Organizing

It's near the end of the year and instead of spending it in a drunken stupor like normal, I've actually been doing some much needed organizing.  You see, I move around a lot (not an alot).  Like, a serious lot which you can undoubtedly find evidence of in these non-hallowed...pages?  words?  Whatever.

One of the things I find I've never got time for during a move is going through paperwork and files and whatnot.  It's a low priority thing and I'm generally more focused on bigger things like moving cars and hooking up utilities and that kind of thing.  Well, the last couple weeks I've recycled four full boxes full of crap that I've been carrying around but that's not what I want to talk about.

I spent the evening organizing my art.  All of it.  Or, at least, all of it that remains.  I viewed, sorted, and filed everything I had left spanning nearly 30 years.  It was...interesting.  Hankerin' at Drunkens and Dragons says that art is a skill.  I agree with this.  I don't have hardly any skill at all but it was fun to see how I got there from having zero skill.  Maybe it was negative.  Can you have negative skill?  I'm pretty sure I had that when I started.

I was also struck by how much I remembered of what was going on.  I could generally gauge the era something was drawn in even if I hadn't started sticking dates on things in 1990 (yes, I really do this).  I even remembered what was going on in my life and where I was living which is kind of a feat given how many places I've lived.  It was an interesting trip down memory lane for better or worse.

The upside of all of this, is that I've been reunited with some of my favorite pieces.  Digitizing gods willing, some of them will show up here.  Maybe my post count can be saved after all.

The Most Fun You Can Have With Your Brain

One of the fun things that I've been doing this year which keeps me more busy than I can comprehend, is running a DnD-like game again.  I ran a lot of games in high school and college and a few times after that but have been in a many-year drought.  I say "DnD-like" because I'm not running 5e or Pathfinder or anything like that because I've written my own system, one I like a lot, and a natural evolution of the one we built and played in college.

Some folks at work wanted to play having been inspired by stuff like Critical Role and asked if I would run.  We just finished session #9 after a long hiatus and there was a fantastic example of players shaping the world a la Matt Colville, something that really doesn't happen in any other kind of game.

Last century when I was in college I ran an adventure for a couple pals of mine in the dorm.  I didn't really have anything planned so we rolled up characters and I invented a little podunk town on the coast but otherwise in the middle of nowhere named Celbengoa.  Humble beginnings at the start, the two of them rolled into town and one of the characters, a swarthy fellow named Akbar hatched a scheme.  With no actual money and no real goods to sell, they chiseled out a few dozen triangles of sandstone from the nearby area and swindled the townsfolk into thinking they were lucky teeth from the maw of a terrible fictional creature called a Sand Serpent.  They ended up selling many dozens to the uneducated denizens of the town and abandoned the town with their riches.

Those characters would end up leaving many more marks on the world but that's not the story we're telling tonight.  Unfortunately, before we get back to the story, we have to talk about one mechanic and some metaphysics.  Sorry.  I'll keep it short.

The metaphysics of the world I run in has the Earthdawn idea that the nature of things come from their "patterns" which can be affected by significant events, strong beliefs, and other normal phenomena.  Casting a fireball is basically tapping into the pattern of the fireball spell and channeling its power.  Akbar's swindle ended up being the most significant thing that happened in the town for a while.  He'd sold enough Sand Serpent Teeth that just about everyone in town had one and had convinced enough folks that they were lucky that they actually started to convey a luck bonus to any who believed.  Akbar's companion would never get the bonus even though he wore one around his neck because he knew the truth.  Folks from that town would get a bonus because for them it actually was lucky and as a significant event had left a change in the pattern of the town and its inhabitants.

The game mechanic is that all player characters have an attribute called luck.  It's a pool of dice they may use on just about any roll to improve their chances of success.  They cost experience to replenish so there's a fun tradeoff between being super badass on a bunch of rolls but then not being able to raise stats as a result.  Characters who grew up in Celbengoa would naturally have a Sand Serpent Tooth and for those characters it would convey +1 to the roll when one or more luck dice were expended.  Several characters over the years have been from that town and have all received the bonus.  It's a tiny bonus and one that is forgotten most of the time but we're now prepared to tell the rest of the story.

One of the characters in my current game, a sneaky sort named Jamal, is from Celbengoa.  In fact, much like Akbar before him, his adventure had its humble beginnings there.  They had just defeated a boss and the boss's minions were fleeing like chumps.  A battered and bloody Jamal is surrounded by kobolds who are now intent on fleeing.  Instead of resting, Jamal lucks his attack roll and knocks it out of the park to the point that he gets a serious bonus to damage.  His AoE hits all 7 but is a low damage ability so he lucks his damage roll and while his damage is good, it manages to bring them all to one hit point.  It looked like those 7 kobolds would get away with their lives...but NO!  Jamal has a Sand Serpent Tooth, adds his +1 and kills all 7 with his AoE.  That bonus yielded the party about 1/4 of a typical adventure's experience.

This is already a fun story and happened at a climactic point in the battle but what really makes it fun is that it was a player's actions two decades earlier that put it over the top.  I don't know how often that happens in tabletop RPGs but I can't think of anywhere else it could happen.  That's pretty goddamn cool, and I had to share.

DA:I vs. DD:DA: La Segunda Parte

Why, yes, I did get google to translate that for me. I also intended this to be posted not many months away from the first part.  At any rate, this second part of my not-so-unbiased battle royale of too (and two) heavily punctuated titles:  Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. If you missed the first part, look for the WALL OF TEXT immediately after this one. I made a real effort to break it all up with pretty pictures. I don't think it helped.

Typical disclaimers apply. There will be spoilers and I am in no way unbiased in this matter.

One of the terrible ironies herein is that the only reason I got Dragon's Dogma at all was a comment Angry Joe made offhand in his DA:I video review (goods at 18:00, though his review of Dragon's Dogma was terrifically amusing). Why, yes, I'd love to see how boss battles should be done, Mr. Joe. Sign me up!

