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.

The Necromancer's Tale

"This world's all wrong

So let's go where we belong

Pack up the stereo, meet at the burial ground

Contract malaria, meet at the burial ground"

 

The Decemberists - Burial Ground

_________________________________________ 

 

"Something in me recoiled at his expression of joy. How could a man be so happy while both my sleep and waking hours were tormented by whispers from the grave?"

 

It was a dark and stormy night.

No, really.

Hi-diddly-ho, neighbourinos. Don't mind me, just doing a bit of... uhh... gardening... at the witching hour of night, in a graveyard, guarded by a boiling cauldron of mind-altering brew. It's alright. I'm a professional.
 

Which is a weird way to start this, since despite overall enjoying the game I'll repeatedly be accusing its creator of amateurishness. The barrier of entry for garage projects in game design rose steeply to complete unfeasibility in the 2000s' 3D graphic arms race era, but has been gradually dropping again over the past decade as a "good enough" suite of generic engines and assets have become more widely accessible.* If credits are to be believed, The Necromancer's Tale is, more so than even Wildermyth, a mom-and-pop project authored/programmed largely or entirely by one writer and staffed in part by a suspicious repetition of that author's last name.

 

This time though, the strain really shows in some blatant project creep, straining to accommodate far more RPG stats, more NPC merchants, more items including cosmetics, than was healthy for its overall capacity. I would have rather seen more finessing at a smaller scale. The program has locked up a few times, the conversation interface resetting up and down is just visually distracting, oddball auto/quicksaves tied to manual saves themselves overwriting save titles, the mouse pointer is far too easily confused by nearby objects and requires frequent zooming and camera turning to select, pathing... gets you to where you clicked eventually but takes some weirdly unoptimized zig-zags, the repetitiveness of carrying and animating skeletons gets very grindy after a couple of chapters, the entire item system is littered with redundant or useless pickups. And while it's not really at the same level of flaws, it drives my inner librarian nuts that the town map is not aligned to North! Not all art assets are well applied to the setting, like a rather modern-looking indoor flush toilet in 1730. I suppose it's a gray area, as the nobility could've had early models... in London, not an Adriatic Ruritania.

No chamber-pots for our musketeers!

And while dialogue trees are laudably well fertilized, a one-man show simply lacked the means to address all possible interactions, yielding some comically oblivious NPCs.

Then she took an arrow in the knee

For all that, RPG fans (myself included) would gladly have sung the praises of The Necromancer's Tale for its handling of several long-standing lacks in cRPG design: avoiding a strict "chosen one" plot, making the player pay attention to his actions, and most importantly playing the dark side and smoothing out the all too facile power fantasy by a self-conscious stinginess toward spell slots and minions. In fact, the entire first chapter is an extended choose-your-own-adventure character creation device:

And if you're wondering, yes, I did end up answering precisely the right questions to yet again make myself an elf wizard. 

Hey, I gotta be me.

Even afterward, the second chapter is played in adventure game dialogue mode, the third is exploration of the town, you try your first tentative fight by chapter four and only really get into tactical combat by chapter six of sixteen. Overall I preferred Tides of Numenera's version of individual stat pools and investment in consumables (even if it was too easy to cover all bases) but stat investment strategy's still handled quite well here, never locking you out of progression yet definitely making you wary of wasting your four flex points needed to surpass a particularly obstructive skill check once a chapter. It all adds up to highly satisfying dramatic escalation paired with an equally well-considered build-up of your own occult power, from vague inklings to tentative toying and cooking experiments to fumbling first efforts to earning your place as a true force of un-nature. Nothing comes easy for our van Elstrik, but as a result each advance is far more meaningful.

