among others) gives him no respect back in the '70s? When he said "take my wife, please" did I miss the part where he said "take her apart an inch at a time with a chainsaw" and is that meant to equivalate to Milla Jovovich hacking asunder men by the hundreds as the titular Evils in Residence? Stacked up against even a single year of filmographic feminism, how many flicks can you remember, ever, in which men are all brilliant, hypercompetent, beneficent martyrs righteously and effortlessly triumphing against woman after woman who are all nothing but filthy, sadistic, bumbling, useless, destructive, moronic slags? How many TV series really applaud men for beating down women? How many books? Comic books? Games? How many songs, paintings, temples. Limericks? Can you not even locate the windmill from which you claim to be rescuing us all?

Old folk tales ran on a simple premise: bogey-men threaten our tribe's status quo; summon the plucky young prince/farmboy/farm-prince to vanquish them. The protagonist was almost always male... and so was the villain. The princess mostly sat around doing nothing, but nobody argued the a priori assumption that she deserved rescue (plus a crown) for sitting around doing nothing. Women later demanded bigger roles in such stories... but only as heroines. They kept the undeserved crown. Villains must stay male, and women must always be shown as superior in every possible way over men. It's not like the market for such tripe just opened up now, either. George Eliot ranted mid-19th-century in reaction to the extant (and unchallenged) proliferation of inane Mary Sues. Even stories like Against the Ice which ostensibly concern men return constantly to men idealizing and pining for women... whereas in the far more popular Colonies, a heroine is one who racks up the highest male body count.

And what's men's rejoinder? Fire back? Girls stink, boys rule? Perish the thought. Wouldn't be gentlemanly, wot?

Allow us, mistresses, but a meek intimation that three years in Northern Greenland may be preferable to putting up with your shit. The polar bears are gentler company.

 

While not commonly going this route, masculine adventure stories can take place beyond the boundaries of family units. A lone explorer or band of brothers set out into the great unknown, battle wild men or just the wild itself and discover something amazing. Women's presence is not required. You're free to go off and do your own thing (except you don't want your own thing, you want our thing to be yours.) The Hobbit is an exemplary such story within the young adult variety, and in its treatment by Hollywood you can see how much the female power fantasy is threatened by independence. It had to be taken over by women. It needed a Tauriel to bask in admiration, and women shaming men for not being manly enough.

Where male protagonists can act independently, female fantasies absolutely require the presence of men as scapegoats and punching bags. If you'd like to see why, take a look at two last films. Blade Runner 2049 is the story of a man scraping and suffering through an entire plot only to be told at the end almost verbatim: what, did you think you get to be the hero, no, you exist to do all the work so the princess who's been living in safety this whole time takes credit. Mad Max: Fury Road more blatantly pushed its angelic females at the mercy of a cruel ugly male and the titular character himself sidelined by a new heroine. Take special notice though of Nux the third wheel, derided for being disposable cannon fodder in service of the villain ("just a war boy at the end of his half-life") but who is allowed to redeem himself by... becoming disposable cannon fodder in service of women, which is obviously better.

 

#KillAllMen is a smokescreen. Dead slaves are unproductive. The idea is rather to fabricate a life debt to women, men being possessed of some primordial guilt, some original sin to be expiated only by surrendering their lives to the fairer sex. The central message of feminist media is not only the endlessly reiterated "man bad, woman good" but that men's lives are women's to dispose of. Good men serve women. Evil men are against women. And there is No. Middle. Ground. No independence, no individuality. Men are to be permitted nothing of their own. The results are so predictable you can call the final boss fight by level 2: thanks for building up the kingdom and taking all the risks and blame, now let a queen take over. Seeing how many popular old geek staples were taken over by feminists (Tolkien, Ghostbusters remade with all-female cast, Thor-ette, etc.) sets one wondering if women are basically Morgoth: an impulsively avaricious force capable only of perverting their counterparts' creativity toward their own self-aggrandizement, spawning endless tortured and twisted devolved mockeries to plague our cultural wasteland.

They will take endlessly until there is nothing left of you. Stop giving. If Mikkelsen and Iversen really did spend their Greenland sojourn staring at a picture of women, leave that out of the story just as you leave out their bathroom habits and snoring. Your life is not hers. The princess' fate is not your responsibility, rando' farm-prince. Outgrow the primitive fairytale of going down to hell and back (Journey to the Center of the Earth jumps to mind) only to justify yourself as suitable mate.

 

Know one classic SF yarn that called it truer than most? You've heard its name, you know the basic plot, but likely have never read the original:

The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle

We open with the narrator almost literally called to adventure by his intended, who turns down his marriage proposal because only a man of great achievement would be worthy of her. So off he schleps to wrestle dinosaurs on her whim. Upon his successful return from prehistory to the lands of the living, she greets him with utter coldness, having already married... some nondescript solicitor's clerk. We end on the following note:

 

"I'll use my own [share of the loot]" said Lord John Roxton, "in fitting a well-formed expedition and having another look at the dear old plateau. As to you, young fellah, you, of course, will spend yours in gettin' married."
"Not just yet," said I, with a rueful smile. "I think, if you will have me, that I would rather go with you."
Lord Roxton said nothing, but a brown hand was stretched out to me across the table.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

"Something's wrong 'cause my mind is fading

Ghetto-blasting, disintegrating

Rock'n'roll, know what I'm saying?                                          - no Beck, seriously, nobody ever knew what you were on about!

