Dungeons and Dragons Online - 8/20 hours

Let me start off with a funny (and somewhat shameful) confession - I was a little afraid of this game, starting out. I'd heard that MMOs are notoriously addictive, designed with cunning application of modern psychological theory to trap players in a compulsive cycle of chasing rewards that are just good enough to encourage further playing, but never good enough to be satisfying. I was worried that I'd be ensnared in this trap, and Dungeons and Dragons Online would become an unshakeable obsession.

However, if I'm being honest, I was also kind of hoping that would happen. You may (and probably should) view this as a species of misguided romanticism, but there is something about it that strikes me as connecting to the deep root of the human condition - to become addicted to an MMO is to fall into a carefully calculated section of the bell curve. It is common, and therefore, perversely, noble. And whatever negative impact it may or may not have had on my personal life, at least it would have been something primal and real, a reprieve from the bloodless detachment that is my more regular habit.

Of course, now that I see that written out, it is obviously ridiculous. I could easily fire up Recettear if I really wanted to react emotionally to a game or Civilization 5 if I wanted to get lost in one. And the temptation of having a sexy addiction spice up my autobiography (it should surprise no one that I missed out on sex, drugs, and rock and roll) is so transparently juvenile a fantasy as to be instantly dismissed.

It helps that Dungeons and Dragons Online is not an especially good game. I'm playing a Paladin, because it was the class marked as most viable solo, and the occasional smite notwithstanding, it mostly consists of walking up to enemies, holding down the mouse button, and then waiting for them to die. I expect that I could improve my performance slightly by using my various stances and feats, but I'm not sure that the actual experience of doing so would be any more engaging.

Still, it's not terrible, either. I'm not miserable, or even especially bored, while playing. It's more like I'm playing on a kind of mental autopilot. There are buttons I have to press, and decisions I have to make, but so far none of the button presses have tested my reflexes and none of the decisions have been particularly difficult. It's pleasant. I doubt very much that any individual moment of the game will stick with me in years to come, and I don't even want to begin exploring the minutiae of the crafting system, but those aren't great faults.

At least when it comes to soloing a Paladin up to level 3, Dungeons and Dragons Online is like the saltine crackers of video games - virtually flavorless, but so inoffensive in its blandness that it easy to forget exactly how much you've consumed.

Dungeons and Dragons Online - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

Enter a world of danger and adventure with Dungeons & Dragons Online®, the free, award-winning, massively-multiplayer online game based on the beloved RPG that started it all.

Key Features:

     Experience the Best Action Combat of Any Free MMORPG: Take control in combat and make every move count. Leap past deadly blade traps or dodge poison arrows. Whether fighter, sorcerer, or rogue, every move is your move as you block, tumble, cleave, and more on your way to glory and power.

    Play for Free: Experience the action, danger, and intrigue of Dungeons & Dragons Online for free! Play as much as you want all the way to level 20.

    Exciting Adventures with Iconic D&D Monsters: Come face-to-face with a dragon, defend your sanity from a Mindflayer, or get roasted by a Beholder as you delve into the deepest and most treacherous dungeons ever imagined. Test your skill against a monstrous number of iconic Dungeons & Dragons foes in your pursuit of power and glory.

    Adventure alone or with friends from all over the world: Set out on an adventure of your own, create a group with friends or join a guild to meet new people.

    Create a Unique Hero: Craft the characters you’ve always wanted to play with deep character advancement that offers nearly infinite possibilities. With 8 races, 13 classes and nearly limitless traits and character abilities, it’s possible that no two characters may ever be the same!

    A Rich & Beautiful World: Explore the sun-drenched, magic-powered city of Stormreach, the gathering place for countless DDO players from around the world any time of day or night. See the iconic locations of Dungeons & Dragons brought to life like never before! The world of DDO is yours for the taking.

    Enhance Your Experience: Shop in the in-game store for extra quests, powerful gear, experience boosts, buffs, and more. You choose how little or how much you spend.

Previous Play Time

24 minutes

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

Obviously, as a free game, there was no real risk for me, but that wasn't the only reason I downloaded it. Most of my friends play this game and I thought maybe I should occasionally poke my head out of my hole and engage with other people socially instead of hiding away all the time. As you can see, that resolution lasted less than a half hour.

Expectations and Prior Experience

I dabbled with the character creator a little bit, but didn't actually finish. I'm not really sure why I quit, exactly, but I do have some diffidence towards the genre. I've heard that MMOs can be repetitive and slow-paced, and that free-to-play games, specifically, are mechanically optimized to "encourage" people to pay money. On the other hand, a large, persistent world is fairly intriguing, and, of course, I love fantasy roleplaying games, so I feel like I could potentially enjoy it quite a bit. Worst case scenario, it's mildly boring, and that doesn't worry me at all.