 

Unfortunately, the worldbuilding's very hit-or-miss. The author did some reading, I'll grant (thematically apt literary references pepper your environs) but lacked a coherent feel for preindustrial mannerisms or speech or daily life. Incongruities crop up in every expository paragraph. There was no "pulp" fiction in 1730, books being still quite rare and scant literacy providing no market. Children would've been farm labor or at best shop apprentices. What grates most of all is the constant and absurd repetition of "okay" a quite modern Americanism which only spread to the rest of the world with 20th-century mass-media and cannot be waved away by the universal translation convention. DIY voicing lands all over the map, sometimes spot-on (the more casual anglophone characters) other times groaningly terrible (socialites or any "ethnic" accents like Slavs or Italians) to where it immediately breaks immersion.** Which brings us to the piles upon piles of gratuitous snowflakery, because there. are. a. lot. of those quaint ethnic extras serving absolutely no purpose but to stamp some "inclusivity" form in the writer's brain. It was odd from the start mixing Venice with an imaginary Ruritania, but then you pile on with Irish, German, Austrian, English, Senegalese, Chinese, Turkish, plus various nondescript middle-Easterners or East-Europeans, and the setting loses all coherence, grinding the narrative to a halt again and again and again in performative multiculturalism. With every new pointless character waxing poetic on the virtues of other cultures or voicing anachronistic pacifism and populism, I couldn't help wondering why they didn't simply set their game in such an exotic locale or go for a straight-up fantasy world.

 

The setting would have been served far better by a more coherent portrayal of peasant life and Enlightenment-era craft guilds, of noble privilege and the intrusive and abusive power of the Church, agrarian dependence on the seasons and the whims of nature. Blighting crops and killing livestock are conspicuously absent manifestations of the dark arts here. Instead much of the game is devoted to tediously and redundantly lining up all the standard "woke" saints and devils, be it kow-towing to Islam or Orientalism or homosexuality (seriously, in 1700s Europe?!? gay men were treated as only slightly less unnatural than necromancy!) or a half-black half-brutha noble of spirit, or of course, as always, the most pervasive historical/biological revisionism of all, the feminist variety.

 

Man bad; woman good. Repeat the mantra.

For just a partial taste:

- bad enough to pretend no segregation of the sexes existed, but female sailors? 'nuff said

- said female sailor openly bragging about her promiscuity and conquests? would've gotten run out of town as a harlot, possibly by the local whores for muscling in on their turf (and that would've made a better story)

- female gang leader who apparently needs no male muscle 

- a perfect, victimized mother and evil father

- industrious and matriarchal society of progress

- witch gets automatically redeemed to a peaceful, friendly herbalist by the end because all her negative traits were the fault of men 

- a woman broke a rib <breaking up a fight> on the docks not <fighting> and "Her intent did not seem rude, but rather, efficient."and she's conveniently juxtaposed to a male doctor whose male brother is caught up in shady business and her male superior won't let her investigate the case of the evil males

- when throwing dice, the woman "shows men how it's done"

- ghost story about a husband betraying his wife to her untimely demise; for a bonus, stick in some line about her being too strong-willed for him

- your childhood friends now dating are a sitcom-standard savvy attractive female and bumbling dopey fat male

- a farmer's wife bitching about her arranged marriage as cause for armed rebellion and you get punished with a relations penalty if you reply with a line about personal merit

- a wife that's all business because her husband would run said business into the ground

- a brilliant scientific/mathematical female wasting away in an unhappy marriage to a sleazy husband 

 

Man bad; woman good. Repeat the mantra. As in Disco Elysium, creativity and coherence die instantly on contact with feminism. Sad, because once again there is some evident core talent here. It's just wasted chasing performative, moral majority-approved pablum instead of building on the strengths of the plot. Beyond that, other elements were shoehorned in as industry or pulp fiction standards, like the plethora of sex/romance subplots. Son of a cocksucker, in a story about necromancy of all things? Why!? Dragging these out well into the second half when we should be focusing more on the supernatural also make the last few chapters drag a bit.