Everywhere I look there's a devil waiting"

Beck - Devil's Haircut

 

Among Owlcat Games' quirks, they appear to hold up as their greatest source of inspiration, their aspirational peak of design, Neverwinter Nights 2's main campaign. As far as duplicating the centering effect of an edifice like Crossroad Keep on a roleplaying campaign this is all well and good. However, the NWN games are frequently referenced for some very solid reasons as a lull of mediocrity between the Infinity Engine series and the later DA:O / PoE1 revival of tactical, plot-based cRPGs. My last Pathfinder post dealt with the infuriatingly, insultingly simpleminded companion roster, but that's not the only aspect of Wrath of the Righteous giving me flashbacks to 2006.

 

The subdivision into official, discrete acts is more pronounced than it was in Kingmaker, Wrath's immediate predecessor, though this mostly facilitates spotting development sinks. Though Act 3 logically embodies the main thrust of your crusade into the Worldwound, Act 4 obviously ate up more than its share of graphics, dialogue and encounter design (to admittedly memorable effect) leaving Act 5 noticeably threadbare after it. And, just as with Kingmaker, Owlcat's desperation to market an epic-length campaign litters Wrath with obvious timesinks. Enemies' sky-high stats (especially armor) over-emphasize D&D's fundamental over-randomization to force reloads depending on critical success. Some of the adventure maps (Drezen, Lost Chapel) are designed for time-consuming backtracking. Worst of all, while the time constraints of Kingmaker's barony management were unnecessarily (and obtusely) punishing, Wrath's lack of deadlines is under closer scrutiny an excuse to eat up the player's time trying to amass three or four large stacks of barely trickling troop reinforcements.

And then there's the classes.

On one hand, the literally dozens of new classes and sub-classes make for a wide gamut of minimally divergent replayability, should you be so inclined. On the other hand, where introducing a new class used to imply some shift in baseline function (barbarians, bards) the new idea seems to be just slapping some ludicrously overpowered free feat/spell (like my witch of the veil's infinite swift action casts of combo teleportation / invisibility) on an existing class and calling it new. Or endless more variation of sorcerous lack of foresight in not preparing spells. Or duplicating (and therefore obviating) existing prestige classes like arcane tricksters as core classes like the eldritch scoundrel. I was annoyed enough by swashbucklers and spirit shamans in NWN2 and multiplying that redundancy and imbalance twenty-fold isn't helping matters. The D&D class system desperately needs a full revamp.

 

NWN2 was also a laughably easy game which moreover boosted the player to level 3 before even the first quest. At first glance Wrath would seem the exact opposite. You spend quite a bit of time at low levels fighting vastly more powerful demons with highly frustrating immunities and resistances. You're not showered with full sets of gear from the start as you would be in games from the past couple of decades. You'll certainly learn to appreciate cantrips in Act 1. On the other hand, instead of sedate low-level survival, this mostly amounts to overblown dramatics. By level 2 you're already getting moderate healing potions as loot and finding legendary artifacts. By level 5 you're deciding the fate of hordes of angels. Low levels don't feel low, and the entire campaign begins to look like some meta-commentary on level scaling, pitting you against nonsensically overpowered enemies then just handing you nonsensically overpowered freebie "mythic" abilities like Last Stand and Shake it Off to compensate. The overblown badassery degrades the campaign's potential to mostly a tween power trip.

Which is not to say it's all bad.

Compared to Kingmaker's infamous bugginess, Wrath plays much smoother and improves quality of life quite a bit with a functional turn-based mode (which occasionally bugs out and needs to be toggled on and off when characters freeze) bonus overlap warnings and more tooltips reminding you of spell availability to various characters when making your level-up selections, mounted combat and even wider pet variety, wider gear availability and better choreographed fights against mixed melee/range/fighter groups. On the other hand, it trips once again over its desperation to overwhelm munchkins with awesomesauceness in everything from conflicts to character models to spell effects. Not that it isn't hilarious seeing my reducepersoned hobbit next to my enraged pet glabrezu:

I am literally the size of a toe.

- and I'm pleased to see demons acting... demonic, truly evil instead of so many games' kid-friendly wishy-washy walking-on-the-grass Bowdlerised heck-devilry:

 

 - but quite often you're stuck waddling the screen back and forth trying to see what's happening under the slather of glitz:

There's a ghost under there somewhere. Good luck finding it.

- and the lack of a grid not only trivializes positioning for things like flanking but yields some... unintuitive melee engagement:

As usual though, writing suffers even worse. Alignment shifts provide opportunities to reinforce any of the four axes (and never combos) almost every single time, with some painfully forced interpretations. An evil dialogue option, for instance, should not mention control unless it's also acknowledged as lawful evil, and the CHAOTIC Evil demons spend entirely too much time and energy enforcing slavery. Though thankfully it can no longer be accused of laziness (as Kingmaker's) the texts could've used a couple more passes for redundant verbiage and repeatedly fall into the trap of ordering the player how to react... and missing the mark.