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition - 20/20 hours

Mood is a funny thing. Earlier today, I was in a bad mood because I'd accidentally deleted my 14 hour post. So the tenor of this post was originally set around my disappointment at its loss, and my exaggerated (but not insincere) grief at the thought of the world living without my half-assed predictions about the appearance of thought eaters, crabmen, and wolfweres (though amazingly, this last one proved to be true! wtf Baldur's Gate II?). However, in the process of searching to see if, in fact, crabmen did make an appearance (they don't, demonstrating that there is at least some sanity in the world), I found a cached copy of my lost post, and thus was able to restore it. Instead of being super bummed out, I was now perky and optimistic.

This change of mood revealed something to me. Or more accurately, rewriting this 20 hour post to account for my changed mood revealed something to me. And that is that my perception of the game is strongly influenced by my mood. I was all set to write a gloomy post about how much I hate level draining (seriously, the worst mechanic ever) and the fact that these damned shadow thieves keep giving me busy work, despite the fact that I paid them 15k to help get Imoen out of prison (and not, as they seem to think, to become their best buddy).

Now, however, that seems kind of petty. In fact, I'd say that over the course of my last few posts, I have probably been unnecessarily harsh on Baldur's Gate II. Because I'm in a good mood, I'm more inclined to see the upsides of the game than the downsides. It really is an incredible implementation of the AD&D ruleset. It gives you a near-limitless scope for perfectionist tinkering. The strategy behind choosing and casting your spells, finding the perfect party composition, setting your marching order, and optimizing your equipment has a phenomenal depth to it, and those moments when you have perfect execution are incredibly satisfying. Plus, there is so much of this world to explore, with plenty of NPCs to meet, party conversations that are at turns amusing and effecting, and a diverse menagerie of monsters to beat the shit out of. There is literally nothing I could reasonably want out of a D&D video game that has been left out (except, of course, crabmen).

Yet, if I'm being perfectly honest, I haven't been greatly enjoying myself over the past ten days. I think it comes down to mood. I've been pretty worried and stressed out about non-game related stuff, and that has leaked into my gaming life. Playing Baldur's Gate II has felt more like a chore than a joy (which is why it has taken me 10 days to play 20 hours - significantly longer than it took me to finish the much inferior Bad Rats), but despite having some aspects that could fairly be described as "chore-like," I don't actually think it's the game's fault. I'd often thought of gaming as a way to temporarily escape life's troubles, but it turns out you can never really escape from yourself.

I'm not sure what I want to do now. There is so much of Baldur's Gate II left to explore, and I know in my heart that if I could just capture the proper sense of dedicated immersion, I would want to burrow my way into the game and never leave, but when I actually think about the physical act of playing it, I start to feel anxious and overwhelmed. I think I've subconsciously formed a mental link between this game and the avalanche of bills that all came due since my last paycheck. So the frustration I feel towards Aran Linvail for taking my damned money and not giving me what he promised may be mostly a reaction to obnoxious rpg plot-padding, but is also probably more than a little mixed up with how I'm feeling towards the student loan people right now.

As a result, I think I'm going to have to say goodbye to Baldur's Gate II, at least for a little while. It is undeniably a classic, and I'm definitely going to want to explore it thoroughly, but now is not a good time for me. I guess that means I've lost the bet I made with myself, and will thus play Dungeons and Dragons Online instead of Planescape: Torment, but you know what, I'm cool with that. I'm pretty sure that as an MMO, Dungeons and Dragons Online has plenty of content to cater to clueless newbies, and a game that I'm not immensely invested in "solving" or "experiencing to the fullest" (because, unlike other games on my list, I downloaded this one for free) may be just the palate cleanser I need to get back into the groove of things.

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition - 14/20 hours

I have to hand it to Baldur's Gate II - they are not fucking around when it comes to AD&D lore. At one point, while I was crawling around in the sewers underneath the city slums, I popped up an unmarked staircase and faced a group of myconids. Yes, myconids. It's at this point that I wish there were some kind of dry and understated sarcasm font so I could get across exactly how nonplussed I was when I stumbled across this encounter.

Myconids are also known as "fungus men." They are humanoid mushrooms who live in a hierarchical, caste based society ruled by myconid kings, who are larger, blue in color, and can incapacitate enemies with psychoactive spores.

The game doesn't explain this. The myconids are just there. There's no attempt to integrate them into the larger story or explore the world-building implications of their existence. They're just weird creatures that you have to fight.

