True Story

Today I sat in a chair.  It broke.  The universe can be un-subtle sometimes.

Also, I finally realized a lifelong dream.  I finished painting a miniature.

Those two things are unrelated except that I can talk about both of them here.  So there you go.

Kel's Corollaries

You probably already know that I (quite obviously) have played a lot of MMOs but you probably didn't know that I'm almost as infamous for sometimes saying things. What things?  Well, here's a sampling.

You're probably already familiar with this one:
"You can't please everyone all the time."

To this I add the following corollaries which I've found to be largely true:
"You can't please any single person all the time."
"You can't please all people at any one time."

Corollaries, postulates, and Axioms:
"If you're only going to choose one trick, DPS is a pretty good one."
"Dead mobs do zero DPS."
"Living through an encounter is a superpower for a DPSer."

"There are very few encounters that aren't solved by liberal application of overwhelming firepower."

Quotables:
"I can't {heal | DPS |tank} any faster! I'm mashing the button as fast as I can!"
"...it's not as much fun as it sounds." This is usually preceded with a description of a very messy death or wipe.
"There are no unskilled positions." (Wildstar)
"The actors may have changed but the roles remain the same."  True in business, too!

2017 in Review

So remember when I was ultra salty about working for a stupid company that had lame media policies?  Well I don't work there anymore so now a year and change late, here's 2017 in Review.  I've cleverly published this in the past! so it should show up in the right place.


Dungeon Siege III (2011): ***
I don't think I was blogging about my gaming when I played DS1 but DS2 shows up in the first of the award-winning installments of this post, 2009 in Review. I am an unabashed Dungeon Siege fan despite its (many) flaws. DS3 has some nice throwbacks to earlier games but you can only get so much mileage out of name dropping and cameos.

The game is short by old-skool standards but I guess not by today's. I finished in around 16 hours all told in a couple weeks. Given that the game was built by Obsidian, I rather expected the writing to be better. You're beaten about the head and neck with the name of the Big Bad(TM) throughout just about every dialog and I didn't really find any of the supporting cast all that interesting. The art was pretty, the girls in particular, but gameplay was a shortcoming.

I played a long range DPSer which seemed like a good idea right up until the I realized the camera would just plain not show me as much of the field as I wanted more or less negating any bonus from having long range at all. Then there were the times when the auto-targeting system would target a mob I didn't care about as a melee bad carved my poor character up. The most maddening parts were at the end where insta-kills and un-dodge-able attack sequences became very common. Maybe it's easier for tankier types but honestly, the game should be playable for all the main character choices. To add to my frustrations, I frequently got caught on terrain unexpectedly and my character had long ability pauses which made it difficult to do anything with fine timing requirements.

Master of Orion:  Conquer the Stars (2016):  ****
MOO2 is one of my favorite games of all time and it gets installed on just about every machine I frequent. I've kicked around designs of a 4x game (here, somewhere) that mostly crib from that game of the late 90s.  Well, it seems that someone's been thinking the same thing. MOO:CtS is just about the game I've been trying to build for the last decade. It is about as much of a spiritual successor to MOO2 as I think you can get right down to the names of the ship components, buildings, and much of what they do. It's not entirely the same, but it's close enough that I mostly knew what things did before I read their descriptions. I've got some gripes which shouldn't surprise anyone.

I wasn't ever able to figure out tactical combat which sucks because that's probably my favorite part of MOO2. Ships are split into AFAICT tanks and dps but I can't figure out how to make that go. There are also weirdnesses with the way the AI interprets what they should be doing given the ship design which confounds my ability to design them properly. I might get back to it to try to figure it out later except that the game is really, really plodding. My gaming rig is about three years old now, about the middle of the pack of consumer i7s and even on small maps, the game can be extremely slow. I liked the zoom-in/zoom-out between events on the first couple games but add a few seconds pause to each of those and I got real sick of it by the end. This basically meant that I could only play small maps (a crime in a 4x) and playing a long game, say, to get at an end-game win condition, meant a lot of waiting. I would be a lot more forgiving if I didn't feel like I was waiting on the UI so much of the time.