 

From a more practical angle, quest/chapter progression tends toward the idiosyncratic or outright nonsensical at times. The Necromancer's Tale sells itself as among other things an "exploration" game, but as I've tried to point out numerous times, beach-combing is not exploration. Repeatedly combing the same beach, even less so. NPCs flicker in and out of existence or utility from chapter to chapter and (per adventure game norm) you constantly have to run around individually checking each one to see if new dialogue options have become available because random schmuck #16 sitting around town just happens to have an "in" you need to exploit to complete your quest (oh, she's his maid? good thing nobody even hinted at her existence the previous eight chapters and fifty times I wandered this location asking everyone what they do for a living!) Actions become available or unavailable depending on chapter (e.g. lockpicking, or curing the beaten Venetian) doors and town gates open at arbitrary times, and there are entirely, entirely too many random "gotcha" moments where you lose faction rep for asking standard adventurer questions, e.g. asking the apothecary about your father's death or merely asking a guard who the fuck he is. Gotcha moments do not serve as a meaningful challenge, but only the author's need to feel superior to his audience.

 

Yet still, given that, given all of that, admitting all of that fumbling, bumbling stumbling so worthy of grumbling, amazingly The Necromancer's Tale still breaks slightly better than even and deserves a playthrough.

It is hard to sufficiently emphasize just how effectively it nails its core feature of a gradual slide toward darkness and imperceptibly waxing mystic puissance. The crafting system is just involved enough to make you work for your reagents. Not only do the florid descriptions of supernatural sensations lend a far more visceral appeal to what would usually be summarized as "cast magic missile" but these mesh with mechanics like your mana pool initially depending heavily on a randomized "winds of magic" bonus which becomes less and less relevant the more your own power puts you beyond the whims of fate. New discoveries chain into each other, like a mystery investigation netting you a tank mook that can pass a couple of strength checks letting you among other things acquire a wraith summon which makes it much easier to farm zombies from bandits trying to ambush you. The spirit world begins to impinge upon your perception, putting you in danger of revealing your powers by accident. Your humanity meter starts dropping... but then, is that a bad thing? Your progress toward the unnatural feels perfectly natural, beginning with the best of intentions, forced into desperate measures by economic circumstance, continuing with verifiable righteousness, overindulging under the moral umbrella of others' worse crimes, growing beyond the pettiness of human morality.
 

I've said that necromancy itself needs a more even-tempered treatment than the primitive, thoughtless disgust with which it's treated. I've praised movies like Maggie which return to the core, low-key terrors of zombification. This is the best RPG treatment of such themes I've seen in a very long time. My favorite moment in the whole game was stashing my swelling army in the farthest corner of the map, in a place of ancient magic, just leaving them to stand, silent and expectant, in the cold, secret, dark reaches of oblivion, their lurid shadows dacing on rock walls as I shuffled among them in my burial shroud grave-lit by my demonic wand, adding the latest two or three zombies to the throng, or picking my tank mook out to sneak him back into town for repairs.

 

For all its faults, there is a lot to be said for a game that can make so much of so simple and unscripted a moment.

 

_________________________________

 

 

* We shall not speak of RPGMaker or other chibified, pixelated retro junk.

** One of the voices sounds like the fishwife from the marketplace on Earth in Warframe?

 

P.S.: To me, there seemed only one logical way to end the story, but if achievement percentages are any indicator, most players did not go the route of eternal darkness, clinging to the more conventional morality of a redemption story instead. The author shows a lot of potential, but it will be wasted if that mass approval lodestone keeps skewing plots toward pablum.

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.

 

 

 

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

A Measure of Mud

Hey, guess what game I'll be talking about in a few days!

Trudging through that dust-bowl brought to mind an old Sylvester Stallone movie titled Lock Up that I caught a couple of times way back when, and which has seemingly faded from everyone's memory. Not unjustifiably, either. Ostensibly a prison movie, but without much to say about justice or prison life, but nonetheless overstating everything it didn't have to say, every damn minute of every damn scene. Dialogue sounds like placeholder for an actual script. It belabored each and every shot and even the soundtrack somehow managed to consistently mismatch its mood. Aside from that it's Stallone flexing his way through a litany of manly cliches in quintessential '80s fashion: power tools, car, tossing a ball, body-slamming, punching, protecting his mate, squaring off against a standard-issue less-manly-therefore-bad villain. If you want a highlights reel, keep in mind they're not lying when they say those are the movie's best scenes. The flick seems to have flopped, badly.

