Thursday, November 30, 2017

Pandora: First Contact - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

Pandora: First Contact is a science fiction 4X turn-based strategy game on a planetary scale.

In the future, factions have risen up from opportunities and ideologies independent of governments. Private corporations and religious movements have started wars over greed, ideology and power. Many have died and many lands lay in ruin. Planet Earth has been exhausted and colonial attempts on other planetary bodies have been in vain.

Finally, after decades of exploration, an interstellar probe has brought promise of a new world many light-years away. The most powerful factions have gathered their best men and women to send on a long journey to Pandora.

Far from desolate, the earth-like planet has been found to host a plethora of indigenous life forms. While the gigantic monstrosities inland and at the oceans seem relatively calm, human-sized bugs and fungus are threatening to stop mankind's expansion.

As the various factions strive to take control, each will research and develop numerous new technologies, discovering new weapons and industry, whilst opening trade agreements and forging alliances with other factions to gain a foothold. As they spread, they will discover ancient ruins from alien civilizations that will grant them advantages over their rivals.

Previous Playtime

11 minutes

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

This game had been on my radar for awhile. Sid Meier's Alpha Centrauri is one of my all-time favorite games, and this was a game that purported to be a spiritual successor to it (although, for the life of me, I can't remember where I saw that bandied about). It was during one of my ill-advised shopping binges that I tossed it into the cart with like a half a dozen other games.

Expectations and Prior Experience

I've yet to play a turn-based 4X that I didn't at least somewhat enjoy, but Pandora: First Contact has gotten some pretty harsh reviews. I'm pretty sure it will be all right and I'll blaze through it, but maybe it won't. Although, even if the worst happens, I don't anticipate taking too long to finish this. Turn-based games are simply too easy to play while watching TV or killing time at work.

Majesty 2 Collection - 20/20 hours

Confession time - I had some trouble starting the game up today, and I might have let it hang a little longer than strictly necessary before Ctrl + Alt + Deleting my way out. I didn't do it for long, but such was my state of mind that shaving a minute or two off my play time through technically allowable, but dubiously valid tactics felt like something that needed to happen.

I guess it's because I never really got what I wanted out of this game. I never felt like that guy in every rpg in existence who stands around with the exclamation point over his head. I never felt like the mysterious old man in the tavern who assembles random travelers into an adventuring party. I never felt like a manipulative schemer, sitting in the middle of a web of intrigue. I just felt like an RTS player who couldn't really direct his troops very effectively.

In other words, I really didn't care for this game at all. The art was appealing. There were some nice building and unit designs. I still like the game's pitch. I really do want to be the guy back at town who assigns the quests to wandering heroes. And that's basically it. An okay-looking game in a genre I don't enjoy, executed poorly, but with a central idea that's kind of interesting.

It's embarrassing that it took me as long to get through as it did. I may be losing my touch when it comes to powering through games I don't particularly like. Thankfully, I don't have all that many left.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Majesty 2 Collection - 15/20 hour

I am so ready to be done with this game. I thought, at first, that not directly controlling my units would be liberating, that it would allow me to focus on things that interested me more, like building up my town's economy. But there's no economy and there's no real variation in the building. You either survive long enough to build everything or you don't. There's a degree of interest in seeing your heroes slowly conquer the map through their adventures, but it's not enough to carry a whole game.

I think there's a lot of room to explore different levels of authority in games. So, potentially, a strategy game where your forces are autonomous could potentially be quite interesting (actually, I think it already exists and is called Crusader Kings II), but usually, you've got an unrealistic amount of control over some very specific things. Like, in the Tropico series, el Presidente decides where every house and business on the island is built, even if you're trying to establish a capitalist society. Very few games actually commit to the idea of limiting your control to high-level policy.

I wonder if the issue here is a technological one, or if it's a failure of imagination, or if it's just because the high-level approach would have you looking mostly at spreadsheets and reports and less at maps and characters. Certainly, issuing a generic proclamation of "we are at war with the goblins" is less exciting than moving around individual units. Hell, even Crusader Kings II gives you the godlike ability to direct units to exactly where you want them, despite the fact that your character is hundreds of miles away.