In all, I liked MOO:CtS and I might try it again when I upgrade my big rig. I think my biggest disappointment was that I really wanted to like it more than I did.

Skyrim (2011): ****, ***** with mods
I have generally avoided Bethsoft games because I've known a lot of their ex-pats who say not flattering things about how that company is run. As a result, I've missed out on a bunch of stuff. I do not condone some of the shadier things they or their parent company have done but I can no longer deny that they've made a good game. I've now played through twiceish and I am happy to report that I now understand the memes of 2012 a lot better.

People have described Skyrim to me as "a Bethesda game" which didn't make much sense having never played one. For those who wonder, this apparently means "open world, bite sized chunks of gameplay, overworked voice actors, and frequent bugs/crashes." That's how I'm interpreting it, anyway. I don't think that really does it justice, though. There's a cleverness and subtlety of design that we don't see too terribly often plopped into a world that's as vibrant and alive as any I can name off the top of my head.  And there are bugs...lots of bugs and this after five years of the modding world fixing them.

We'll start with the stuff I didn't like which is a much shorter list than what I did like, just so's I can get it out of the way and start gushing about the best game I played thislastsome year. I found the combat pretty stiff and unrewarding, maybe one step up from DS3 but many, many steps down from Dragon's Dogma which is the standard to which I now hold all action-y combat. The early game feels way too deadly, especially on higher difficulties, and the end game feels way too easy which is doubly bad on higher difficulties. This is largely due to crafting but it's against my alignment to not play to win. I also felt that in the un-modded game there was a lot of tedium mostly due to carry weight. I need to keep all my bug parts, flowers, and rocks so I can make things but then I have to leave a lot of loot behind. Alternatively, I can be diligent about dropping all my bug parts, flowers, and rocks into a container somewhere but then I either have to ferry crap back and forth to the crafting tables or I don't have it with me when I get to a crafting table. I don't feel like this made the game better.

On a better note, I feel that much of Skyrim is pretty well designed. The dungeons and interior spaces are pseudo-branchy enough that they don't seem super linear (even though they mostly are) which has the result that I don't get super lost too often. Most of the longer ones even end in a one-way door or something at the end of the dungeon that dumps out pretty near the entrance so you don't spend a bunch of time re-tracing your steps. Nice. I also like that they're more inclined to show you something going on rather than beat you about the face and neck with it. I view a lot of the encounters as vignettes with a story for me to figure out during/after rather than the more exposition-heavy and front-loaded approaches of DS3 and Amalur. I rarely found myself skipping dialog which meant that the VO didn't annoy me which seems like a good thing for VO to not do. I also liked that there was a fairly detailed set of beliefs and history which can really only come from having five games in the same series, though I don't think Final Fantasy got the note.

I even liked some of the puzzles and mini-games which are things I've traditionally not liked. The lockpicking game deserves particular kudos for not being too brain-bendingly difficult and generally always being a gateway to a reward which takes a lot of the sting out of when it did feel too difficult.

The best part, for me anyway, was the mods. I was going to detail two but at the time of the final editing I'd only written about one and it's been a couple years since then.  So I'll leave you with one.  Inigo is the only follower you'll ever need (no, really).  At the time of posting (spring of 2019) the mod author is still working on him with a V3 release on the way.  I wish him godpseed and such a release might make me re-install and replay Skyrim again.  Yes, Inigo is that good and someday I may talk about how he's influenced some of my other gaming.

Fallout 3 (2008): ***
So as is my wont, once I've played a good game from a studio I'm otherwise not familiar with, I want to go into their back catalog and see what I've missed. As an especially fun note, I'd already purchased Fallout 3. FWIW, I hadn't played Fallout 1 or 2 so other than the superlatives others have heaped their way, I didn't really know what to expect. The short: great world, clearly in the same vein as Skyrim, but far, far more primitive.