 

Yet somehow I always held a modest soft spot for it. Maybe just because I saw it when I was twelve or something and didn't know better. Maybe its the pretty decent fights with lots of unsophisticated, grunting violence, the sort of which you've seen too little in the post-Matrix decades. But looking at those few scenes now, I think Stallone got upstaged by the real star of the show: that muddy prison yard! It squelches. It stretches across the frame. It encompasses the men's own drab inmate duds and the dun concrete walls. Characters slip and fall in it. It spatters and clings and sits heavy and implacable. This is your world, creature of mud.

Such drab beigeness can be doubly fraught in an interactive medium. Where a movie director can force action in the mud, a game designer risks the player stopping and looking around to ask 'what the hell am I doing here' every minute of gameplay. Indeed, I've bashed a few titles here on the blog for just such hollow environments. But I've more often praised the ones that manage to pull it off. A good designer always has an answer in mind for what the hell you're doing there. As above, he dangles a monument off in the distance to grab your attention and let you get your bearings. Or slopes and sweeps the terrain to make you wonder what's over the next rise. Or supplies suggestive wind/water/traffic motion carrying your attention across the landscape. Even if your immediate surroundings feel empty, you are made to think of something beyond the nothing, made to value the steps you take.

 

The Shawshank Redemption for instance had opera and a library to offset the mud. Lock Up lacked them.

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!

Wolfermyth

I haven't given a spoiler alert in a while, but the Wildermyth quest The Scattered Self is a bit of a WTF? moment you should probably experience for the first time yourself.

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My most burning question once I encountered the physical transformations in Wildermyth became whether these include... y'know... the main one. The classic one. The me one. Cue Chayven Teelfletch the warrior, henceforth my favorite character. Once upon a time (I believe it was turn 26?) Chayven's party stepped into a glade favored by the wolf god, and with a resounding "Hell Yes!" piously accepted the wisdom of fang and fuzz.

Much of the time it's hard taking seriously the output of a game randomizing character names, traits, events, rewards, skill-ups, pretty much everything except the font. Still, when it works, it works wonders. Thanks to Chayven's other feats as he leveled up, he became a teleporting bruiser with multiple types of multiple attacks and my lynchpin for all the hardest fights. But that wasn't the spiciest bit.

 

First off, yes, our heroes' names are Chayven and Jaymnen. They eventually had a daughter. Her name is Chaynen. Randomizers are fuynen. The waterling says it's a very earthy name. Moving on. Time passes.

 

Now, keep in mind everything that follows is technically unrelated to the character's wolfishness, stemming from a completely different random trait. Including the first line.

Thus begins the quest The Scattered Self, which even for a fairly whimsical fairytale setting, gets a bit... trippy. You wander aimlessly until somehow stumbling by forest paths into the quester's own body, wherein awaits the personification of your body's defenses: a pig.

And yes, you can indeed go mano a mano with the swarm of parasites invading your body... or side with them, for sheer love of all that lives, forcing you to physically beat your manifested immune system into submission so it'll let them stay. We round out the whole shroomy affair back at home for another quiet domestic scene. 

Wherein our hero reassures his love (whose body he explicitly placed off limits to the parasites per article 5, paragraph 2 of the peace treaty) that he's all the better off now that he's eating for a hundred thousand.

 

Ta-daaaah! Love thy very close neighbour.

 

While I might normally chide such writing for straining too hard at creativity, having this trigger, of all my characters, on the party's werewolf, now that was just the icing on the cake. Because, yes, of course, who else would be more biologically malleable? And how much funnier is it for this to happen to the wer-wolfe who keeps calling love mind control, slavery and parasitism on his blog? Hm. You know... from this angle, I kinda get it.

War's Ails and Unscuffed Chrome

"It's so gorgeous to be back in Paris once again

Now I wonder what they put in the rain?"

 

Shivaree - It Got All Black

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It's a rainy day outside, but luckily modern man may at at time escape into alternate realities bathed in the undimmed radiance of...

Has anyone invented umbrellas yet?

...ummm, never mind.