That's not a complaint, by the way. It's entirely true to the spirit of old-school D&D, and it makes curious, if not eager, to find out exactly how far out there the game will get - Owlbears, wolfweres, crabmen, winged snakes? I'm kind of hoping I get to see a Thought Eater (which sounds like a super serious and horrifying monster, but looks like this:

 

Yes, that's a platypus skeleton, and yes, it's a real monster)

But Baldur's Gate II's commitment to being true to AD&D has a downside as well. I was clearing out a a sinister slaver compound and found to my dismay that the slavers had some trolls (because when you are in the business of buying and selling human beings of course you want to keep flesh eating monsters in the same building as your primary product and their primary food source - there's nothing at all that can go wrong with that scenario) and I discovered that I could not kill them. The reason for this is that the Baldur's Gate trolls play by the same rules as trolls in the roleplaying game - they quickly  regenerate any damage not caused by fire or acid, and the only way to kill them is to reduce them to 0 hit points and then hit them with an attack of the appropriate type. 

Unfortunately, when I encountered these trolls, I had no fire or acid spells memorized (going into the intricacies of AD&D's bizarre magic system could be a whole series of long posts in and of itself), and, unlike the tabletop game, I couldn't just handwave it away by claiming I used my flint and tinder to light a torch. I had to go away, sleep to rememorize my spells, and then come back and fight the trolls again. And what if I hadn't known their weakness? It's not as if the game took pains to spell it out (although, to be fair to Baldur's Gate, I am extraordinarily sloppy when it comes to keeping up with in-game lore, so I may have just missed it).

All-in-all, I'm enjoying this more than the original Baldur's Gate, because the higher level gameplay is a bit more forgiving (I have a cleric who can cast Raise Dead, which gives my party a ton more stamina), but those little D&D-isms still kind of bug me. There's a reason I stopped playing AD&D second edition and moved onto other roleplaying games.

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition - 9/20 hours

In the course of writing this blog, I've noticed something about myself - I like Big Games. It's a preference that transcends genres. If I'm playing an rpg, it had better have multiple character builds, dialogue trees, and an open-ended story. If it's a strategy game, it should be be a massive time sink, with plenty of fiddly bits for me to tweak. If it's an action game, unlockable powers, hidden (but not too hidden) stages, and an epic storyline are a must.

Yet, if I'm being honest, I can't help but feel a certain ambivalence about these games. It's like their bigness is a prerequisite to catching my attention, but once I start actually playing them, I begin to feel a bit overwhelmed. This isn't an absolute thing - I have over 300 hours in Civilization 5, and I've more or less systematically completed both Oblivion and Fallout: New Vegas - but it's nonetheless part of my awareness. I start to worry. "Am I playing this thing right?" "Did I miss something important?" "Maybe it would be easier/more interesting/more fun if I started over and made different choices."

Maybe it's because I'm aware of the commitment I'm making in starting a Big Game. I know I'm going to be with it for awhile, and I fear that if I do things wrong, I'll be stuck doing something I don't enjoy (or, at least, could potentially be enjoying more). Or maybe it's a kind of misguided guilt, like if I don't take the right path, I won't be experiencing the game "as intended" and wind up coming away with an unfair judgement of the game (with a simple I game, I don't have that fear, possibly because I'm overconfident about my ability to understand such games in their entirety). More likely, it's simply a case of choice paralysis - I get myself so worked up with hypotheticals that I lose sight of the now.

Which is to say, I haven't accomplished much in the past four hours. I beat the Shade Lord, solved the small town's whole "mysterious death" problem, and recruited a couple of new party members - Valygar, the ranger (the Cowled wizards wanted me to kill him, but fuck those guys, they didn't even give Imoen a hearing), and Mazzy, the halfling fighter (a clear example of the game creator's just outright fucking with fans of the pen and paper game, seriously a halfing fighter). That sidequest only took me up to 10,000 gp, so now I'm wandering around looking for work, and my big worry is that there are just so many random npcs that I might get tired of searching the maps right before I stumble onto someone with some real money.

Baldur's Gate II is definitely a Big Game. Even if I get to the main story, I won't see the whole thing. The question before me now is, what's the best path, going forward? Fighting the Shade Lord and his instant death attacks was a pain in the ass. Going into Valygar's planar sphere and finding a clay golem (immune to most spells and edged weapons, because AD&D2 was not at all shy about saying "nope, we're shutting you down") was even worse. And thus I can't help entertaining speculation that if I'd played things just a bit differently, maybe I'd be having an easier time.