By that point in the campaign I hadn't seen the mook in question for two acts, had rebelled against his queen's leadership, and my sole remaining interest in him would've been to zombify his corpse. To be sure, Owlcat even snuck some commentary into the game on the exasperating impossibility of pleasing everyone, in (ironically) one of the more pleasing bits of flavor text:

- but this is a bit hard to swallow from a company whose reach constantly exceeds its grasp. Maybe instead of implementing fifty classes poorly they could've limited themselves to fifteen more balanced ones. Maybe instead of padding the campaign out to 150 hours, 75 would do. Maybe instead of nine mythic paths you could do with five and spend more time looking for writers capable of making them memorable instead of infuriating (Trickster) or paid more attention to awkward, mis-worded quest prompts, descriptions, etc. For instance a line in the Ineluctable Prison: "You sense a familiar undead spirit that is doing its best to hide from you." cannot be solved by the obviously indicated True Seeing spell or by any amount of perception buffs or by sneaking in while invisible (don't look at me like that, I was stumped) or by lifesense (yes I know it said undead; stumped!) but automatically progresses after you clear the dungeon, not that anything whatsoever you do along your way indicates it might be revealing sneaky ghosts.

 

Again, I don't want to sound like I'm completely bashing Wrath of the Righteous. I wouldn't have spent so much time on it were that the case. It's actually refreshing to play a themed campaign instead of most games' Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny approach, and some of the dungeons (like the Ineluctable Prison) do a better job of mixing ongoing plot, episodic encounters, trash mobs, traps and nuisance / boredom factors to keep things fresh. That halfway through Act 5 I could have my ass saved by a humble little Remove Sickness spell speaks highly of Wrath's ability to keep you on your toes.

In fact, looking at various forum threads and walkthroughs, Wrath does seem to have cashed in at least some of its potential for replayability and player customization. Aside from my own witchy lichdom my party, as is my wont, was relatively lightweight and heavy on support casters. Fights requiring burst damage gave me no end of grief, like Chorussina who would've been impossible without a scroll of Create Pit I had squirreled away, or the demodand cabal in Alushinyrra. But, from their complaints, others had far more trouble than I did with the Pathetic Quasit, Playful Darkness, Shadow Dragon and Eternal Guardian, where my large bag of tricks let me exploit their weak points. (hint: you can polymorph Playful Darkness... and repurpose it)

I wholeheartedly approved of the neat little solution offered by my lichdom to the final decision. And hey, some of the characters are interesting enough, like Areelu, Zacharius or the Storyteller... but the better moments are constantly undercut one scene later - e.g. when you do finally discover the (rather trite and predictable) event which set off the villain's rampage, a pop-up message informs you "now you know" the better to sap the grand reveal of any possible gravitas. Owlcat tried much too hard to appeal to shitheaded tweens, from the gratuitous high-level enemies and gratuitous "mythic" freebie feats to the simpleminded characters strutting through overstated world-shaking events, a world in which there are no big actors, only big roles.

 

Though Wrath of the Righteous has its good points, the main reason to play Owlcat's games remains a lack of meaningful competition in story-based, tactical cRPGs.

Chumpanions of the Righteous

"'Cause they know who is righteous, what is bold

(So I'm told)

[...]

Beware all those angels with their wings glued on

'Cause deep down

They are frightened and they're scared

If you don't stare"

 

Smashing Pumpkins - Cherub Rock

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Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is a... passable cRPG featuring above average combat encounters (marred by a lack of tiles for turn-based precision, plus over-reliance on luck-based reloads, and 'mythic' freebie abilities obviating much of your actual class progression) but a roleplaying side stretched thin between infantile pandering, the same four alignment choices for every encounter and underdeveloped or railroaded player paths. Worse, NPCs closest to you (the Baldur's Gate -style companions and the questgivers who'll be talking your ear off the entire campaign) are all slightly under-developed (albeit overly-verbose) and mostly run the gamut from trite to outright infuriating. So for this post I'll run through my CN halfling witch-lich's friend list.

 

Spoilers are of course implied.

 

Well, here they are, starting with the ones I missed or didn't even bother with, then roughly escalating in order of quality.

Finnean

To pad out a lack in design which I myself criticized in Owlcat's previous Pathfinder release, you're given a weapon that can morph to suit your specialty. All well and good, except he's a talking weapon introduced as a plucky, quirky comic relief sidekick (a gimmick very easy to misuse) so I told him to shut up and sold him to the first vendor at the bar to fund a tower shield specialist mercenary.

(At least Finnean doesn't count toward your party size total.)

Lann: LN? LG? monk. Didn't play him because I opted for Wenduag instead, but like her, his stats seem made for a flexible range/melee build. He's the "nice" path to their shared quest. While Octavia and Regongar from Kingmaker worked as divergent interpretations of shared upbringing, Lann and Wenduag are portrayed as more extreme in their schism to the point of irreconcilable (at least from her viewpoint) and which pair lends finer nuance to their conflict may be a matter of interpretation.

Nenio: ?? (apparenly NN) wizard. Hated her introductory dialogue so much that I turned on her on the spot. Basically, any time pop culture doesn't portray intelligent people as stuffy stick-in-the-muds, the only alternative is an abrasive, incongruously clueless motormouth. I don't need an Urkel in my party, much less one whose baseless insults you're expected to meekly absorb and applaud for being born the correct sex. Basically everything I hate about everyone's misinterpretation of my own standard character type of CN spellcasters, so I gave her the boot... though as she and Ember seem your only workable choices for arcane casters, you're probably forced to adopt one or another of the overentitled little bitches.