 

A dreary, drizzly, drab and muddy day greets my landing in Hvalvik, as I begin testing the literal waters of Bannerlord's expansion.

Haven't managed to get myself into any naval battles yet (chickening out of the first and only one so far) but though as I said in my last M&B post I don't think this expansion addresses the game's real needs for more roleplaying and small-group adventuring, what's there makes enough sense in itself. The ability to call ships to large ports makes for interesting half-and-half round trips, for instance sailing across from Car Banseth to Sturgian lands, then looping around eastward by land. The stealth gameplay hinted at years ago is also finally making its way in. You can now infiltrate a bandit lair solo, stealth-killing your way through patrols to a signal fire to call your droogs in for the last big scrap. 

Be vewwy vewwy quiet.

Quite satisfying. But limited in scope. As detailed in my post on RPG timers, Bannerlord is pretty good at balancing costs and benefits for large things like sieges, but for smaller affairs like quests the benefit of running it yourself is dwarfed by the potential profits of continuing your trade circuit while delegating to your companions.

Well, sorry there, Rhyley me boyo, but cows are not a common commodity, and even if I look at the map and see a village selling them nearby there's no guarantee they'll have enough or at a profitable price or more importantly that I'll be able to loop back this way while still pathing to a trade hub or military objective. By comparison the bandit camp stealth run above is more of a known quantity. You need to wait for dark if you want to stealth it yourself, but sunset can be predicted. Other quests, like capturing prisoners or hunting mobile bandit armies that almost certainly will waste days of your time in the chase, are so unlikely and unprofitable that I've never accepted them personally after the first attempt years ago. So are they really part of the game? Hm. Dreary thought. Let's move on to sunnier pastures, like the scorching deserts of the U.S. Southwest where...

Knew I should've waterproofed my implants.

Well, crap. My first jaunt through Santo Domingo only cemented my appreciation for Night City, in itself, as a monumental achievement in virtual landscape design. There's no strict point of demarcation. As in a real city, the skyscraper canyons begin opening up gradually as you leave the downtown area, shopping centers and apartment blocks growing dingier by degrees, diffusing into an increasingly dilapidated shadow of what must have once been suburban cookie-cutter neighbourhoods, until finally, where the city dead-ends into the dam, the architecture itself loses semblance of habitability, consuming itself in unfinished, patchwork, geometric industrial utilitarianism. I nearly expected to find primitive adobe huts trailing off the end of this downward spiral. But note, I called it a "virtual landscape" and not a game. The downpour which accompanied my climb up the dam finally thinned and passed as I reached the top and turned to look back. At first obscured by sheets of falling rain, my journey gradually reappeared, the fringes and suburbs and shops and high-rises and then the gleaming skyscrapers.

 

I flashed back to twenty years ago while playing Oblivion, climbing the mountains east of Bruma to look back on the entire province. There: that's the spot where I'll hunt deer. Downhill there are Ayleid ruins I can dungeoneer my way through. Follow the river for some good herb spawns. Maybe head the other way to fight some ogres.

 

But Night City, for the incredible amount of effort and undeniable talent going into its construction, lacks even that limited gameplay relevance. The gangbangers you kill are interchangeable. The rest of street life is unchangeable. Too much of Cyberpunk 2077 is inspired by theme park MMOs' fixation on XP/loot grinding. Other than sightseeing, what may motivate you to revisit any particular spot? Is there anything in Northside you can't find in Santo Domingo? Individual sidequests could've been placed anywhere. Is the Northside of today any different from the Northside of tomorrow? At least We Happy Few distinguished polite from impolite society by mandating a wardrobe change and some mannerly comportment.

 

I don't know where I was going with this. Something about the recurring theme of rain, motion, change got my mind stuck once again on environment interaction and the relevance of time. Maybe I just need to ditch these grimdark game worlds where the sky's always the color of television tuned to a dead channel and try something more cheerful, something colorful and cartoonish with a storybook flair, like Wildermyth.

Oh, come on!