I don't know too much about the dev cycle of this game, but it seems like all they really did was stick a very basic shooting mechanic on the game they already had. That's not a criticism as much as an observation but I think it might be the root of what I didn't like about it. The shooting part was underwhelming which, when added with the typical RPG-ness of being utter crap at the game's start, meant that the beginning was way harder than it needed to be.

And if you don't like spoilers, you can skip to the next section.  The ending was shit. The designers or writers or whomever was responsible for it really made a mess.  They telegraph a heavy dose of radiation near the ending so I thought "great, I'll take my super mutant companion who's immune to radiation to pull whatever levers might be needed."  Except that he won't.  No, he gives you a line something like "I wouldn't want to rob you of your glory."  So your character dies.  That's kind of bullshit.

Fallout: NewVegas (2010): ****
The real win for Fallout 3 was the followup made by Obsidian.  Your character miraculously comes back to life from Fallout 3 if you so choose. I guess even they though Fallout 3's ending was crap.  Writing this a year and change after the fact I only have my vague memories of it.  I remember the storytelling as pretty good but it being really, really long.  I played it with all the expansions and modded to hell and much like Fallout 3, it still crashed like crazy.  I recall it being longer than I wanted and Steam says 84 hours played.  It also says the last chievo was awarded in January of 2018 so technically this is in the wrong year.  I'm leavin' it here.  You can't stop me!

2017 not in review

If you were looking for the next installment of my award winning series, well, you're going to be disappointed. There are two reasons for this, one bad and one worse which I'm about to rant about. Suffice to say that my 2017 wasn't as awesome as I'd have liked.

I started the year intentionally unemployed. This has its ups and downs. Fast forward to a mercifully short interview cycle and I left my state-subsidized health insurance and retook my place amongst the gainfully employed. This also has had its ups and downs, though mostly up, save for working a millionty-billion overtime hours. For those wondering, this also contributes to this last year's miserable post count.

I make it a point to not talk about where I work, partly because of NDAs/confidentiality and because it's not usually pertinent to what I'm writing. I've been making games professionally for a long time and have a lot to say about their construction. I've also been playing games for a much longer time and have a lot to say about their consumption.

Many bemoan the state of the gaming press on a regular basis as if that'll fix it. For my part, I'd much rather give examples of what I'd like to see than just wax ineloquent about how bad it might be. So when you look at one of my big write ups, that's what it is: me organizing my thoughts about a thing I spent a lot of time as an expert witness with experience on both sides. I hope it is abundantly obvious that all things said here are my opinion, nothing more and nothing less. In fact, I often note this just in case it isn't clear. On my personal blog. Like a lot of people do.

My new employer has a very specific policy regarding social media of which these un-hallowed grounds are an example. "Thou shalt not, under any circumstances, speak/write/blether about anything within the scope of our business about which our competitors might soever doeth such that we, the employer, might be liable to some greater government function such as the FTC or whatever department draweth the short stick of concern, so sayeth Ye Olde Employment Agreement™, amen." Or something like that.

If you asked, I'd probably agree that thiny-veiled advertisements and corporately sponsored smear campaigns against competitors are pretty awful (curated streaming being a sketchy area). That said, I don't think that anyone with enough brain cells to rub together would have any difficulty determining that the crap written here isn't that. And if that's not the case, then I'm pretty sure humanity is Double-Dog Doomed™.

This is a stupid policy (that's an opinion), one argued from a position of fear and insecurity. In layman-ese, it means I can't talk about games here, which is dumb (also opinion). Games are probably the only thing I'm qualified to talk about with any authority and I have a lot to say about the stuff I played this year (Skyrim, my first Bethesda game, Fallout 3, and Fallout New Vegas) but about which I've put only these words to page. That's why this post is a rant instead of what I'd rather be writing.