Writing
John did a much better job than I could ever hope when breaking down DA:I.  The quality of the writing, such as it is, is kind of a big deal in this case. If you were too terrified to follow those links, you should do so now because he handles this stuff a lot better than I ever could. I'll even drag up some links for your convenience. You should read those. Don't worry, I can wait.

Agency
Writing for games is hard; we know that. It's not like other media where you get to control the narrative completely. It's more like improv comedy or performance art where the leading role doesn't have a written script. The "best" games with the "best stories" are the ones where we aren't jarred out of our scriptlessness by non sequiturs or by a loss of the one real thing we have as players--agency. Take one or both of those away and things fizzle.

The best games (see:  most of Mass Effect) do a believable job of convincing players that they have full control over whatever role they choose with appropriate changes to dialog and setting depending on what they've done.  DA:I does a lousy job of this since for the most part everyone treats you exactly the same whether you're pushing nuns into a furnace or building an orphanage with nails you ground yourself. SWTOR, not entirely surprisingly, had a very similar construction.

At least I could find all my
pals on the Ebon Hawk.

With some notable exceptions, the vast majority of the choices you make as the Inquisitor are meaningless. You almost never see the effects of your decisions at all which is a) bad because it looks like you have agency but don't and b) Terribad(TM) since players pick up on the charade and it can draw them out of your world. As a particularly stark example, I found myself asking "WTF!?" after many (many) conversations with Sera where my Inquisitor said something completely unexpected and incongruent with the character I'd tried to play. It sucked and happened frequently enough that I stopped save scumming because I plain didn't care anymore. A player un-invested is a lot less likely to remember a game fondly and it's players that ultimately decide a game's legacy.  You've heard this from me before.

DD:DA takes an old-skool twist on this. The protagonist you play, the Arisen, really only has one set role in the world (to kill shit; possibly a dragon) and you were going to do that anyway.  In this way the bases are already covered and consistent with your time and actions in the game. Furthermore, your character never utters a single line of spoken dialog in the game. You can't be surprised at what your character says because they never say anything! We even get some meaningful choices. If you implicate Fournival, this super-sketchy antiquities collector, he will be whisked away and you will lose a source of some very nice consumables. If you choose to sacrifice your beloved you can avoid facing the scary dragon in combat and instead retire away with your own kingdom. It's odd that a game that doesn't shout from the rooftops about its decisions having weight seemingly has more endings that DA:I does.

Now that's a party!

Dialog
On a less-lofty note, I felt that the Inquisitor's inner circle and the dialog therein was pretty well written for the most part. An all too infrequent trick is to show a character that looks like a paint-by-the-numbers trope but then turn it on its ear and show that there's more. We can give lots of examples of this from previous Bioware games like Sten from DA:O and Wrex from ME1. I thought Blackwall's twist, though a little abrupt, was pretty good. Sera is also pretty well written (if you can figure out what she's saying sans all the ways the Inquisitor interacts with her) and I say that even though she annoyed me. In fact, I can't think of a single character in the inner circle that I thought was poorly written though there are absolutely cringe-worthy parts of Cassandra's dialog.

Kaira the faithful pawn.

The Arisen is sadly not in such good company. Your AI companions called pawns are...well...let's just say they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer. And they can be very, very chatty. (Wolves hunt in packs!) You can tone them down if you take the time to tune them but not a lot of people do, sadly. The majority of the other characters in the game you don't really spend a lot of time with--I mean, you're mostly in the field climbing inappropriately on some multi-story bad. The ones we do get to know about are pretty reasonable. You get a Duke slowly descending into madness who bartered his beloved for fame, immortality, and basically a kingdom and he would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids Arisens! It doesn't beat you about the head and neck with this info but if you pay attention it's all there. It also doesn't go out of its way to explain stuff in lengthy exposition--DD:DA's writers were generally content to give you a few details and let you on to the next hulking behemoth to crawl inappropriately on.

Plot
The worst part of DA:I, the part that really steams me (more than the inconsequential decisions, the plot-by-the-numbers, and the extremely uninspiring bads) is that that they saved the best for a DLC. The teaser we get after the credits roll with Solas and Flemeth hints at exactly the depth that we never saw with Corypheus. This is the kind of writing that we expect from Bioware, not the seemingly half-finished thing we actually got. Unfortunately, this is also the kind of thing we expect from EA: making us pay another pile of cashmoney to get the rest of the story we thought we'd already bought. While I'm curious about what happens in DA:I Trespasser I don't know that I want to encourage that kind of cash grab and I'll probably get the good bits on youtube.

Though this was the end, did you?

DD:DA handles this a lot better. I spent the first half of the game up until the "final battle" thinking that it was kind of weak. I mean, it's a pretty bog standard fantasy story with fairly easy encounters culminating with the killing of a Capital-D-Dragon and then BANG roll credits, just like it should. From there things get a lot more interesting.  With very little foreshadowing, instead of a hero's return as the credits scroll, it all goes to shit. What follows is an impressive display of game craftsmanship. We're entreated to a world that is turned upside down and a universe that is consistent but most likely not what we expected. The title "Dragon's Dogma" even starts to make sense when you get to the end and start piecing things together.

Just about everything in the game starts to make sense, in fact. Why are the pawns so dull? Why does the dragon show up every once in a while and take some poor chump's heart? Why had the duke lived so freakin' long with no signs of aging? And after that, should you get through a second playthrough, you can see your old Arisen and pawn playing the part as Seneschal--fan-freakin'-tastic. The Everfall, the Rift, the Ur-Dragon, the game itself--everything is tied up extremely well. The only thing missing is the bow. Game writers don't have to do this but it's super cool when they do.

Theme
To (badly) paraphrase the great Richard Bartle (yes, that one), designers are trying to tell you something about the world through their games. This could be their point of view, some weird bent on an old idea, or a grand "what if" scenario that we play through. The good ones do this well. The bad ones...not so much.