What would a game even look like if it adhered to the limitations of realistic leadership? There would be a delay between issuing your orders and having them carried out. You would only know what was happening after it happened. Everything you know about your kingdom would be highly abstract and filtered through the ideological preconceptions of your staff. It would be difficult to even tell success from failure. A sequestered king, surrounded by flattering courtiers, may not even know about civil unrest until the revolution is on his doorstep.

 It would be a frustrating gaming experience, to be sure. To not have control and to also not be entirely certain what it is you don't have control over. Video games, as a form of entertainment, have to do better. They have to present you with choices and then honestly convey the consequences of those choices, because that's what makes them games. Anything else would just be screaming into the void.

Do you hear that, Majesty 2? You are on thin ice here. Real thin ice.

Saturday, November 25, 2017

Majesty 2 Collection - 10/20 hours

I don't know what it means to have skill in this game. Granted, this may be because I'm so bad at it that skillful play is beyond my ability to imagine. That's an idea I have to entertain. But right now my working theory is that success or failure in Majesty 2 largely comes down to luck.

It all comes down to a certain campaign level, called "Mortal Foibles of Kings." In this level, you start off surrounded by 5 different sewers. Usually, sewers are a nuisance, but not terribly threatening. They are indestructible, but only spawn low-level creatures. You can keep them contained by building a guard tower nearby. However, it turns out that they are a much bigger threat when they don't spawn one at a time, as a consequence of your village's growth. If you start out with five, right next to your city, then rats can spawn quickly and tear down your construction before you even get the chance to get started. I've played the level about six times already, and only once did I survive long enough to even get my first hero on the field. Every other time, my building was destroyed before it finished construction.

I looked up a walkthrough online and as near as I can tell, success requires precisely the right build order done without any sort of hesitation or delay. It's likely just a poorly-designed mission, but I'd be distressed if it became the new norm. My least favorite part of any RTS game is when the enemy overwhelms your base and you have to watch helplessly as you are out of resources and your stuff is systematically destroyed without any hope of a counter-action. To experience that less than five minutes into a mission is total bullshit.

In an effort to bypass this terrible level, I went ahead and fired up the expansion campaigns. They were all right, though I'm not sure what the Kingmaker or Battle for Ardania expansion packs added, other than extra missions. The Monster Kingdom expansion was pretty neat, though, allowing you to play the game with goblins and liches and whatnot, instead of your usual heroes.

Going forward, my plan is to use up all of the easy missions from the various expansion packs until I run into a dead end at every turn, and then, after that . . . hope that my 20 hours are up. Or possibly complain about the unfairness of it all. I haven't decided yet. Let's play it by ear.

Friday, November 24, 2017

Mass Effect: Andromeda - Wrap-Up

With 62 hours under my belt, I am finally done with Mass Effect: Andromeda. I didn't quite get 100% completion, but I'm satisfied with what I have. Mostly it's just directionless collectibles quests and hanging out with my crew that I have left to do. It's likely, that if I ever play through this game again (and I almost certainly will), that I will go into all the corners, guide in hand, and clear everything out of my journal, but for now, 90% is fine.

It was actually pretty nice to get to play a game naively for a change. No agenda, no benchmarks, just going where I want and doing what interests me. Which isn't to say I don't enjoy playing games for the blog, it's just different. I'm not quite so mindful of the passage of time. I'm not constantly composing and refining my next bit of insightful (don't laugh) critique. I'm just enjoying the game for what it is. And that's a nice change of pace.

Now, for the part where I ruin it by overthinking. Mass Effect: Andromeda had a pretty good ending. Much as I predicted, there was a sequel hook (indeed, at least 3 or 4 dangling plot points that were left unresolved), but to its credit, it wasn't like the original Mass Effect. It didn't end on a note of "there is this big, dangerous problem happening imminently that we are only now getting prepared to face." It was more like, "you won an important and decisive victory, but the main antagonist was only a mid-ranking officer in a larger galactic empire, and thus the Helius Sector's short-term prosperity is clouded by a looming threat." The Nexus and the Angarans have successfully wrested control of the sector away from the Kett, and it may be years before they face retribution.

And you know what, that's okay. I really want to play the next phase of the conflict, where a rising multicultural galactic power takes on the cruel fascists and where Ryder learns more about the mysterious circumstances of the Remnant's fall from grace. But I didn't feel cheated out of a resolution. The story of this time and this place wrapped up nicely, and if there is more to do, then maybe that's because life itself doesn't have an ending. There will always be more stories to tell. . .