I was a bit disappointed when discovering the map zones lack any real personality, aside from your initial decision on resource production. I'm more about the world-building usually. (Which is why I just can't hate C2077.) But more than even Old World's dynastic character growth or RimWorld's Sims-like mood management, this one's all about nudging your randomized crew through randomized events, not only to maintain the status quo but open up new gameplay elements.

She truly is a wit of jam.

In her previous adventure, Jamwit acquired a firearm. By which I mean a fire arm, replacing the ability to wield two-handedly with a flame AoE. You run into several of these transformation quests, turning your plucky farm-boys into forces of nature, which can carry forward into various encounters. She'll never again wield a bow, but flamer-dame here brought her own conflict resolution to an encounter with an ice monster.

 

Well, since the rain's not letting up I may as well return to Calradia. Ironically, though I've moved from my last campaign's home base in the far east of the map to almost the western shores, both areas house herding culture, and both times I've found it impossible to actually sell the insane surplus of work-horses produced. But this time I discovered nearby towns have far more favorable trade prices on meat, and though I couldn't put a dent in the horse market, I gleefully bought hundreds-strong herds of Sumpter horses and flooded butcher shops with their carcasses until they could take no more. And that, the Sumpter Horselocaust, interestingly enough has felt like more of a win than the sheer amount of money my character's making. The real problem with questing in Bannerlord is that running the quests yourself feels unimpactful compared to alternate time investments for your character like war and trade. It's not the quests themselves but what they prevent you from doing. Though Vagrus for instance runs on the same caravan management premise, it more carefully threads quest actions (mostly involving your NPC companions) into your comitatus' business ventures. You can run them in parallel to trading, can still turn a profit on marble in newbietown even if you've polished off its local quests, and those quests in turn have opened you new avenues for local profit.

 

So I suppose I can draw a conclusion here, beyond my usual push for greater consequences for player actions. Making a move should change the board, yes. But your own actions should also be limited by the changing board. It's not as if this is a new idea. The old Dune game for instance had you spreading vegetation across the planet, altering the availability of the spice you needed to mine. And, just as with alternate routes, such costly trade-offs have always been a core element of strategy games, where RPGs' fixation on infantile power fantasy mandated a constant increase in fantastic power.

 

I decided to stay out of kingdom politics in my new Bannerlord campaign, until seven years of trading and questing later I noticed my Battanian homeland's been taking a real battanianing.

(note the lack of green flags)

From five cities down to two, and about to lose #2 and their last castle. So technically the map won't change. The same towns/castles/villages will always be there. The same units can be recruited. But certain goods have become unprofitable due to wartime scarcity (how's that for topical Spring 2026 references?) my ability to be a Battanian will vanish if I don't step in now to rescue them, gaining myself a fiefdom in the reconquered homeland if I'm lucky. Well, that's campaign divergence. If only prices, troops, conquests and reconquests didn't have a habit of rubberbanding back and forth a bit too quickly.

 

Persistent game worlds like Night City have been stuck in the MMO precept of unending grind, ensuring players can always revisit every and all their favorite haunts and victims ("where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came") but looking at the collapse of MMOs, that cozy familiarity may be far less marketable than it once was. Long-form RPG campaigns now stretch to hundreds of hours but by necessity cannot incorporate repercussions which might lock the player out of completing the main quest. You can see a parallel to Bannerlord's village quests being impractically unprofitable toward your "main quest" of wealth and lordship and world domination.

 

So I can't help thinking Wildermyth was onto something, if not necessarily in its heavy randomization, then in splitting the action into short campaigns whose heroes can hop to the next module and the next, much like you would in tabletop gaming, or as in fact many did with the old Neverwinter Nights modules. Some heroes die, others lose limbs. Some decisions end up opening more campaigns or future quest options. But you're still free to give the current adventure a thunderous climax. There's no reason this pattern couldn't coexist alongside permanent or epic-length varieties.

 

 

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P.S.: Baldur's Gate 3 is an interesting case, as it actually did offer a tremendous, unprecendented variety of quest resolution options which really did carry through to later acts, but lackluster worldbuilding and narrative design kept these from really registering as important.

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!