However you may wish to characterize the speech patterns of hyperintelligent free spirits, a children's cartoon nerd parody ain't it. Most aggravatingly, this bitch's personal quest apparently ties into the game's overarching B-plot (The Secrets of Creation) meaning you're expected to keep Urkel glued to your ass for a hundred hours, at least on a first run-through. Which I most certainly did not.

Lich Companions. The Lich mythic path proves pleasingly individualistic in building up your very own army of undead. You can even "recruit" (read:zombify, complete with tormented groans) a full party of undead companions, whose inherent motivation or conflict in being raised from the dead lays out some of the most promising character arcs in the campaign... yet none of which have much to say, probably as Owlcat avoided dedicating much writing time to characters available on only one path. I will admit it works within the theme of deathly silence by which they describe your effect on the world, but still...

Ciar: never got a chance to zombify him, maybe as a result of indulging the barbarian underling's request for glorious death by combat?

Staunton: glaive-wielding warpriest whose attribute / feat array make him jaw-droppingly bad at both the "war" and "priest" parts. At least you get him early enough (early Act 3) that you can partially pad out his build, and what the hell, I like a challenge.

Delamere: insanely powerful archery slayer. By level 16 she could salvo baelors in the Alushinyrra arena.

Kestoglyr: tragic ex-paladin fighter you can revive in the last zone of Act 4, becomes usable only in Act 5. Dual-wields scimitars, so he seemed the logical choice to multi-class to rogue (rowdy, specifically) as an undead place-filler for Woljif. Can gain a personal weapon in the Ineluctable Prison by reuniting him with his lady love, though currently that weapon set is locked, meaning the dual-wielding specialist can't dual-wield anything with his dual-wielding-bonus +5 scimitar. Inspired design there.

Queen Galfrey: ghost bard (incidentally, cool name for a band) While I'm generally annoyed at how late in the campaign you get some companions, making it hard to plan your group composition, some are truly 11th-hour appearances and Galfrey in particular is only recruitable in the next-to-last adventure zone. Justified to some extent as a dramatic reversal of your campaign's start signifying your ascension to power as lich... but still. You'd think a bard of all people wouldn't be so late to the party. What makes her truly annoying are her romantic overtones, her descriptions constantly struggling to squeeze pity out of you, and the fact you never get to call her out on her stupendously stupid leadership decisions, even after raising her as a ghost.

 

Arushalae: CN ranger - not that she acts as anything other than Stupid Good given her singleminded worship of her goddess, cloying niceness and neediness and constantly rehashed romantic overtones. A reformed succubus and blatant teacher's pet, from her infantile lack of personality to her attributes being padded to double anyone else's to the fact she is literally indestructible! Unlike say, Grieving Mother from PoE, her religious conversion and saccharine reinforcement as a cute little girl (including by Anevia, of all people) render any guilt over her troubled past a foregone redemptive conclusion.

Arushalae is basically to Falls-From-Grace from Planescape: Torment what Qara from NWN2 was to Ignus and what Grobnar was to Jan from BG2: an insultingly simpleminded pale immitation. But unlike them she's pushed in the player's face and given a tediously overextended personal quest in which nothing happens (for a bonus, the nothing happens in a dream) under the assurance that nobody could possibly dislike her warbling about her fee-fees... which is of course what makes her so utterly insufferable!

Seelah: LG paladin. Along with the NPCs Anevia and Irabeth, part of a trio of bad girls made good, slightly edgy, antiheroic flavored, but nonetheless card-carrying heroines of the crusade. The only one who really owns it is pragmatic Anevia, and I'd much rather have recruited her than Seelah whose constant reminders of 'I grew up on the mean streets of etcetera' and side quests with her alternate adventuring party get old very quickly. Worse yet, the game tries to strongarm you into bringing her along as the only designated meat-shield out of a score of companions. Handy reminder: you can recruit mercenaries.

 

Ember: NG witch. No less a teacher's pet than Arushalae, though lacking the other's stat fudging. Adorable little girl whom you're expected to coddle and praise at every single step despite doing nothing but spouting inane platitudes, and to whose every whim the very multiverse must bend. I kept expecting her personal quest would at some point explore the obvious logical flaws in her basic setup, only for Mary to Sue harder with every chapter. Like the talking sword with abandonment issues from Deadfire, I have to wonder whether she was intentionally written as badly as possible or simply handed off to some lobotomized teenage fanfic writer. Needless to say she's always given the last word in campfire exhanges.

Ember's misconceived antics veer into unintentional comedy when you realize none of her interactions have anything to do with her character. Name one trait remaining relevant past her introduction. She doesn't elf, she doesn't witch, she doesn't crow, she doesn't orphan; her character sheet may as well read "Klingon proctologist" for all it matters!

 

Daeran: NE oracle. Naughty pretty-boy who serves as your best healer. In practical terms he's statted well, though his oracle handicap (limited movement at the start of combat) means you'll be playing defensively with him around. Decently conceived companion quest, but though he gets pages upon pages of dialogue, he's unfortunately built entirely around his role as 'dangerous' romance novel toy-boy who needs you to save him from his inner demons, so his every interaction boils down to a simpleminded evil-lite 'oooooh, aren't I oh-so naughty and enticing? And rich. And well-dressed. Have I mentioned I'm rich lately? And naughty-naughty!'

 

Sosiel: NG cleric. Practically, Sosiel's main problem is being a moderate-constitution cleric in medium armor, though even more than Staunton you get him early enough to try to make it work. Thematically, his fundamentally uncreative quest for his m.i.a. brother actually ranks one of the campaign's better-executed stories, but unfortunately Sosiel himself comes across as blandly nice - presumably to suit his role as the good boy romantic counterpart to Daeran.