I will probably still write up my thoughts though they'll molder with the other dozen-ish pieces I'm still putting together--editing is a bitch, yo. Some day the policy will change because it's stupid (more opinion) or because I've moved on, in no small part because of this ridiculousness (that one's fact).

So for the poor chumps from legal or HR or whomever it is who draws the short stick to police this crap (and yes, I know you do), tell your superiors that it's dumb to give people more reasons to leave your employ--I have enough of them already.

Oh, and in case it wasn't obvious:  all the writings herein are the opinions of the author only.

2019 edit:  I don't work there anymore, so a year and change out, here ya go.

It Ain't Science, But It's What I Got

Those of you looking for the typical fare here are going to be disappointed. I suffer from gout. Chances are good that you know someone other than me that does too. It is super prevalent in the western world for a variety of reasons we're not going to talk about here. This post's for me, or with an exceedingly dim chance, someone else who also suffers who is probably going through what I have already. There's a TL;DR below for the impatient.

If you follow the previous link to my favorite place on the Intertoobs (Wikipedia) you'll probably see a picture of a demon-looking thing viciously attacking someone's right toe. This almost comes close to describing what it's like, though nothing really does. I get awful migraines, have torn muscles, dislocated shoulders, and generally abused my body in ways that the vast majority of modern white collar workers don't. NOTHING comes close to the pain of gout. When you have a normal injury, you can usually find a position where there isn't much pain. When you have a gout attack, it seems like nothing will ease it. If you're lucky (?) and get it in one foot, you can almost function. Apparently some folks get it in their hands which I would super struggle with. You may hear that "even the weight of bedsheets is painful". I can attest that this is true.

I've now had two attacks. The first was in the winter of 2006 during a holiday break. It started with stiffness in my right big toe in the early afternoon during a drinking binge (I did that a lot at that point) and lit up like the sun by the evening. The next day I went to a doctor and had drugs before I got home. In a few days it was cleared up. I largely stopped thinking about it until the next attack late in January this year. This time I didn't go to a doctor, mostly out of inborn stubbornness, and suffered for the next four weeks. We aren't going to talk about why but we are going to talk about what.

The Intertoobs in 2006 weren't what they are today. I did some research but didn't really pay too much attention otherwise and the supposed "helpful dietary restrictions" were often contradictory. This time around and after about a week and a half of agony, I did more than a cursory reading of whatever material I could find as I became more desperate for relief. Most of this largely didn't help and was still contradictory, often parroting exactly the same words that every other site did.

The Observations

I didn't do any actual science but here were my observations colored by acute and persistent pain:

• Elevating my foot helped quite a lot. I elevated in the evenings so I could sleep at all but getting that foot on the floor to, I dunno, use the toilet came with tremendous pain.
• There was a shit-ton of swelling during the entire time, probably due to increasing levels of damage as the attack wore on. I'm almost convinced that a lot of the pain this time around was a result of the additional damage due to hobbling (badly) on it while in a super swollen state. That toe is still stiff a couple months later which corroborates the thought that there's been long-term joint damage.
• Soda (Diet Coke in my case) made it worse, especially in the evenings. Once I realized this, I stopped drinking soda entirely for three weeks.
• Alcohol of any form also made it worse, usually a lot worse. This one I probably should have known but didn't. Once I figured it out, I got a sober month out of it.
• There was a definite roller-coaster of pain. Getting out of bed and downstairs was usually the worst. Later mornings to early evenings were fine but it ramped up a lot after that. 
• This seems to be due to a correlation between eating and the severity of pain. I didn't eat for a day to test this and it seemed to hold true. I'd been in the habit of eating a heavy meal in the evenings, usually with soda, which always meant that by 8PM or so I was again in terrible pain.
• Carbs seemed to make this worse over non-carbs as well as large meals over small ones.
• I cut meals to two light ones a day mostly consisting of cheese and/or eggs which didn't seem to cause issues. I would have probably eaten more meat if it wasn't such a struggle to get to the store. Quiche, store-bought pie crusts notwithstanding, seemed to be the answer.