Although the fate of Ryder's mother and the identity of the mysterious Benefactor are loose ends that only make sense when you're trying to establish a series. Not everything in life needs to be neatly wrapped up, but when you're telling a story, it helps.

I think the reason the sequel hook went down as well as it did with me was because Mass Effect: Andromeda was more of an open-world game. The planets were big maps you could explore and drive around on, rather than simple hub areas connected to a couple of dungeons. The original Mass Effect had random planets that might have been similar, except that they were almost entirely deserted, and thus never really got to the point where they had individual character.

Mass Effect Andromeda's worlds did not suffer from that problem. They were all gorgeously realized sci-fi locations with their own character and identities (though I'm not sure why there were two separate desert planets). All of which adds up to me just wanting to be really ungrateful here. Why can't I have as many explorable world as the original Mass Effect, but with each one having as much personality as the worlds in Mass Effect: Andromeda? Is that really too much to ask?

Obviously, it is, but I can dream. Ultimately, when I look back at Mass Effect: Andromeda, I'm going to see a game that was a contender, but which didn't really have what it takes to be a classic. The Kett turned out to be pretty effective villains after all (I really wanted to kill the Archon by the end), but the Angarans didn't even manage to rise to the level of the original triology's secondary species. Right now, I am thinking about the game having the exact same plot, but replacing the Angarans with the Elcor, the Volus, or even the Hanar, and it's already about a hundred times better. Which makes it a real shame that it has to follow up on a series that spoiled us with all three. And while I enjoyed helping out the colonies and building up their viability (and there is a pretty neat post-game payoff for getting them all to 100%), too often that involved long and aggravating fetch quests that forced me to go through entirely to many loading screens.

The funny thing is, I think if this game had successfully spawned a new Mass Effect trilogy, it could have been retroactively redeemed by its sequels. If you move the action up to the galactic scale and liberate the clusters the other Archons were assimilating, you could have the diversity and the wonder that was missing. If you polished the mechanics just slightly in the sequels, you could make this opening chapter essential playing as a prelude to some really amazing games. With a bit more backstory, the Remnant may well be as compelling as the Protheans. The potential is there, but it's probably never going to happen. The studio was shut down and rumor has it that the sequel was entirely cancelled. Such a shame.

Oh well, at least I got to charge into a bunch of enemy's face-first, and I will always cherish Mass Effect Andromeda for that.

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

More Mass Effect: Andromeda

I'm starting to worry about this game. At around 30 hours in, I finally got to the big reveal about who the Kett are and what they've been doing, and it was pretty satisfying. A good combination of horrifying and comprehensible, using a weird sci-fi technology and with some intriguing philosophical implications. And because of that, I estimate that the chances of this game ending on anything but a cliffhanger to be approximately 2%.

Call it cynicism, if you will, but the timing of the revelation was suggestive. There are six planets to explore in this game, and I'd just finished the third. So at almost exactly halfway through the game there's this dramatic reveal that completely changes the context of what you're doing while simultaneously raising the stakes. It was both welcome and proper, but . . . The story mission for the next planet revolves around finding a transponder that will allow you to track down the leader of the Kett.

In other words, they burned about 1/6th of the game's content on what is essentially a delaying tactic. Over the course of this mission, I've learned absolutely nothing new about the Kett or their sinister mission. After 30 hours, the villain finally gets a name and a face, and now the game is spinning its wheels before letting me confront him.

Let's just say, I recognize a pattern here. I'm going to fight through all these arbitrary obstacles and achieve some major victory that allows the Andromeda Initiative to get a foothold in the Helius cluster . . .  only to learn that the real threat has yet to make itself known. And don't get me wrong. It worked great in the original Mass Effect. That whole sequence starting in Virmire and going up to the end of the game was amazing. You get the coldly creepy introduction to the Reapers and then some political intrigue back at the Citadel only to follow up with learning the truth about the Protheans and appreciating the story's true epochal scope, and you end with a tense final mission set against the backdrop of a spectacular space battle with hard moral choices, and memorable visuals and music. Sure, it all added up to a huge sequel hook, but I loved it.

Which brings us back to Mass Effect: Andromeda. I can see the same pattern emerging. I'm certain that the last 20% of the game will up the intensity dramatically, and I would ordinarily be totally on board with that, except that I'm playing this game eight months after it was released, and so I already know that a sequel is unlikely. It's an entirely different thing to experience a thrilling cliffhanger when you know that the resolution is never going to come.