Trever: CN ... lots of things. Sosiel's ex-paladin brother. Too bad you only get him at the end of Act 4 so he'd be hard to fit into your party as yet another offensive melee fighter, even if his build didn't indicate his troubled life history by being scattered between fighter-ish classes with no synergy. On the other hand, it's a nice deliberate sacrifice to make for the sake of roleplaying, for anyone who wants to see the Sosiel / Trever power duo through to Wrath's end. Me, I had zombies to raise so I did them both a favor and packed them both off home soon after rescuing him. Have a nice life bros, you've earned it.

Camellia: ?E shaman. Rapier specialist. Takes about five seconds to realize she's evil, soon as you ask yourself just exactly who would be hiding her alignment in a paladin-infested city. However, her spoiled brat persona gets toned down after her first appearance, and in direct counterpoint to Daeran's preciousness her quest arc follows through on her basic precept, turning out to be a thoroughly, irredeemably evil bitch manipulating you and abusing your leniency toward her to indulge her sadism. Honestly didn't think they'd go through with it. Line by line the writing ain't winning no prizes, but solid and well executed concept nonetheless. I eventually killed her back at the mansion when she clearly plummeted below my own Pandemonium on the good-evil scale.

 

Greybor: NN slayer. Dual-axe offense would fit well in a game with more max-CON sword-and-board companions to balance out your front line, but doesn't mesh with Wrath's already redundant lineup of dual-wielding and two-handers, especially with overpowered archers providing most of your damage. However, his companion quest positions him, along with Regill, as a sorely-needed reminder that likeability should not equate to appreciation, the antithesis to Ember and Arushalae and Daeran and Seelah and Nenio and Finnean's infantilism. A cold-blooded appreciation for each other's quality is all you need, growing slowly, cautiously to camaraderie and proven trust without the need for maudlin recitations.

Woljif: CN rogue (of the spellcasting variety, ugh, this mangled class system) Though you're better off focusing on his physical abilites to keep him functional in melee, he makes a dandy buffbot as a secondary caster and is by far your best trickster. More work also seems to have gone into his dialogues (with good voice acting to boot) to where he's arguably the best fleshed-out character in the game, with a personal quest exploring a reasonable spectrum of tiefling possibilities. Wise-cracking without seeming intrusive, with a hard luck backstory that never veers into the outright sappy and an ascension to power that remains within the scope of game mechanics (unlike some others here) he pretty much stands as proof that Wrath's worst points stem less from inability than from deliberate pandering to the idiot market.

 

Wenduag: NE fighter. Once again, shaky alignment, as Wenduag acts out an excellent portrayal of archetypal CE. Only wanting to be chieftess re-qualifies her as non-chaotic.

First though it's worth mentioning her stat build, because in a game full of archer / bruiser redundancy, her very flexibility as STR / DEX fighter makes her a nightmare to level up. Unless you know all the other companions ahead of time, she keeps getting made redundant by the flavor of the Golarian month. I started her off with bows and (to make use of the first good two-hander you find) glaives. Cue Staunton and his glaive. So I picked up more longbow feats. Cue Delamere and Arushalae. So I completely retrained her for falchions. Cue Trever. By late Act 4 I was about ready to retrain her again as a freakin' bard with harmonica feats, but for fear some damn harmonica-prodigy angel would descend from on high just to screw up my weapon distribution yet again. That I was considering a scimitar just as I found Kestoglyr proved my exasperation well-founded.

However, Wenduag's Stupid Evil tendencies are what make her both contentious (going by forum chatter) and a surprisingly decent character by the end. Sadly, some of her quest prompts (especially in Act 4) are unenlighteningly written or outright absent, making it hard to get her "good" quest ending without cheating.

Don't get me wrong, Wenduag is a horrible, horrible person, and that's what makes her a good character, for living updown to one of the hardest companion types to portray aptly (albeit a frequent player personality) the rabid dog. You're basically talking about characters who will turn on their allies as soon as the opportunity for mischief arises... which is exactly what Wenduag does, unable to resist the temptation of promised power and swearing fealty left and right, and with INT 10, WIS 12 and CHA let's-not-even-talk-about-it, she plays out the role of a born sucker, just barely savvy enough and socially inept so as to outsmart herself in her allegiances. Her argument for why you should let her live after her final betrayal even makes sense: she doesn't even bother trying to convince you that she's flipped some moral switch but only that you've demonstrated your dominance in the excruciating fashion she can understand, and finally removed her best available temptation. You can follow her trainwreck of thought.

I'll stand by Wenduag as I stood by Qara because while she still lags behind better versions (Ignus or Kills-in-Shadow (who incidentally would fit the NE type better for her more stable fealty)) she fits a difficult companion role better than most games would even try.

 

Regill: LE fighter who acts LN. His climactic self-sabotage in service of the cause, which somehow comes across as more meaningful than mere martyrdom for so thoroughly fathoming his fellows' mentality, stands out as the most memorable moment in any Wrath companion quest. Like others here, his alignment is shaky at best, as you never see much malice or malfeasance to justify an "evil" designation beyond indifferently neutral pragmatism or martial callousness.