DD:DA makes at least a couple of its statements very clearly:  willpower, especially the will to live, drives mankind and this agency is a gift. This is notably inconsistent with what we hear in the last halfish of the game as we start to put the pieces together--that the eternal cycle will continue and that you, the current Arisen, are but the latest in the never ending chain and don't really have a say in the matter. If you're powerful enough to defeat the Seneschal, the world is yours to shape in any way you like until such time that your will is ground down and you summon a new Arisen to challenge and ultimately take your place. Fail to beat the Seneshal and you're reborn as the next Capital-D-Dragon as the near-champion of a previous age to challenge the next Arisen. I contend that the thematic difference in the two halves was done on purpose where they would stand in stark contrast until your last action in the story.

But before we go there, let's step into the WABAC (TM) machine to 2009. In Dragon Age: Origins, my Grey Warden gave her life to free the world from the Blight. It was the only way to be sure that the Archdemon would be defeated without uncharacteristic trickeration after everything else had gone wrong. I felt that the writers had backed me into a corner and I chose the action that fit my character best. I also felt robbed, maybe because of this. I remember it as "The Dragon Age In Which I Was Deprived A Good Ending" (or something like that). I felt like it was the only reasonable choice but it was a sad one to make.

My Arisen sacrificed herself in much the same way for much the same reason. She gave her life so that the world could choose its own path without a Senechal's guiding hand as her last act of defiance. Her last expression of agency was to break the cycle and to give that agency to the world.  I was backed into very much the same corner without other alternatives and I'll remember Dragon's Dogma completely differently. I found the ending just as sad but infinitely more satisfying because the statement was so profound and so clear. Kotaku had a different opinion. Kotaku is like that sometimes.

Flip side. What does DA:I tell us? To be honest, I struggled with this one. DA:O did make a statement; that choices matter. DA:I tells us the same but shows us differently so that can't be it and I'm not so cynical to think that they wanted to show the opposite. The best I can come up with, and it's kind of a stretch, is that people can rise to great challenges. We get bits of this when Varric talks about Hawke and that whole thing that went down at Kirkwall in DA2. I don't think DA:I's installment here stands on its own, sadly, and not in only because we can trace this further back in the martyr ending of DA:O. Maybe someone can fill in some blanks for me but I felt like I was left with yet another very unsatisfying ending. (That's right, I dropped the same link twice...who's gonna stop me?!)


And This is Where I Get My Rant On
If you thought I could get through this thing without a rant, then good news! It was hiding at the bottom of the box all along like that last half-donut left in the break room at the end of the day. Seriously, people, who eats half of a goddamn donut?

Bioware should know better.  We know this because they've done better. The Mass Effect trilogy is a shining example of what our medium can do with enough effort and resources despite the travesty that was the ending of 3. DA:O looked like a good start and while I hated that I couldn't get a good ending, I felt that the choices I made had weight. Fast forward five years and in a game that claims consequences for player actions as a pillar of its design we get fewer than we've seen from the same studio and in the same series.  Not cool.

In today's very incestuous game biz, we see a lot of games tacking on bits of other games in the hope that it might capture some of the magic (and buyers) of the original. DA:I was not improved by having a crafting system and was made a lot more tedious by having rocks and weeds gatherable at all. Would a better system have saved those features? Possibly; I understand that Fallout 4 and other Bethesda games have these for good and ill. The same statement can be made for some of the other mini-games, scavenger hunts, and more open sandbox-y world.

And why the crap did you save some of your best storytelling for a freaking expansion?!? DA:I feels incomplete without this stuff. Corypheus almost makes sense as a mid-scene sub-boss rather than the anti-climactic chump he is in DA:I sans that content. Were they too ambitious with their (assumedly) nine-figure budget and four year dev cycle? Did the money people push the game out earlier than the devs felt was reasonable? Did they have to scramble to finish off enough bits to shove into a box? Or is this actually a play by EA to sell more units like the conspiracy folks say? I don't really know. What I do know is that DA:I fell flat for me and that's awfully disappointing, especially for a game whose untested glory was shouted from the rooftops by just about every gaming media outlet.

Bioware has a history of making fantastic games and are now making games that are only OK.  As one of the biggest, baddest, and most noteworthy studios of this generation, are they not being allowed to build great games anymore?  If not Bioware/EA then whom? Not many can foot the bill for games like this, not with production costs skyrocketing. Who, then, will be the ones to push our medium forward?

Fin

Deep breath...whew.  The poor state of DA:I's writing by itself is a travesty but it couldn't even be propped up by the rest of the game's design. Graphics, marketing budget and name-brand recognition will move units for sure but gameplay is still king for our medium. I rather hope that this will always be true. As I've said here many times, media hype usually indicates a lackluster game and that seems to be the case for DA:I.

By contrast, I feel that DD:DA was extremely well written but in much subtler ways. It shouts less but at the same time manages to say more. I found it to be both subtle and sublime in its own interesting ways. The terrible irony is that DD:DA is built with just about the same ingredients list but ends up doing just about everything a little bit better culminating in a much better game. Yet, for all its good points, it was released to very little acclaim and hardly any fanfare. 

DA:I vs. DD:DA: A Write-up With Too Much Punctuation (Part 1)

DA:I's Evelyn Trevelyan

This was going to be a not-so-unbiased analysis of Dragon Age: Inquisition which I'm on record as not having liked very much. Instead we're going to compare and contrast Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen in an epic battle of punctuation-bearing titles! Whereas I'm a lot more qualified to talk about gameplay and that sort of thing, don't think for a moment that I won't talk about writing here too.

DD:DA's Arissa

I like the Dragon Age series on the whole but don't like the trend it's on as we get further into EA's, errr, EA-ification of Bioware. Be advised that there will be many spoilers here for both games so proceed at your own risk.

Since I've written far too much about the subject over the last half year it took me to complete this thing, I've split this non-review into more-easily-digsted-chunks in an attempt to preserve our respective sanities and boost my post count. You can thank me later.