I guess I'll just have to try and enjoy it while I can. And who knows, maybe my worry here is unfounded. Maybe Mass Effect: Andromeda will have a perfectly satisfying story in its own right and the only thing I'll be left hungry for, come the end, is more time in the Mass Effect universe. That would be nice.

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Interlude - Mass Effect: Andromeda

I have a confession to make. . . I have a secret life. In addition to my 200-odd Steam games, I also have an Origin account. It only has ten games in its library, and of those, I got six for free. And of the four games I paid for, three of those are different versions of The Sims.  But nonetheless, I've been holding out on you.

I'm telling you this because the other day, I was at the store and I saw a copy of Mass Effect: Andromeda for PC on sale for half its usual price, and that's why I haven't made another Majesty 2 post. Over the last 3 days, I've managed to play this one game for 24 hours.

There's this thing that they started doing in Mass Effect 2 where one of the class abilities was the "biotic charge." You target an enemy and fly through the air, slamming you into them at high speed, doing massive damage and putting you in ideal position to shoot them at point-blank range (or, you know, be instantly slaughtered by the enemy's friends, but nothing ventured . . .) It's just about the funnest thing in the whole world and it's only gotten more enjoyable in each Mass Effect game since it was introduced.

That's the primary reason I've played the game so much. I just love flying recklessly around these gorgeously realized alien worlds, tearing into robots and monsters and the like. Combined with plenty of the typical open-world rigamarole to give me reasons to go from place to place, and it is perfectly calibrated to keep me on the hook.

So I like the game quite a bit, but it is a contentious entry to the series and I can see why. Andromeda is simply not as compelling a setting as the Milky Way (fake Andromeda - if aliens are reading this 2 million+ years from now, I'm sure the real Andromeda is great). The original Mass Effect trilogy had a ton of work put into the background lore and it showed. Just about every one of its sci-fi creations was compelling in its own right, and taken all together, they created a world that was both diverse and engaging.

Unfortunately, Mass Effect: Andromeda doesn't seem to do the same amount of work. So far, there are only two new intelligent species compared to the dozen or so from the original trilogy. And unless there's some great lore revelation coming up, they are simply not as interesting as the Milky Way species (again, fictionally). When you compare the Angarans to the Turians or the Quarians, or the Krogans, it's not even a contest - I can't even describe to you why I find them bland, because they have no characteristics that are distinct enough to comment upon. I suppose it's a victory for sidestepping the "planet of hats" cliche by making the aliens be as varied as the humans. But if you can't reduce aliens to a stereotype, then what is space opera for?

And the Kett, as villains, forget about it. They're like the Collectors but less creepy and menacing.

The worst part, though, is that it doesn't have to be this way. They could build upon the groundwork laid by the first three games and just make the setting more diverse, but that would kind of involve not transporting the story two and a half million light years away, where none of the stuff you've established before could possibly have any effect on what's going on.

I understand why they did it. They wanted a free hand in writing a new sci-fi story without having to worry about the baggage and expectations from the original trilogy. Ultimately, though, they set themselves up to fail. In order for Andromeda to work as a game, they had to sell Andromeda as a setting, and that means creating something so utterly new that if feels exotic, spectacular, and dangerous even in the context of an established sci-fi setting. The Helius cluster had to feel like it was worth the 600-year cryosleep. The people in the arks left behind a world of bug monsters and blue psychic space babes and evangelical jellyfish and killer robots from before the dawn of history. So whatever they found needed to be even more exciting than that. And it just wasn't.

I'm still going to play the game to the end, though. What can I say. I love exploration and I love charging into gun fights like a colossal idiot.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Majesty 2 Collection - 6/20 hours

The thing about this game is that it's an RTS where you can't directly control your units. In other words, it's kind of a crummy RTS.

I mean, it's kind of fun to try and bribe your collection of heroes to go and kill specific monsters. But sometimes you've got a whole lot of heroes and no money and it's pretty much up to chance whether or not they'll rescue your village.

It's a slapdash way to approach military strategy, and honestly, I don't really mind it that much. If the alternative is me paying serious attention to the dispensation of my troops and their battlefield positioning . . .