While yet again his gimped build is difficult to work around (a max-DEX fighter in heavy armor) he hits hard enough with those freaky little double hammers to edge out poor Trever and Staunton for pure practicality.

However, he amasses more style points even by mid-game than any of the rest could hope to. Oddly enough for a themed campaign opposing almost entirely CE enemies, lawful companions are in short supply. I don't know about Lann, but Seelah's lawfulness gets completely drowned out by sappy "power of friendship" plot excuses, so Regill alone ends up picking up a lot of the slack in both reliability and common sense. In a roster full of whiny prima-donnas he and Greybor are usually the only ones opting on no-frills gettin' shit done, which you'd think would count for more on THE VERY DOORSTEP OF EVIL INCARNATE!!!

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Conclusions?

1) By sheer numbers, I was surprised to find most of Wrath's companions... bearable, or even intriguing in the last few cases, contrary to my overall impression of them as insufferable little preening twits. It appears rather the case that the politically correct cretins are simply given more screen time, longer personal quests and more dramatic interactions than their better alternatives. Most of Regill's lines, for instance, come during council meetings, which are so tediously numerous and overextended as to prompt click-through. The worst companions are shoved in your face right from the start (Seelah, Nenio, Ember) while some of the most promising (Trever, Lich's zombies) are 11th-hour additions.

 

2) While Owlcat learned a lot of lessons from Kingmaker, their interpretation of the alignment system remains shaky. Characters receive their L/C/G/E designations as much by a top-down partitioning of roles according to arbitrarily designated representation quota as they earn them via their own actions.

3) Aside from being portrayed as nauseatingly good/cute/sexy-badass (with the notable exception of Wenduag) most female companions' stats are min-maxed and outright inflated (Arushalae, holy shit!) to make them look as good as possible, while the males' stats are wrecked for their assigned role (Staunton, Sosiel, Regill, Trever) so as to reinforce the womandatory "man bad, woman good" bashing without which nothing may be published. If you want to handicap yourself for a challenge, try running a sausage party in Wrath. Ironically, being less idealized actually makes the menfolk more interesting.

 

4) The most engaging are neither the most ingratiating (Ember) nor the most extreme (Camellia) but those which best own their basic nature.

 

5) RPG romance needs to die in a fire. Or in ice. Or down a hole. Or up a hole. I honestly don't care how, just get rid of this idiocy. Look at how much damage it's done in Wrath. Arushalae was obviously designed from the ground up as a romance option. Galfrey instead of being scrutinized as a leader becomes a stand-in for anyone who wanted to bang Princess Peach. Daeran and Sosiel's personalities are crippled by it. At least Camellia and Wenduag's motivation in coming on to me made sense in context (playing on male protectiveness) but it still diverges too abruptly from the campaign's general concerns. Half your damn companion roster keeps stumbling over their own gonads!

You want romance? Make a porn spin-off and sell it separately.

 

6) They sort of fail at the BG tradition of companions, which interacted with the rest of the campaign more or less regularly, either expositing, cracking jokes or bitching you out over your RP choices. Wrath's roster on the other hand is verbally absent, aside from a few one-liners by Woljif and rare alignment-based issues like Seelah abandoning me due to my lich-craft. (Good riddens.) This uneven intrusion into your campaign lends more weight to their fewer (but often lengthier than in old games) interactions, boosting annoying moments' nuisance by volume. Maybe even Arushalae would've been more bearable if she didn't blindside you with "let's go talk about an imaginary picnic table for fifteen minutes... AGAIN"

7) As the audience for this new medium grew up over the past decades, computer games (especially cRPGs) should have matured with them (or at least progressed through adolescence) and this has sadly not happened. Though the campaign is not completely lacking in nuance, Wrath's special little companion snowflakes strutting their pre-chewed moralism and expectations of social sanction keep bringing to mind one particular descriptor: infantile.

 

These are the perfectly superior/transgressive/dependent best friends a sixth-grade bully expects to have, the social approval prescribed by our lowest common denominator: a cute little girl lecturing others on their badness, a sexy, sassy, classy femme fatale, a feudal playboy, a desperate for approval black amazon with a hard luck backstory, a sex goddess trying to be good if only you'll love her, a know-it-all who probably can't get any friends besides you and who'll let you cheat off her notes for the secrets of creation exam... and the cheerful, helpful little buddy you keep in your pocket, willing to be anything for you. This is not an RPG group. It's a mean girl's entourage.

 

One wonders whether Owlcat's hoping to capture an audience of sixth-graders, or merely one stunted at that mental level.

Plot Hooker With a Hack of Gold

"She sees a mirror of herself

An image she wants to sell

To anyone willing to buy"

Green Day - Extraordinary Girl

 

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Moderate spoilers from The Order of the Stick

Irrelevant spoilers for a badly-written character from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

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Back when I was fourteen I came up with the best idea for a novel: science fiction, but with no science! It was gonna be, like, space guys, but not in space. Also, monsters. Is that not the most awesomest and most original idea evar!?!

 

One of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' few well-written moments comes while ransacking the lair of a mad scientist experimenting on demons. You set loose a witch who'd been sentenced to burn at the stake beforehand, only for him (of course it's a him in this particular case; man bad, woman good - repeat the mantra) to say "crusader, didn't you ever consider some of the witches condemned might actually have been guilty?" and proceed to attack you in the name of his demon lord.

Yes, categories are usually established according to some observable (albeit often misinterpreted) trend. Wer-wolfes bite people, damnit!