Movement
Anyone who plays action-y games will tell you that movement is a big deal. Can I tell where my character is? Can I avoid falling to my death skirting around the edge of a cliff to get a shiny? Can I complete jumping puzzles without Hulk-Smashing(TM) my hardware in frustration. MMOs tend to do a very good job with this as do FPSes. In RPGs it's more up in the air, errr...pun intended. Wouldn't you know it; we have a case in point right here!

Movement in DA:I felt floaty and disconnected to me. Most recent Bioware games have this flaw, Mass Effect included. I wasn't ever entirely sure where my character stood which made things like the aforementioned cliff work and jumping puzzles extremely frustrating. I had many a-plummet down what I thought was a scale-able piece of postcard-worthy terrain to an early demise. I would jump more in hope than in expectation. It always felt wrong to me in my hundred or so hours in game such that just about every precise movement attempt ended in profanity.  It plain did not work.

Why, yes, I would like a side of IK.

In contrast, DD:DA never left me wanting for control. Rather than being locked to jumping for vertical movement, characters in Dragon's Dogma can climb various objects and terrain features much like they climb monsters (but we're not ready to talk about that yet). Think of it as a fantasy parkour simulator if you like. As an added bonus, you get a bark and an animation if you get too close to an edge rather than falling to your doom. Nice. Character's positions are very tight and minus some issues picking up very small objects on the ground, I never had any difficulty judging where I could climb or moving around. My hatred of jumping puzzles is well documented at this point but in DD:DA I found myself climbing all over the goddamn scenery (and monsters) on a regular basis. Movement is precise and forgiving but way more important than that, it's predictable which makes movement based exploration very rewarding.

Unfortunately, neither game gave good mounts so that's a wash. DA:I's mounts are terrible making the already poor movement feel even more ponderous. You're saddled (sorry) with lengthy mount and dismount animations to go slightly faster confounding any attempts at picking flowers or rocks. DD:DA doesn't have mounts at all though Angry Joe's issues with fast travel are somewhat remedied by an eternal ferrystone granted in the PC port. Unfortunately, I didn't understand how useful they were until I'd seen most of the game once. The result was that on my first playthrough I spent a ridiculously long time watching my Arisen jog through the same scenery over, and over, and over again.

Presence
How much does your character feel like a part of the world? This is a big piece of immersion so getting it right is kind of a big deal. DA:I did a middling job of this. On top of having a very tenuous grip on the forces of gravity and friction, NPCs will mostly ignore you unless you get to a scripted cutscene area or something like that. Monsters are terrifically myopic with eyesight that doesn't reach as far as you could throw a large rock. The exceptions are pretty few and far between limited to scripted things like dragons and a couple really sneaky-seeming Varghests who seemed to be hunting me but were actually just moving relatively quickly about long patrol paths. Maybe Bioware's legendary dialog can save us.

While it's true that important characters like your companions and advisors (and whatnot) will engage in some well-VOed banter, it's typically at very obvious and well-scripted times with very few surprises. Said banter will change over time and inclination, some of which is very, very good. Furthermore, the composition and density of NPCs changes accordingly as time goes on and Skyhold goes from a ragtag group of refugees to a world power. Unfortunately, other than having more bodies about, it doesn't feel any more populated because you can't really interact with any of them--they're mostly a part of the scenery. Despite the fact that you've got somewhat of a divine aura and the supreme leader of this little operation, only the scripted ones pay you any heed. Not great.

DD:DA somewhat surprisingly does much better in this regard, probably because it seems to be less ambitious. Townsfolk will greet you as you're jogging by and each pawn you interact with will issue a pleasantry. It is the same pleasantry every time, but it is a pleasantry. If you run too close by non-pawns, they'll jump out of the way and issue a bark. Nice touch. As in DA:I, dialog will change as the plot points progress which makes those worlds feel more alive than they would otherwise seem. Caxton's lines did get old after a while, though. It was also a little weird during the endgame seeing shopkeepers feet away from a yawning abyss in the middle of the town rather cheerily going about their business.

DD:DA throws us an interesting curve ball. Attacking NPCs in the capital or otherwise causing trouble will promptly get you arrested and thrown into the dungeon sans most of your stuff. It even goes so far as swapping out your armor for something more appropriate given the venue. An interesting twist on the dungeon mechanic is that you're supposed to stay put for an in-game day (30 minutes). If waiting isn't your thing any more than it is mine, you can bribe a guard if he's nearby. Alternatively, if you have a skeleton key in your inventory you can use that one item to make an escape.

Doesn't look so tough.

The dungeon mechanic would be interesting in its own right but how it's used in the game is even more fascinating. There's a pretty straightforward quest involving a wrongly-accused gardener who's been throw in the slammer that you're supposed to bust out but that's not why we're here. At one point the duchess has you flogged and thrown into the dungeon to cover up for some, err, extra-curricular activities. Damage done, she'll deliver you a skeleton key to get out opening up a new quest and area. In a similar way, a "villain" once defeated (and rezzed) will end up in the dungeon which isn't really a place that most people frequent intentionally. In one of the few places in the game overflowing with exposition, he'll tell you why he did bad stuff and why he felt like he should turn himself in. He'll even give you his magick shield. I can't tell you which came first, the dungeon as a quest location or being thrown in there for being a nuisance, but both together are perfectly logical and helped me feel more rooted in the world.

Burnination in potentia

Bads also seem to be much more alive than in DA:I. Goblins will taunt you from afar if they see or hear you. There are traps set that will alert them to your presence sometimes resulting in ambushes. Big bads will spot you from afar and charge into you with the quest "Ambush!" popping up. Nothing prepares you for the first time you see a Chimera charging your position from halfway across the freakin' forest. In the much more boring daytime, you can generally spot them from a ways off, potentially preventing disaster. In the far more entertaining night time, you generally won't see the dragon until it's RightOnTopOfMeOhGodTheBurnination!