The Bad
These remedies didn't work or did with drawbacks:

• Vinegar pills seem like they should have worked for reasons that will be clear below, but didn't. They also taste terrible. I got no particular relief from taking them for a few days.
• This was also shotgunned with taking cherry extract pills which also didn't work and were stupidly expensive. I had high hopes for cherry extract because cherry juice almost works. 
• I did get relief out of tart cherry juice which I really enjoy but it had two serious downsides. First, for me anyway, it's a super good laxative which I've filed away for future reference. Second, the high sugar content meant that the resulting upswing in pain was nigh unbearable, especially when paired with food.
• Dried cherries and other suggested fruits (dried pineapple, fresh apples) didn't help.
• Beet juice may have worked. I took this with other remedies that did work so I can't really be sure.  Like I said, I didn't do real science here. Beet juice is also a laxative and with such a "fun" combination of dietary experimentation, I spent a lot of time counting the planks in my bathroom and finding all the places where the previous owners did a lousy paint job. Beet juice also tastes awful.
• I pulled "baking soda in cold water" off of a couple sites that had additional warnings. This did work, and worked really well, but the additional warnings were warranted. I had serious blood pressure spikes doing this and I used this remedy for about five days. It works almost too well, usually giving relief enough to get a shoe on and to drive for short distances which is why I kept doing it despite the dangers. It's worth noting that it also tastes godawful.
• Icing the affected toe would make it numb enough to not feel pain for a short while but once temperatures were more normal, the pain came back with a vengeance. It might be that the external pressure of icing increased the trauma but I stopped doing this after two days because it hurt too much once the icepack was off.

Relief, Finally

This is what got me through the last half, the stuff that actually worked.

• Straight up drinking apple cider vinegar actually worked, probably too well. Bragg's is the readily available one where I live (Cascadia). You want one that isn't filtered or pasteurized that has an active culture or mother. It's not super expensive and it worked within moments much like baking soda in water. A couple shots in the morning and evening before bed was usually enough for a day. If things got dicey between, another shot or two would fix it. I started mixing it with beet juice which strangely made both more palatable. Then I started cutting it with water. At the very end I was drinking it straight up. I don't recommend this. Never in my life before this have I felt the lack of owning shot glasses.
• Drinking a lot of water also helped. I like to think that kind words and encouragement to my overworked and under-performing kidneys might have also helped. The jury's still out.
• Drinking that same water with lemon seemed to help between vinegar doses. It also tastes pretty good though now I have a strong association between lemon and pain. I'd seen this on a couple sites before finding a biker guy's page who vehemently attested to its efficacy. I've misplaced the page, sadly, but he was right. It's likely that the Vitamin-C has some effect and it's worth noting that humans are one of very few vertebrates that can't synthesize it.

Summary

The TL;DR version:

• Avoid beers, sodas, sugars, and carbs.
• Drink vinegar (yuck). 
• Drink more than a healthy dose of water and lemon.
• Profit.

Here's hoping that I don't need to refer back to this, ever.

"A Lot of GMs Get a Bad Rap as Being Frustrated Novelists"

When I was young, I read a lot of fiction. I read all kinds of stuff from hardcore sci-fi from the 50s to the Dragonlance sagas to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, the Dragonriders of Pern and everything between. This continued into my early undergrad days and then I just didn't read anything but textbooks and technical docs for a long, long time and no, comics don't count. Neither do graphic novels, though I have a fondness for Empowered. Actually, scratch that, I did read one book, an Earthdawn one...er...Talisman which doesn't get its own link, an anthology of short stories which I recall being OK but not great--such was my love of Earthdawn. Sadly, the other Earthdawn books I bought in my ebay buying craze phaze in the early 00's sit next to it unread--er, anyway...