Although I wish that there was more to do besides trying to influence adventurers. Your village doesn't really have a civic life or complex economy. Your shops just contain items for adventurers. Everything you build revolves around them in some way. At best you can try and maximize gold return or research tactical spells. It doesn't really even matter where you place your buildings.  The trick lies mainly in picking the right build order.

So I guess I'm in this position where I just have to go along with it. I mean, there's not really anything particularly bad that's going to happen and probably nothing especially good that's going to happen either. If I half-ass the game for the next 14 hours, I doubt I'll miss out on anything important.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's a lot of skill involved here and I'm still too much of a novice to see it. Only time will tell.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Majesty 2 Collection - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

In the world of Majesty, you are the ruler of the Kingdom. Your rule is not absolute, however, as you face subjects that are independent and stubborn. They will need a great deal of persuasion before they carry out your wishes...

Includes all Majesty 2 content:
Majesty 2
Kingmaker expansion
Battles of Ardania expansion
Monster Kingdom expansion

The Kingmaker game editor enables players to create their own missions. Also included is every item, quest, unit and building previously only available for purchase using the in-game store. This additional content includes new spells, weapons, units, heroes, buildings, quests and more.

Main Features:
Real-time strategy with indirect control – your heroes have a will of their own
Build the ultimate fantasy kingdom and experience an engaging world, but beware: monsters are waiting to lay siege to your domain
Defend your realm with noble warriors, spell-wielding wizards, or wild barbarians
Multiplayer for up to 4 players over LAN

Previous Playtime

0 hours

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

This game is a funny one. I can remember exactly why I bought it - my friend Jon described the game to me and I thought it sounded intriguing - but I can't remember exactly what he said to me that I once found so persuasive. I actually bought Majesty 2 years after our original conversation, and only because I recognized the title.

Looking at the store description, I think it was the part where you control a king, but you have to direct self-willed heroes. That sounds like a pretty novel sort of game mechanic.

Expectations and Prior Experience

The thing is, this is a kingdom-building RTS. So I will definitely like the kingdom-building parts, but the RTS parts may cause me trouble. Especially if the enemy comes in and wrecks my kingdom. The indirect control mechanic gives me cause for hope, though. If I can't directly control my troops, then it seems likely that the combat portion of the game will be pretty forgiving. It would be downright perverse if the game punished me for something that was literally out of my control.

Divinity II: Developer's Cut - 20/20 hours

I never got to be a dragon. It's my own fault, really. If I hadn't started a new save file, I would surely have made it. Even as it stands, I'm pretty close to reaching the boss I need to kill to get the power. Just one more dungeon to go. But I think switching to a warrior build was probably the right move, nonetheless. Towards the end of my time with the mage build, I was having to reload 1-2 times per battle. So, who knows. Maybe it would have taken me an extra 7 hours to get to this same place. Probably not, but it's impossible to say for sure.

Divinity II is the first game in the series I've seriously contemplated playing past my deadline. I find myself enjoying its action-rpg gameplay and excellent voice acting. Ultimately, the reason I'm not is because of a thematic choice that would be annoyingly cynical if I thought it was at all deliberate - the game keeps putting me in a position where I have to kill basically innocent people.

Like, there's this one side-quest where a knight asks you to help him get food for the village he protects, only, when you get to where the food is, the regular military is there and they say they need the food for some other group of people. Whichever side you don't pick, you have to fight the other. And okay, the knight is a bit of a jerk, but not so much that he deserves to die (especially not while on a mission of mercy), and the soldiers may serve an authoritarian organization, but this is ye olde medieval times and they're actually fairly decent guys. So why, exactly, are we coming to blows here?

And that wouldn't be so bad in isolation, but stuff like that keeps happening. When you go to the temple that gives you the thing you need to unlock the island with the dungeon where you get your dragon powers, you find that all your old dragon-slayer comrades are still there. Only now they hate you because you've been corrupted by dragon power, and so rather than talking things out and demonstrating that maybe dragons aren't so bad after all, they attack you and you're forced to defend yourself, killing several named characters, including a couple that you were on pretty friendly terms with at the beginning of the game.

But even that, as frustrating as it was, is not so bad as what you have to do on Sentinel Island. When you first step out of the teleporter room you are greeted by this strange elemental creature who tells you that you must recruit some staff for your future citadel, and that there are already two candidates for each available position . . . and the ones you don't choose will be killed. That pissed me off. So much so that I searched for a guide because surely no game would be that sadistic. There had to be a heroic "third option."