Gathering and Crafting
Folks have noted that both games suffer from MMO-itis when it comes to their crafting and gathering systems. For those unaware, MMO-itis is where single player parts of games tack on grindy things to keep people playing for whatever reason. In an MMO where there's a sub involved, this makes sense or at the very least we're accustomed to it. In single player games I'm not as sold. Both games have surprisingly expansive gathering and crafting systems so let's take a look.

DA:I's gathering system was clunky. If you weren't sharp eyed enough to see a few off-colored pixels in the corner in the distance you leaned, like I did, on the search key. The search key sent out a radar-like wave from your character and send back a ping if there was something interesting nearby. This was overloaded for hidden quest objects for which you'd get a different ping until you centered on it at which point it would start drawing that object.

I had lots of problems with this system. Crap was freakin' everywhere and my OCD has a really hard time not picking every flower, grabbing every stone, chopping down every tree, and killing All The Things(TM) to gather the bits they dropped. This means that I never wanted to use my mount because mounting/dismounting was such a hassle and goddamn it, I need that flower. This was doubly bad because at every camp in the field there's a requisitions officer offering you a quest that requires those same mob bits and rocks in bulk. Turn enough mob bits and rocks in to complete the quest and you get a couple points of power and the opportunity to do it again. I had no idea what power was for but it sounded real good so early in the game I'd scour the countryside for even more bad-bits and rocks for not a lot of utility.  Great.

The crafting in DA:I was similarly questionable. Whatever spare rocks and animal bits you kept around could be used to build things but only if you had the right schematic. These seem to have mostly been hidden in places I didn't look and the ones I did find were usually already obsolete. Some schematics made whole new weapons and armor but most of them built an upgrade like a hilt or haft or something to make an existing piece better. I ended up with a gajillion upgrades that I couldn't really tell apart and the UI for managing inventory was so clunky I didn't really want to mess with it. Furthermore, the handful of things I did craft were rapidly overshadowed by random crap I picked up in the next dungeon. Tedium + clunky interface == less fun than it sounds.

But lo, it gets worse! All those flowers can be used in alchemy which lets you improve or make new potions. Some potions you get an infinite supply of but others you need to manually craft. I got super excited when I upgraded my basic health potion right up until I realized that I didn't have enough of the T2 material to mass produce them. This led to much swearing and many deaths for the next two zones until I could find enough of the right flower for it to be a non-issue. A heads-up would have been nice.

So how did DD:DA do? We've got basically the same system here:  you travel around the country side picking up rocks and flowers and animal bits and use them for fun and profit--you know the drill. Most of the flowers can be used as is for a boost of health or stamina or whatever. For a nice bonus, many of these can be combined with other random bits to get a bigger boost to health or stamina or whatever. As a final twist, many of these curatives will improve if left in your inventory to age but only for a short while until they rot. Some bads will even rob you of your perishable curatives by making them rot with special attacks so that you can't boost your health or stamina or whatever. Neat.

On the gear side we lose the ability to make new gear (aw) but retain the ability to improve gear (yay!). In some cases, the total improvement is massive but requiring some rare bits from the toughest bads or flowers from the deepest dungeons conveniently located near the toughest bads, naturally. You can only upgrade equipment at specific vendors so it's typically the case that the old sword I've had and upgraded for the last 20 levels is still better than the shiny new one that hasn't been upgraded. If I survive long enough to get back to an appropriate vendor and have the right bits to upgrade, then it will be better than the thing I got right now.

No one said that dragonforging
would be easy!

This is already pretty good but it gets better. If you've defeated a dragonkin of some kind there's a nonzero chance that one or more of your items will be dragonforged. This change increases with the difficulty of the dragonkin in question (typically) and with the level of upgrade of the weapon. Once dragonforged the weapon gets even more powerful and unlocks a new set of very expensive upgrades. In this way, you don't have to give up your Sword +2 of Overkill--it'll dragonforge to a Sword +3 of Overkill if you're lucky!

I like this approach to gear because it encourages you to make investments carefully and increases the utility of those investments. Weapon-wise if you want to crank out the maximum amount of killage you are stuck with a very particular set of weapons which are non-trivial to get but there are still reasons to keep around certain older varieties too in order to put specific debuffs on the uglies you're killing. Armor-wise, the sky is the limit! With enough player skill, most obstacles are not gear-driven which leads to the game's somewhat unfortunate nickname: Fashion's Dogma.

Combat and Mechanics
Combat is a big deal since it's a lot of what you're doing. This is even more true if you believe that in games, much like porn, the story is only there to tie the action-y bits together.

In DA:I I picked a two handed warrior. This may have been what I played in DA2 but honestly, I can't remember. It seemed like a reasonable choice, really. Run up to bads and clonk them upside the head with a giant piece of weaponized metal and then take their lunch money. In retrospect this was a very poor choice and not just because the Inquisitor loses an arm. Two warrior parties in DA:I do not work. You split the most expensive armor across two characters and can't build enough guard without a shield to keep out of trouble anywhere it would make a difference. Thus, I couldn't take the hits to drop a sword and board companion and I couldn't keep up with a rogue or offensively specced mage. By the time I realized my mistake I was 40 hours in and too far along to be able to re-spec expediently. This is a classic mistake in RPGs and one that Bioware of all people should understand--don't force players to make the most important choice in the game before they have enough information to do so.

Combat just about always felt bad to me in DA:I. Since movement was so clunky and imprecise, I had no end of trouble standing in the right place. This was especially aggravating when winding up a long animation action and then having my companions knock the bad out of range. As a result, I never really felt like I had all that much control over the outcome, speccing issues notwithstanding. There was a very short span when I had a high powered weapon and was fighting lower level bads where I'd charge up and either Mighty Blow or Pommel Strike them into eating sand. The rest of the game was not as fun. Nearing the end of my time in the game I would actively avoid combat because it felt so tedious.