But that's a one-liner from an enemy redshirt, belying the idiot-friendly tripe pervading Wrath's portrayals of good and evil. Meanwhile Ember, the witch companion you interact with for five variously ludicrous acts is a cheesy, infantile parody of a Mary Sue, a perfect light of goodness and clairvoyance who needs do no more than pout for even ersatz divinities to obey her demands.

 

Because of course your witch friend is an exception to all witchy ways. She's speshul.

And of course the orc is a noble paladin. She's speshul.

And of course the kobold is a mysterious benevolent sage in kobold's clothing. He's speshul.

And of course the succubus is reformed to goodness and an invincible spotlight-stealing plot-trampler. She's speshul.

And of course the female drow you chase down turns out to be good at heart and only victimized by a man. She's speshul.

And of course your aasimar, being male, is a token watered-down "evil" bishonen bad boy. He's the wrong kind of speshul and he needs you to emotionally manipulate him into boyfriend material.

Needing a break from that nonsense, I decided to fire up Vagrus: the Riven Realms instead, a managerial strategy game with turn-based squad combat and a strong role-playing side. Sure, they misspelled my name in the preorder credits, but I'm not nearly shallow enough to complain about that repeatedly and at length every time I mention Vagrus... y'know, that game that misspelled my name in the preorder credits? Anyway, I schlep on over to the first major city and start recruiting companions.

Of course the orc is a noble warrior who doesn't live by his people's code of brutality. He's speshul.

And of course the drow has abandoned his people's underground empire. He's speshul.

That second particularly grates, as Vagrus pedals furiously along the elfemism treadmill.

You introduce a race of antagonists: evil, underhanded troglobites. Call'em orcs or goblins. They sing songs about going down. They're pretty cool. Now readers/players demand more orc characters in the story. Now they want to identify with the badass orcs, since it would give them an excuse to act "evil-lite" and still claim they're better than the average orc. Pretty soon orcs/goblins are looking less and less antagonistic, and comic after comic starts treating them like some beleaguered ethnic minority. They even move aboveground, improve their posture and start dressing like spaghetti western injuns.

Problem: now what are we supposed to slice'n'dice in caves?

Solution: introduce a completely new race. Oooh, let's make them fallen, mutated elves (a very non-Tolkien original idea *wink-wink*) 'cuz that always drums up some drama. "Drow" sounds like a badass title. Make'em evil so the players don't feel sorry for killing them and give them some cave adaptations like shadowy dark skin to blend in the dark and make them dishonest and underhanded and treacherous so they're even more hateable. Cool, huh? So cool, in fact, that readers start demanding more of them, and then start identifying with them and demanding drow heroes who can act evil-lite yet still bemoan their fellows' greater evil.

 

Problem: now what're we supposed to mince and mash in caves?

Solution: introduce a completely "new" race. Make 'em sneaky and underhanded and evil and hateable and cannibalistic ("looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!") and give' em some cave adaptations like pale cadaverous skin for lack of pigmentation. Call 'em "wraiths" because that won't cause any confusion and this completely new and original fantasy wraithsrace will solve our evil-oid humanoid scarcity FOR EVER AND EVER and ev- seriously though, set your clocks.

It's a variation on the red queen hypothesis. Each newly introduced character/category is defined from the start as more extreme than its predecessor, but in reality this only places it in the same niche vacated by that predecessor as it bred out to generalism. How many times this cycle will repeat is anyone's guess, though if the "specialness" inflation of real-world social movements and religions (ever more puritan, ever more vegan, ever more queer) is any indication, the sky's the limit. For now let's just consider the typhoid Marys, the Drizzts and Thralls watering down fantasy races, those speshul little snowflakes. Let me ask you something: was Legolas elvish? Was Elrond? Galadriel? Even the second-stringers like Thranduil, Glorfindel, Haldir, Arwen? Did any of them need to become the antithesis of all things elvish to stand out from the crowd? Did Tolkien go "roight then, first elf I wrote was an ancient, gracious, graceful, wise guardian of the land, so enough of that, next elf must needs be an adolescent vampire!" Or a seraph. Whatever.

 

While I stand by my criticism of GreedFall, there was one character I liked, and surprisingly he hailed from my temperamentally antithetical faction, the theists:

Petrus (at least in the first half of the game I played) didn't need to be holier than all the other thous around him to get his point across. His personality was not defined by either one-upping or renouncing his group designation but owning it, a welcome undercurrent throughout GreedFall but less pronounced in other characters. In fact, he slightly reminds me of another badass grandpa from another fantasy religious order, O-Chul the paladin's paladin from The Order of the Stick... and O-Chul in turn brings us full-circle back to Wrath of the Righteous.

See, O-Chul may or may not have tamed one of the villains (spoiler alert as to which one) while the villains help him captive and tortured him for months on end - with the prerequisite of susceptibility on that villain's part and an extensive build-up of tenuous game-playing metaphors and uncertain rapport. Contrast him to Ember from Wrath, who routinely turns gangs upon hordes upon armies of demon-worshippers and demons themselves from evil to good by no more than flatly telling them to be good - with the writing doubling down by outright commanding you to believe that cheesy platitudes just sound more convincing when they come from this insipid little snot because she's so convincingly good. A witch mind you. The good witch of the worst. *

The descriptor we need to introduce here is "facile" and it applies to both the basic design of characters like Ember and their expected interaction with the world. After his imprisonment, O-Chul delivers his rescuers a list of their common enemy's attacks. How did he get it? By instantly and effortlesly discerning it via telepathy? By just asking and having them tell him their secrets because he's too cute to refuse? By stumbling upon it via heroic luck? No. "One saving throw at a time." He remained a Lawful Good paladin and played his strengths under the circumstances, awaiting the right moment for decisive, unflinching action toward the greater good. He endured, and in enduring not only grew strong but strengthened his allies.