Nope. If you don't make the choice yourself, the elemental decides for you, killing half the guys at random. Seriously, what the fuck Divinity II? I'm trying to be a hero here and you're just, like, "nah, somebody's gotta die."

Like I said, this would be inexcusably cynical if I thought they were doing it on purpose, to make some kind of point. However, I think these sorts of quests are just coincidentally awful. This is an action game. The only thing your character really knows how to do is fight. Thus any sort of drama or conflict, it must revolve around a battle somehow. Combined with a desire to not have any serious branching options, and you get a story where sometimes you just straight up murder people because it's easier than talking to them.

Video games, am I right?

Friday, November 10, 2017

Divinity II: Developer's Cut - 9/20 hours

There's a thing video games will do where you level up and you get new stat points to improve some aspect of your character, and it's all very exciting until you actually assign the points and discover that it only improves your abilities by 1-2%. When that happens, I start to wonder why I even bother. I am not perceptive enough to notice the difference in my performance. Fewer, larger improvements would be so much better.

But that's not a complaint specific to Divinity II. Sure, leveling up can be kind of underwhelming, but it happens often enough that it's reasonably motivating. It can get a little frustrating when the monsters seem to scale faster than your power level, but hey, I don't have to do this forever.

The game's story, so far, has been serviceable. You're a dragon-slayer, but there's only one dragon left in the world, and so you have to sit out the mission to take it down, because you're still untrained. Except something goes wrong, and you arrive at the scene of the battle to find only one survivor - a dying dragon knight who gives you the power to become a dragon yourself. And that's sure to have some fallout eventually, but in the meantime I'm running around doing insignificant chores for people, because it wouldn't be an open-world rpg if NPCs could deliver their own letters or rescue their own pigs.

I wouldn't have it any other way, though. For the longest time, I harbored the idea that all I cared about in these sorts of games is going to new places, fighting enemies, and collecting loot. But the extensive padding in the first two Divinity games disabused me of that notion. What I really like is going to new places, fighting enemies, and collecting loot with a fig-leaf of an excuse to do so.

Which is good, because I did a foolish thing and started a new character after seven hours with my first one. You see, I'd discovered a "skill book," an item that gave me a new skill point without having to gain a level, and I was so thrilled by this discovery (despite the somewhat underwhelming nature of skills in this game) that I immediately fired up a guide to see if there were any others around. It turns out there were plenty, but I'd already missed my sole opportunity to find three of them.

I mean, it's foolish to put so much stock in completionism for a game I'm just going to quit after 20 hours, but it nonetheless bugged me. So much so that I started over from scratch. However, I know a lot more this second time around than I did the first, so I'm not anticipating that it will take me quite so long to get to where I was before.

I suppose you could consider it a compliment to the game, though. Would I really be so sanguine about backtracking in a game I didn't enjoy?

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Divinity II: Developer's Cut - 3/20 hours

It's easy, sometimes, to be dismissive about the role of presentation in making a good video game. "Graphics are superficial" and "the only thing that matters is gameplay," and all that. But playing Divinity II so soon after the other Divinity games really puts those arguments into perspective. Seeing a 3-D animation of an airship floating into a dock did more to connect me to the setting and characters than any amount of text boxes. Being able to see the buildings from ground level and distinguish their unique architectural details at a glance has made navigating immensely easier. Hell, the relatively good voice acting of the NPCs has actually made me care about what they say.

Which isn't to say that Divinity II is necessarily great at presentation. It's still too early for me to say, given that I'm still in the starting town and have not seen anything but the typical faux-western-European fantasy pastiche that usually dominates rpg settings. I mean, Two Worlds did the same basic setting and looked almost as good (with the caveat that its voice acting and character design were much worse). I'd say that it looks about as good as an early Xbox 360 game. It's a little better than Oblivion, but not quite as good as Skyrim. It likely comes down to a budget thing. All of the graphics are crisp and clear, and it does some interesting things with trees and terrain, but you don't get that sense of obsessive attention to detail.