I was especially disappointed with DA:I's encounter design. Maybe it's because I'd done another tour with Wildstar but all the combat felt really dull. None of the mobs were really all that interesting and large mobs didn't move very well and weren't very engaging. Dragons were pretty much carbon copies of each other requiring fairly micromanaged control over your party to defeat cleanly. I stopped fighting them when I realized they were all more or less the same.

In stark contrast, combat in DD:DA feels vibrant and alive. Striders fly all over the battle field carving up bads like turkeys while Warriors wind up mega blows to knock down bus-sized uglies. Spellcasters are also very rewarding making the ground explode or summoning pillars of ice to climb on to get a higher vantage point.  Want more?  A fighter pawn with a shield or a greatsword can launch your character into the air to grapple with a flying bad or maybe a really tall one. Pawns can also hold a baddie down so that you can get a coup de grace. And don't think that casters are left out: two sorcerers can spell sync to halve the time it takes to rain fire down from the heavens.

That's just the beginning. Dagger users get a dodge roll with a set of i-frames to keep out of trouble while shield users can block to keep out of danger. Better yet, if you have good timing and can watch the actions of your opponent, you can execute a perfect block which will stagger your enemy and potentially do a mess of damage to them. How good does your timing need to be? One of the augments you can get will increase the window by five frames. That's right kids, five frames which is ~83ms as the game generally runs at 60fps and those five frames feel really significant when you're trying to perfect your timing. Assassins and fighters have a similar counter with similar windows--high risk and high reward. Nice.

As for the typical trope of choosing your RPG character's class when you have the least amount of information, DD:DA is way ahead of the curve. When the game starts you pick one of three base vocations by choosing a weapon (staff, sword/shield, bow/daggers). Advanced vocations show up at level 10 and you can switch at any point after that at any place you can rest so you're never really locked into a bad decision. The game even goes out of its way to make experimentation with other vocations a big chunk of the fun. Your hired pawns don't gain levels so you'll be replacing them regularly which means you'll see a wide swath of different gear and builds some of which will undoubtedly teach an observant player how different bits of it work.

At least there's only one.

And now we're on to the good part. If you've ever noted that you spend most of your time in most RPGs hacking at a big ugly's insole and wondered what would happen if you could, I dunno, climb up behind them and hack at their eyes or squidgy bits instead, then boy do I have a deal for you. Every bad has its critical spots and the larger the bad, the more critical spots it generally has. Applying damage to critical spots, naturally, does a pile of damage which is easy enough as long as those critical spots aren't somewhere inconvenient like beady eyes or the bottom of a foot or something. So if you have short but ever-so-pointy daggers, you really want to be climbing that ugly to put pointy-bit to squidgy-bit. The bads, also naturally, would prefer your pointy-bits not be applied to their squidgy bits and will bat, throw, grab, drop, burn, and otherwise try to throw you off. I can talk about this all day but you really need to see it in action to get the full effect. Go ahead, I'll wait. DD:DA's implementation isn't without its flaws but it is a cool idea that I wish we saw more often. Why do most games keep us hacking at big bads' insoles, anyway?

The beast part, though, is that in DD:DA, skilled play trumps stats just about every time. Stats do count--they make the margins a lot wider, but they aren't the be-all end-all that we see in most RPGs. Extremely skilled players can perform feats of daring-do with under-powered and under-geared characters making for some very entertaining highlight reels. I don't know that I've ever played an RPG with combat quite as enjoyable as DD:DA. For that matter, most MMOs don't achieve this level of awesome. For all of the game's other shortcomings, the combat is engaging and is why I spent so long with it.

Places To Go And Things To Do
In RPGs you pick up a lot of stuff. I think that's a rule of RPGs. One of the many annoyances I had with DA:I was that the interface is hella-clunky. Why can't I compare gear when selling the piles of cutlery and fashion I've accumulated? Why is comparing items so inconvenient in the first place? Why can't I vacuum loot in an area instead of interacting and watching yet another animation of my Inquistor bending down with my companions looking on awkwardly? Other games do these kinds of things, why not this one?

DD:DA splits up armor by location which makes generally usable lists but not weapons. Those get dumped into a single pile sometimes screening for things usable by your vocation. Similarly, your giant stash of consumables, rocks, and animal bits is neither sorted nor searchable. Good luck finding your eye of newt in there. Not much better, really, and if you play the game as much as I did, you end up with a huge pile of loot. Not the best, but moving on...

I feel like I spent a tidy chunk of my time in DA:I, say 15% which would be just over 15 hours of my life I'll never get back, waiting for things to happen. Not plot things or dialog, but transitions between things. It took freakin' forever to get into and out of the war table. We're in and out of the goddamn war table all the goddamn time. Are they hiding some terribad loading code? I played on SSD--no excuses. Just running around to talk to people at Skyhold took a really long time because the place was huge and apparently designed by a masochist. Cullen apparently had some pretty awesome dialog that I never heard because I couldn't freakin' find him! Mounting and dismounting which should have been a value add sucked because it took way too long but I've already ranted about that.

Flashback time:  DA:O had a pretty good balance of places you could go and a few things to explore. DA2 did a lousier job of this and went to a very linear map progression in a way that made the world feel very small and very disjoint. As if trying to correct for its predecessor, DA:I has some absolutely giant maps where it isn't immediately clear how to get where you need to or even what things are important. It's as if someone had just played Skyrim and really wanted to get some of that open world sandboxy goodness in a game that is neither open world nor sandboxy. This turned DA:I into a lot of tedium trying to figure out where crap was. Bleh.

In this respect, DD:DA fares only slightly better. It's both open world and sandboxy so it benefits from very large areas. Unfortunately since it's super easy to not understand how port crystals and ferrystones work it seems like you spend an awful lot of time watching your character run from place to place. Not great. This is not helped by the fact that mobs will spawn at the same point between just about every time you pass through the same locale. At least they switch up to harder bads as the story progresses. I'm probably in the minority here but I was mostly OK with fighting the same bads at the same points because the combat loop never really got old.