One of the things that keeps coming up in my renewed studies of GMing, is to consume lots of media. Pretty much everyone's said this now. Adult life has taken its toll on me for sure and these days I don't consume a lot of media aside from games and even that has dwindled in the last couple years. This is evidenced by my award-winningYear In Review(TM) posts. Matt Colville recommended Pawn of Prophecy, and at one of my seemingly semi-weekly Amazon orders, I figured what the heck. I hadn't read anything from Eddings but I'd always heard good things. I took the first book home over the Holidays at the beginning of thislast year not realizing it was a ten twelve(!) book series and was immediately hooked.

There are for sure things I don't like about them, now that I've read the first set, but there's an undeniable humanity and complexity to all of the major characters which makes them relate-able. I was pretty much able to guess at all of the major bits of the plot but finding out how those things came to pass kept me flipping pages until late in the night on too many nights. I finished the Belgariad this evening and looking back, I have to wonder how much more interesting the last twenty years might have been if I'd read more. Old age is funny like that.

The quote in the title is from one Adam Koebel of Dungeon World fame. He said this in his award-winning series "Office Hours" which I watch on the youtubes.  (The goods are here at 3:24 if you want to play along at home.)  I got a good chuckle out of that. Hankerin' and Colville (link above) are both actual novelists and folks whose GM tips I've found invaluable. (The goods are here and here and no, I've read neither yet, and I don't get Amazon referral bonuses, either.)

For years I've wondered if I should be writing. I invariably hear about nanowrimo and think, "yeah, I could do that." The same thing happens with game jams, naturally. Part of the reason I started this ridiculous waste of almost no bandwidth is to get better at it. I wrote a comic last century. I build things in Lego out of that universe. I run a game in a fantasy world I've been creating since the mid 80s. Both of these have been touched by dozens and influenced by a lot of crap that I probably can't even remember. Sadly, the only folks who ever really get to see any of it are my players. Is that how it's supposed to be? Did Koebel hit it on the head, or what?

Right at the moment I am too sober and feel the need to lift a toast to Aunt Pol, Belgarath, and Garion. I rather miss them already.

2016 In Review

It's that time of the year again where I regale you of last year's tales of gaming gluttony.  Or gaming and gluttony. Judge if you must.

It seems that 2016 didn't go the way anyone expected. I've mostly settled into my home in the Pacific Northwest, inasmuch as I ever settle in anywhere. It needs a lot of work but I knew that when I bought it. Hopefully property values will continue to rise until I need to sell which might be soon; who knows? Hopefully I'll also have a new job early nextthis year, so there's that.

I did a bunch of BBQ thislast year but that shouldn't surprise anyone.  There was a fun span of like 7 consecutive weekends when I fired up the smoker--it was epic.

The only other news, and it's not really news, is that I've been doing RPG stuff again. Then again, if you've been here before, you probably already know that. Someday I'll spout more stuff about that here, but until then you'll just have to wonder. Unless you're one of my players, in which case, you know most of the gory details already.

This year's gaming started fast and furious but ended with a whimper. I don't think I got through even a third of what I expected to which is sad making. Maybe 2017 will be better. On with the recap!

Dragon's Dogma:  Dark Arisen (2012:2013/2016): *****
If you read my not-so-award-winning post (here) and (here) then you already know how I feel about this game. Angry Joe put the seed in my head that I should check this one out in his review of Dragon Age: Inquisition so when the PC version was released on Steam in January I picked it up. On sale. With all of the DLCs included. Shock and awe is all I have. There's an incredible attention to detail and game mechanics that a) are internally consistent, b) never get old, and c) still pose challenges to veteran players. I struggle to remember a single player game that captivated me as much as this and if they ever release the MMO version in the US, I am so very, very doomed.