But that, I suspect, is a fool's game. What I should be doing is accepting that while the game might be big, I am, in fact, just one person - a mind tethered to a particular place and time - and that I should not attempt to play the whole game at once. I should focus on what's in front of me, and take joy in exploring. I don't have to find an "optimal path," because really, as long as I'm still playing, the game is doing its job.

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition - 4/20 hours

On my way out of the first dungeon, I encountered a clone laboratory. The main villain, Irenicus, was attempting to bring a particular woman back to life. It was a sequence that highlighted the main weakness of crpgs. If I were playing this scenario in a tabletop game, I would have tried to ally with her. She had as much reason as I did to hate Irenicus, and she seemed to have an adventurer's skill set. If, as in the game, the clone was unable to listen to reason, I'd have used hold person or something to incapacitate her until I could bring her to a cleric for healing. In any event, the last thing I would have done is what the game forced me to do - kill her. It's always frustrating to brush up against a game's illusion of freedom, especially when it otherwise presents you with a great many choices.

Sadly, it was an unavoidable tragedy. Just like when we emerged from the dungeon and got into the middle of a magical battle. Irenicus was slaughtering some town guards for some unfathomable reason (I suspect he was trying to recapture us and the guards interfered, but then, why did he build his base under the town?) Imoen cast a spell to defend herself, and then the magic police showed up and arrested them both. Or, at least, they tried to arrest them, Irenicus killed a few of them, and more showed up. He finally submitted to capture on the condition that Imoen be taken as well.

Which, you know, is total bullshit. Given the circumstances of our encounter, it should be obvious that Irenicus is a ruthless murderer and general threat to the city, so why the hell would the magic police accommodate him like that? And what the hell do they have against Imoen? And why is there no way that we can get her released or at least tried in a court? Who are these assholes? Fantasy justice systems are always the worst.

On my way to the government building, I met Gaelyn Bayle, a highly suspicious character who claims to represent some sort of vague and mysterious organization. He told me his group would help me spring Imoen for twenty thousand gold.

My next move from here is to track down various odd jobs to earn the money to get Imoen out of jail. Currently, I am going after some kind of evil warlock or spirit called "the Shade Lord" in order to stop some killings in a random Podunk town. This involves winding my way through some very dim maps, and making a probably ill-advised alliance with a werewolf (as a D&D player, I should know that werewolves are always evil, but I've gotten used to thinking of them as the wild, yet noble creatures of more modern fiction).

My biggest worry at this point is that this is a much longer sidequest than I originally signed on for, and I'm not at all sure I'm tough enough to finish it (the enemies I'm fighting are immune to nonmagical weapons). I wish there was some way I could know what the intended level of the quest.  I guess that is just part of playing an old-school rpg. Perhaps freedom necessarily includes the freedom to not know what the hell you're doing.

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition - 2/20 hours

I kind of hate the opening to this game. Don't get me wrong, it does a lot of things right, but I'm having a bit of a hard time enjoying the pretty new level design or the robust, mid-level starting characters, because everything I've seen so far has been so fucking grim.

Okay, so maybe the cast of Baldur's Gate didn't leave a huge impression on me. There wasn't a whole lot of intra-party chatter, and I never learned about their backstories or personal interests. Nevertheless, I was generally well disposed towards them. We went through some hard times together, fought monsters, looted treasure, the whole rpg deal. They were my crew.

And in the first two hours of Baldur's Gate II, I find that half of them died, and the other half faced a fate worse than death. It doesn't help that my final party in the first game was Dynaheir, Minsc, Khalid, Jaheira, and Rasaad, so the starting party in BG2 is almost exactly the same, except Minsc and Jaheira have been tortured and had their lovers murdered.

And I don't even want to talk about what happened to Imoen. The game is being really vague about her experiences, and I can't help but think that's meant to imply she was raped by the villain. Then again, she also talks about being "cut," so perhaps she was "merely" tortured.

Blech, it's such an ugly way to begin a sequel. What were they thinking? "Hey, the fans of the first game are eager to catch up with the colorful cast of heroes, so we have to come up with something interesting to do in the time between the games . . . I know, how about we ruthlessly brutalize them, so that they have a real motive to fight this evil guy. Yes, it's perfect!"

I'm still in the process of escaping from the opening dungeon. When I last quit, Jaheira had just discovered Khalid's body, and I got the joy of consoling her in her grief, and hearing Imoen reassure her that he was mutilated after he was killed, because she was present when it happened and forced to watch when the villain kept her eyes open with probes.

I mean, I get Baldur's Gate II, you're edgy. Now will you back the fuck off a little so I can actually enjoy a damned fantasy rpg without wanting to bury my head in a pillow and cry myself to sleep?