Adding to the difficulties in DA:I, quests tended to be very tedious and there were far too many of them. Every dungeon had at least one scavenger hunt. These ranged from trivial to ridiculous often revolving around collecting dungeon themed tchotchkes. Collect 15 soul shards. Collect 7 idols. Find 12 ancient glyphs of boringness. Sometimes these things were required to move on. It's like a Doom key quest puzzle but often less sensical. Why do I need 9 mummified bat wings to convince the Elvish-magically-sealed door to open? Are they peckish after their thousand year sleep? The game was not better for the majority of these and the dungeon does not need to be made "more interesting"--it's a dungeon; it's already interesting.

DD:DA does slightly better. While there are piles of quests, mostly of the kill variety, they aren't necessary though sometimes the rewards are useful. It's also mostly true that you don't generally need to go out of your way to complete them--they happen very organically while you're off gallivanting across the countryside or traipsing through the main quest line.

Moving on to encounter design we see another large discrepancy. DA:I's encounters were largely uninspired. Maybe it's because I'd played so much Wildstar; maybe it's because they were freaking boring. Dragon encounters in particular have my disdain as being mostly carbon copies of each other and not especially interesting or well thought-out. This is doubly true for the random packs of mobs scattered across the world. With a few exceptions, they're spaced out very regularly across the countryside without much consideration of what they might be doing there. MMOs do this for a variety of reasons none of which apply to a single player game.

This is how dragons should look.

DD:DA's encounters on the other hand are a lot more dynamic. Fight a flying dragon by shooting out its eye to drop it on the ground? Check. Jump off the scenery to grab onto its tail as it goes aloft. Yep. Grab onto its head and go to town on its sensory bits before it grabs you and slams you to the ground? Yes, please. It gets better! Fight too near a ledge and tumble to your doom? Yup. Convince an ugly to charge you near that same ledge and dodge out of the way so it can plummet to its doom? You betcha. Now shake it all up for various other vocations each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and strategies? It's as if they know my kryptonite.

Flip the Record Over and We'll Continue on the Other Side

I sometimes wish that blogger had a word count but right after that thought I become very frightened--I don't think mankind is ready for that kind of power! As such we're going to end this one right here on this particularly happy note. Sanities are being preserved right now, people. 

My Post Count!!!1!one

In a blatant attempt to rescue my post count in a rapidly ending year, here's some art.

I'm starting to learn how Manga Clip Studio works but it's not going fast.

This is De'elah.  She's been here before though probably a really long time ago and maybe not on this site.  She'll probably be back again at some point.

I won't talk about how long this piece took mostly because it's embarrassing especially given that I started with an OK sketch (from 2004, no less).  Nor will I talk about how badly I screwed up the shading.

I will say that I needed to be done and it was above my admittedly low minimum suck bar.   So there's that.

Why are your printer drivers 143MB?

Seriously, HP, WTF is in there? Bloat much?

Printer. Drivers.

Freakin' Blogger

I think I broke something. Actually, I know I broke something.

All I really wanted to do was change the widths of things. Blogger insisted that I choose a new template so I did. Comforted by the "Edit HTML" button, I changed font colors and widget layouts and whatnot and, well, you see the results. It's bad.

You see, the happily reassuring "Edit HTML" button is a lie. What lives in the templates for this site is no simple HTML despite what the template name might claim. No. What lives there is true and unabashed evil-tude.

I may try to hack up the HTML evil that lies at the heart of this site. More likely I'll become a giant squid of anger and reload the old template with its barely legible text and super narrow columns.

Seriously, people, when changing simple things in a goddamn blog template are mind-jarringly complicated, it indicates that something has gone very, very wrong.

Less Sketchy

Meh.  Still needs work.  Someday I'll learn how to use my tools.

Also:  how is it April already?!

2015 In Review

You might not be surprised to hear that I start my increasingly traditional "Year in Review" posts right after I post the previous one. While this sadly doesn't stop them from sucking, it does improve their accuracy!  This one squeaks in just before the deadline for...reasons that will be obvious by the end.

New Digs
I've moved!  Again!  This time, it's back to New England (boo!) but in a new state entirely (New Hampshire).  The motto here is "Live Free or Die" but I always think of it as "Live, Freeze, then Die".  Because it's cold.  And I arrived in the middle of a historically bad snow storm.

New Digs
I've moved!  Again!  And no, that's not a copy and paste error!  My current employer decided that one cross-country move in a year wasn't enough so they decided to relocate me to the greater Seattle area. There's good and there's bad with that but if I'm honest, I was good with one move.  As a result of spending roughly half the year moving, there wasn't nearly enough gaming this last year as I would have liked.

Well, Crap
No one actually likes the formalities.  On to gaming!

Broken Age (Act 1, 2014):  ***
I backed this on kickstarter and only got to finishing it this year. Broken Age is a lot of what I like to see out of games but glaring in its omissions.  Style and charm it has in spades.  Substance and depth it lacks.  I suppose I can let the latter go since that's not the kind of game it is but I was reminded of this rant about adventure games more than a handful of times.

While I didn't have any legitimate "throw the controller" moments, I did get stuck at one point last year and didn't get back to the game until March while trying to free up space on my games drive by completing games I hadn't yet finished.  First world problems, yo.  There is some legitimately good writing in this game, however, and (also, unsurprisingly considering the roll call) some legitimately good voice acting.  I'll also award a star for the soundtrack which was both exceptional and seemingly an exception in this day and age.

I haven't yet played Act 2 and I'm not even sure if I own it but it's on my list of things to do soonishly.  Maybe in 2016?  Check back in a year and find out!

TotalPlanetary Annihiltion (2014):  **
If you've read stuff here you know I'm an unabashed fan of Total Annihilation.  Planetary Annihilation was supposed to be the same thing turned up to 11 which is why I gave them quite a lot of kickstarter money.  While they got a lot of the bits right it unfortunately doesn't come together well at all.  I wanted to like this one--I really did--but no.