If you create a paladin it should be because you want to play a paladin, not a barbarian with better public relations. If you insert a witch class into your game, it should not consist of people wrongly accused of witchcraft! Space dudes not-in-space is not an original idea. "Dudes" is not a fantasy race! Character designs like "orc that doesn't act orcish" or "drow that doesn't act drowish" aren't just facile in their concept but in their interactions' overwhelming focus on the non-issue of their exceptionality instead of more personal motivations. Is it so impossible to create a witch character with her own personality and with actual struggles to overcome by personal choice, effort and sacrifice who still acts like an illicit practitioner of occult magic? Was Dragon Age's Morrigan so unpopular a character?

And yes, it's damn near impossible to discern how much of this idiocy is due to pop fiction writers' professional incompetence or their intellectual inability to move past such clichés or just disinterested pandering to the retard market they believe they can't capture otherwise. I'd bet on the third factor overwhelmingly. And yeah, admittedly, I did think up "space dudes not in space" at fourteen... but after a few pages realized the plot was going nowhere. Within the year I'd abandoned it altogether. Vagrus is now two months old and Wrath three. By June the degenerate munchkin brigade you apparently think requires your undivided attention will be ashamed they ever associated with your brand name... not that you could pry them away from Hello Kitty Online in the first place no matter how hard you Mary your Sues.

 

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* There's an obvious parallel to be drawn here to real-world social activism. A white person declaring all white people are racist, the "one good man" declaring all men rapists, the religious believer declaring we are all sinners, all are implicitly setting themselves up as holier-than-thou... by doing absolutely nothing aside from moving the goalposts.

P.S.: You misspelled my name in the preorder credits!

P.P.S.: If you're going to bring up Fall-From-Grace, I'll get to that, geez, gimme a break.

Conundrum Unworthy of Solving

I was chugging along at a pretty decent pace in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, but one particular "feature" sapped my little remaining enthusiasm for its mediocrity: those stupid tile puzzles.

 

The basic idea is arranging a set of two-square (domino-style) tiles along the floor according to a starting pattern. Solid basic notion, idiotically implemented for several reasons:

1) They can be slotted forwards or backwards, but nothing indicates the position they'll take once laid down. There is no rationale behind discerning this by trial and error.

2) Instead of universally recognized ideograms (plus signs, hearts, etc.) they use their own script... which is actually a great idea I'd be glad to support (I've even requested an alienese keyboard) if the resulting characters weren't so similar as to blend together, making them an unwieldy chore to memorize.

3) The tiles are too small to see in your inventory, and for some insane unreason were drawn with a pointless reflection effect in the middle further obscuring details.

4) Even if you understand the basic idea and know how to start, you're left with at least four paths to suss out by mindless trial and error (due to the second symbol on each tile) requiring several clicks to open a slot, select a tile, confirm your selection, then when it turns out it was the wrong one, select the slot, pick up the tile, confirm your de-selection, backtrack thus a few tiles, etceteree, etceterah

5) According to online chatter, in order to get even the slightest hint as to their meaning you supposedly have to drag along one of the most annoying companions in a very annoying roster, meaning you're arbitrarily punished for unrelated roleplaying choices.

I would've been willing to put up with all that nonsense. I did the first, simple, introductory puzzle and returned three acts later for the second, only to be completely stumped... only to be told by an online cheat-sheet that the instructions were in this case a red herring.

... yeeaaah. Fuck it.

At this point even the infamous "rubber ducky" puzzle from The Longest Journey made for better gameplay, and I finally realized they're doing it on purpose. It's meant to waste your time squinting and randomly ignoring one instruction or another. This is not a puzzle at all. It's an interface timesink. Instead of intellectually challenging and rewarding problem-solving, this is yet another pure playtime padder like the fights requiring 1/400 odds opening dice rolls. Skip it. Despite having more than enough content for epic-length run-throughs, Wrath's developers still patheticaly, insecurely padded out the campaign's length by mindless repetition every chance they got.

Come on, Owlcat. You're far from the pinnacle of your creative field... but you're better than this.

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edit 2021/11/23

What really singes my tail hairs is that just a lope and poke later I ran across a truly entertaining puzzle in Wrath of the Righteous:

Pulura's Fall took me about five tries and ten minutes to solve and aside from being a reading test instead of visual pattern matching, gets right every single error in execution the other got wrong.

1) No uncertainty as to which symbols light up when you click something.

2) No unnecessary overlap or similarity between symbols (i.e. no "daughter" "doubter" and "draughter")

3) No graphic fuckery.

4) No multiple clicks to execute a single action.

5) No depriving you of information for having better taste in companions.

(Kestoglyr did groan at one point, but that may have been more related to the unremitting horror of his tortured existence than a puzzle-solving hint to his halfling overlord.)

 

It even includes a possible red herring depending on how you interpret the hints, but this can be eliminated methodically.

So... yeah, Owlcat. You really are better than that!