Divinity II isn't really all that much like its predecessors. The over-the-shoulder perspective is more personal than the god's eye view of the 2D games. Distant areas are obscured by terrain and obstacles, rather than fog-of-war, making it feel more open and expansive. And combat feels more like action and less like a series of abstracted dice rolls. And it's not like the Fallout series, which had a distinctive post-apocalyptic by way of the perpetual '50s aesthetic to give it identity. I actually don't have much handle at all on what makes these games part of the same series. There are a couple of familiar place names from the first game, but in the second, I never even interacted with the real world at all. Perhaps that's why this is game is the numbered sequel, despite Beyond Divinity being the second game in the series.

Nonetheless, I'm enjoying Divinity II quite a bit. The pacing of quests is much better (in that I'm only three hours in and I've already completed some!), the NPCs are more distinct and memorable, and your character's "gimmick" (being an elite mystical dragon-slayer) gives them neat abilities like being able to see ghosts and read minds. My only real complaint is that the mind-reading costs experience points to use. Every time I've read an NPCs mind, it's been fun and flavorful, but expending a permanent resource for a temporary benefit (let alone otherwise irrelevant setting color) just doesn't sit well with me. My hope is that the xp I earn from monsters will start to scale so high that the xp I lose from mind-reading will be trivial by comparison.

I guess what I'll do is keep plugging away. As long as the quests and the rewards keep coming at a satisfying pace, it doesn't really matter if I do things optimally or not.

Monday, November 6, 2017

Divinity II: Developer's Cut - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

Dragons: they have been hunted, they have been slain, but now the hour to strike back has come. Break free from the confines of the human body and take to the skies in this epic RPG adventure that challenges your wits and pits you against a thousand foes. Spread your wings, burn your enemies: become the dragon!

This Developer's Cut includes the ultimate edition of Divinity II, good for 100+ hours of highly acclaimed RPG gameplay, as well as the brand new Developer Mode and many more amazing extras!

Previous Playtime

0 hours

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

Bundle. Cheap. "What's the harm?"

Expectations and Prior Experience

With two previous Divinity games under my belt, I feel pretty confident in saying that I expect the game to be mostly fine, but I worry about the plot being unnecessarily drawn out. Or, more accurately, I worry about the "100 hours of gameplay" breaking down into "35 hours of story and 65 hours of wandering around lost and/or underleveled."

Yet I think it says something that I have just come off of 40 hours of Divinity games and am willing to dive back in for another 20. I guess I have hope that this game, having a release date 8 years after the others, and, judging from the screenshots, being made in 3D, will be a little bit more user friendly. There's no real reason to think that, of course, but that's the attitude I'm choosing to have.

I figure the worst case scenario is that I'm stuck running in circles again. That would be pretty annoying, but I'm running out of games (huzzah!), so if not now, when?

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Beyond Divinity - 20/20 hours

I'm STILL IN HELL!

It is definitely clear at this point that I underestimated the amount of afterlife in this game. I defeated the boss, cured the Imp plague, and then suddenly got magically whisked away to do chores for a necromancer. When my summoning ended, I came back to find the Imp village slaughtered in its entirety. It was an event that managed to hit a trifecta of horribleness - being a disgusting atrocity, unmaking the work I'd just spent hours to achieve, and then depriving me of the reward I'd been expecting.

It was pretty neat to be on the receiving end of a magical summons for a change. It really makes you appreciate how killing your summoner and breaking free to run amok in the mortal world is, in fact, a sensible and appealing thing to try and do. Sadly, I never got the chance. I guess the necromancer was too good at his job.

In the end, the "all the imps die before they can tell you how to get home" plot twist mostly served to diminish my interest in the rest of the game. It felt like the rug was pulled out from under me, and I kind of resent having to track down and befriend this new group of people before I can move on.

I don't think I will be sticking with this game past 20 hours. I do have a strong desire to escape fantasy-knockoff hell, but I'm afraid of being jerked around again, and of course, being at a the beginning of a new area means my guide is frustratingly vague. The emotional payoff just doesn't seem worth it. Also, the skill system in this game is a step back from the original, and so if I were going to play an old-school rpg from the Divinity series for another 40+ hours, I think I would stick with the first game.

That being said, I was mostly all right with Beyond Divinity. It only really had two real flaws, from where I'm concerned - the first being that the weapon skills are too specific, thus punishing you for failing to specialize early and then stick with your choice for the whole of the game. The second flaw is one endemic to the isometric rpg genre - navigation, particularly to new quest objectives, is more or less left up to chance. No one ever tells you where to go. It's not even like Morrowind, where the NPCs give you directions that are accurate, but too vague when you take player subjectivity into account (i.e. "it's a little ways past the big rock"). Systematically searching ever area and talking to every NPC is pretty much the only way to ever get things done. It's exhausting.