There is way too much micro which is completely against what it's supposed to be. Planets are too small, moving units between orbital positions is way too hard especially when your opponent is entrenched, and if you slip up in your defensive strategy even a tiny bit or heaven forbid don't have the tech available, it's more than likely you'll get hit by a showstopper like a nuke or an orbital laser or god knows what that you cannot recover from.   Even on the easiest setting ("normal", no less) it is almost impossible to beat any faction leader showdowns in Galactic War mode.  The other encounters are comparatively a breeze.

I gave up after a sickening number of hours trying to figure it all out. This game needs two of three things and I don't especially care which:  1) put in an easy mode so I can learn, 2) put in a tutorial so it's not a learning cliff anymore, 3) put in a "no extra planets mode" with extra large planets so I can avoid the worst part of your game. We are more than well taken care of when we want a RTSes that emphasizes APM (real time tactical more than real time strategy, really, but no one seems to know the difference anymore).  A spiritual successor to Total Annihilation should not be one of them.

Spell Force: Breath of Winter (2004): ***
I like the SpellForce series which is why I was happy to see that the expansions were finally all available in the US and on Steam.  This is a game that I've now bought twice, the first time in no small part because there was a pretty girl on the box.  I'm not without my vices, I suppose.  I thought I'd written about my fun in Spell Force up in here somewhere but I can't seem to find any evidence mostly because I can't be bothered to look.

It might have been because I'd just played Planetary Annihilation but the game seemed very primitive. I suppose that's to be expected given that the original was released more than a decade ago. Whether it was the English SKU for the US market that didn't get enough love or it being forced out before it was ready, there were parts of the game that were poorly executed.  Difficulty was all over the map so even though I ended up doing many Ridiculous Feats of Farming(TM) through a lot of my playthrough, parts of it were stupidly hard.  I don't think it was quite as good as the original SpellForce but that's not uncommon for expansions.

I'd intended to play the last piece which is why I got the trilogy on Steam to begin with, but it didn't work out that way.  Next This year, maybe.

Caribbean! (2015): ***
I really struggled with the rating on this one.  On the one hand I got all the tall-shippy goodness that I've so missed from Ancient Art of War At Sea.  On the other hand, the are parts of the game that are very, very unpolished mostly because it wasn't done (playable beta, basically).  If nothing else, it's a Mount & Blade engine game so I can, and did, mod the shit out of it.   For a good couple months this last summer, this game sucked up all my attention.

Around the time that I was de-dustifying this post near the middle of December, I was somewhat surprised to learn that the full game was released as Blood & Gold: Caribbean! which is in fact entirely too many punctational characters for any game name.  I forgive this fact because I was granted a Steam key since I'd bought the early access version.  This Next year we'll see if you really can have too much tall-shippy goodness in one year.  I have high expectations.  I may be disappointed.

Wildstar (2014):  *****
Wildstar went free to play this last year, right around the beginning of October.  "I'll just take a peek and see what they did."  It always starts that way, doesn't it?  It didn't take long to get sucked back in and it's super easy to lose yourself in this kind of game when you're working a thousandy-billion hours a week.  I probably won't do a multi-page write-up for it so this'll have to do.  Some things are better (smoothing of difficulty curves, reduction of lame grinds, easier attunement, better pricing).  Some things are worse (crafting, in your face cash store, mudflation in spades).  Some things are still ugly (ilvl, community toxic as ever, piles of bugs some of which have existed since launch).

Despite the fact that they did their damndest to kill it, despite the fact that I have no one to really play with, despite the fact that it's a game that probably doesn't have a future, and despite the fact that I have very few remaining in-game goals, I find myself playing just about every day and I still love it. The combat loop is exceptional and I'm on record as having said that killing mobs never stopped being fun which is still true.  When the eulogies start rolling when NCSoft finally pulls the plug, remember that you heard it here first:  Wildstar was a gem of a game that was fantastic in spite of itself.  (Also:  I totally nailed on the free to play thing.)

I think it's run it course and I've been free for a few days now due to the next and last item in my list. That's what addicts say, right?  "I can quit whenever I want!"

Dragon Age:  Inquisition (2014): **

Evelyn Trevelyan,  warrior noble.
Her eyes are very blue.  Are they
too blue?  Is that a thing?

Going back in Teh Historys(TM) I note that I rather liked previous Dragon Age titles (as seen here in 2011 and 2009) but memory doesn't hold as generously.  I remember Origins as "The Game in Which I Was Deprived a Good Ending(TM)" and DA2 as "The Game Which Was Terribly Disjointed(TM)". DA:Awakening I barely remember at all if I'm honest beyond Shale who was awesome.  DA:I was super well-received by the press which is usually a bellwether for a game that's overrated and experience drives this point home yet again.

While the world is a lot more cohesive than in DA2 I feel that it is a heck of a lot less well polished as a game as opposed to as a screenshot engine for which it is more than adequate.  The interface is terrifically clunky which led me to miss out on some important stuff early on and there's a lot of tedium just doing normal things.  The maps are too large and I spent what seemed like an eternity moving back and forth over the same points over and over (and over) again even for what should be easy and rewarding things like talking to my crew.  When you can turn what should be the best part of the game into tedium, you know there's problems.  Then we get to the length--it's a huge game easily spanning 80 hours (I was nearer 100 though I understand you can do it in under 20) and at many points I just wanted it to end so I could get on to other stuff. This is probably how I will remember DA:I--"The Dragon Age Game Which Was Too Tedious."

I was going to say some stuff about good writing and Bioware and blah blah blah but no, not this time.  I found the writing to be, on the whole, very average.  Any other game from just about any other studio, I'd probably list this as a high point.  For a game with what I have to believe was a nine figure budget (the intertoobs are failing me on this one) from a studio that used to be known for fantabulous writing, no.  People far smarter than I have said some stuff worth reading.  I may follow suit and do a bigger write up.  I figure I might as well since I spent all that time with it.

So There You Have It
That was my 2015 in a nutshell.  Now, pardon me for a moment while I prep next year's post.