Endless Legend (2014): ****
In my award winning post 2012 In Review, I had a short blurb about Endless Space which I liked a lot. I didn't write a lot about it because times were tight, man, and we couldn't afford more words. Endless Legend takes place in the same universe but with a decidedly fantasy bent. The ideas are mostly the same as Endless Space and most of the strategy elements are fairly similar. One big difference is that the myriad factions all play very differently which is interesting if not easily balanced. Quest victories have also been added and leaders can be represented on the field of battle which is an appropriate addition. Strategic and Luxury resources can be burned for large empire-wide bonuses, perhaps too large.

I'm struck by how much like Master of Orion the FIDSI and population system in this game is, though it plays out fairly differently. I didn't like that many of the not-early-game resource were luck of the draw which usually meant I couldn't build the stuff I wanted when I wanted to. I also wish that fewer of the tech options were tied to buildings. As a direct result of this, industry ends up being way more important than anything else in an empire which seems under-scrutinized. I'm also not a fan of the exponentially increasing cost of all techs based on the number of techs researched. I like being able to blind my enemies with science and in this game I can't really do that.

Spell Force: Shadow of the Phoenix (2005): *
This is the last expansion for the original SpellForce.  Your avatar starts at a pretty high level and still reeling from the difficulty of BoW, I farmed the ever loving crap out of the early game. Unfortunately this turned out to be unnecessary since I hit cap around 2/3 through. The story was...not good but it tried its best. It seemed as if each map had its own almost self-contained plot which basically meant they dragged on far past the point of good taste with a very tenuous hold on the one before and the one after. I threw in the towel about four levels from the end stuck on an over-complicated puzzle that I just don't have the willpower to plow through.  It's just too tedious. I gave it three serious tries over two years--I don't think I'll be back. I'm hoping that Spell Force 2 expansions will fare better nextthis year.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (2012):  ****
I miss a lot of games when they come out and this one was cautiously recommended by a few folks. So when it came up for sale on Steam, I picked it up...in 2014. I didn't really have high expectations but it's a decent enough game and I had fun with it. Maybe it's because this year also contained Dragon's Dogma which has raised my bar for RPGs, but its action-y combat left me a little wanting. The writing was pretty good but there was so freaking much of it. The level design fits the same bill--it's like an MMO without one of the Ms and the O. It ends up being is a bit sloggy through some very pretty terrain fighting the same mobs over and over again and walking back and forth and back and forth and back and forth through the same terrain. I found myself skipping dialog and quests, something I almost never do, just so I could get back to smashing things with a hammer. Steam says 64 hours spent but it seemed like a lot longer. It had a satisfying if not spectacular ending but that's OK.

Civilization VI (2016): ***
I had pretty mixed feelings about Civ 5 and overall felt it was too complicated and ran too slowly. My opinion of it dropped when I found The One True Strategy(TM). Civ 6 looks like a lot of the same--only far, far too complicated and I know Civ! It is for sure a slick looking game but I find the UI a little cumbersome and there really does seem to be too much information kicking around. I dunno; maybe I'm not the target audience anymore but there are just so many things to keep track of and there always seems to be something on fire. Starting on the easiest setting didn't help either. I was on my way to losing my first four games. When I finally won one, it was by accident (religious victory) and only because I got tired of seeing their stupid missionaries flooding my space. The second type of win I got was pretty much the same "oh wow, the game ends here and I'm not sure why" (cultural victory) which is weird. Now that I kind of understand the game I kind of see where they were going but not well enough to know if I actually like it or not. More research required, I think.

Parting Thoughts
This year's list is short but sweet, I think. Sort of a sign of the times in what was a pretty freaking difficult year with far too many business trips. I also note that there seems to be a glut of 4x games these days, not that I'm complaining. One does wonder how there were like none five years ago and now we're inundated with them.

I'm hoping to get through more stuff in 2017 so I can keep my 'net cred. Check back next year to see how well I did!

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.