But you know what, it's a more interesting setting than Divine Divinity, and while the "escape from hell" plot was way too stretched out, it did immediately grab my interest, and could well have supported a whole game, were the fantasy-knockoff hell filled with a variety of distinct and memorable characters and imaginative afterlife-inspired vistas.

Overall, I'd gauge my feelings about Beyond Divinity as "vaguely fond, but also slightly disappointed." There was a lot of potential here that went untapped, and a lot of unnecessary padding, but the basic idea was sound, and I always at least slightly enjoy ARPG gameplay. If I play again, though, it will be to salvage my wounded pride. I really wanted to get out of hell.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Beyond Divinity - 15/20 hours

I am still in hell. Maybe this game takes place almost entirely in the afterlife? That's not a possibility I considered. The structure of the plot thus far led me to make certain assumptions that may not have been justified. It's just that the Death Knight told me we had to escape Samuel and then find his former mistress Isolde, and so I jumped to the conclusion that these would be separate and independent phases of the game.

It's still possible, I suppose. I have finally found the source of the Imp plague, and as soon as I grind enough levels to beat this improbably difficult boss, I may well have accomplished everything I need to do in hell. And, of course, if it really is a 60-hour game as advertised, then it could easily break down to 20 hours of escaping hell, 20 hours of searching for Isolde, and 20 hours of doing whatever Isolde wants you to do to earn her help.

Using a guide did help me out a bit. Although now that I'm writing out my thoughts about the game, it does strike me as strange that I didn't simply skip ahead to see when I would finally be back in the mortal world . . .

. . . And it's actually pretty unclear. The guide I'm using doesn't go a lot into the lore. It seems like I will be teleported away after a few more post-boss chores, but it doesn't say to where. Another district of hell, perhaps?

I've picked up a second wind, though. now that I'm making some kind of forward progress. I have a short-term goal that I'm invested in (getting powerful enough to take on the boss) and I'm reasonably certain I can complete it in the time allotted to me.  Once I get that done, I'll have to come up with some new thing to care about, but hopefully I'll be almost out of time by then.

This game has been a rollercoaster of emotions for me, but I'm in the final stretch. If I can stay focused and finish it in the next couple of days, I'll probably be all right.

Friday, November 3, 2017

Beyond Divinity - 10/20 hours

I'm in hell. Both literally in fantasy knock-off hell, and figuratively in the sense that I'm miserable. I can't find the thing that lets me get on with the story. The leader of the imp village knows how to return me to the mortal world, but in return I have to find a cure for a mysterious illness afflicting the imps.

Fair enough. Except all I know is that I'm looking for an alchemist imp who is in a cave somewhere, and now I have to systematically search the whole map because I don't even know which direction to go. The thought that haunts me is that someone already told me where to go, but I forgot. Alternately, there is some minor character that I have yet to talk to.

Or maybe the game itself just doesn't want me to know.

I suppose it shouldn't matter that I'm lost. After all, what I'm really doing is just wandering from place to place killing monsters, and I don't need directions for that. Wherever I happen to be at the moment is where the gameplay is happening. Yet once more I've succumbed to the trap of meaning. I want to cure those imps of their sickness. I want to escape hell. Even though I would simply be presented with another mission to finish. Even though I would simply be trapped in another map. It would feel like accomplishment.

The key, I think, is to engage the game on a smaller scale. To start caring about individual locations and npcs, so that my wandering between them becomes a meaningful activity in its own right. That way I can systematically search and still get the feeling that I'm making something happen.

I don't know, though. Ultimately the characters aren't all that interesting. The places aren't all that interesting. The story was moderately interesting, but not so much so that it feels worth it spread out over 10 hours. I want something to happen.

What I'm going to do is try my best to exploit online guides. I figure there has to be some way to go directly to what I'm supposed to be doing without running in circles for hours at a time. Yes, it's not really taking the game at face value and sidestepping most of its actual mechanics to play an instruction-following game instead, but it's so much easier.

I may not be as cut out for old-school rpgs as I'd previously thought.