Author Archives: Azuriel
[Baldur’s Gate 3] Too Late Now
One of the infographics from Larian regarding Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3) is how over 93% of players created a custom character for themselves. I… did not. And it is very clearly a mistake. One that I cannot possibly “fix” now that I’m like 45 hours deep into Act 1.
Why did I not create a custom character? I thought that the game was going to be like Divinity: Original Sin 2 wherein there were very specific story beats that would be better with an Origin character. Although, to be fair, I am not exactly certain that was the case even in that game. But it seemed important enough to do there, so I did so here as well, picking Gale.
If you are one of the overwhelmingly vast majority of players who haven’t rolled an Origin character, let me explain why it is a mistake: your character doesn’t speak. Yes, custom characters don’t speak either, but I am assuming that Gale has a lot more to say about things beyond 1-2 quips at the conclusion of side quests. I have no clue how much of his background is normally explained by the end of Act 1 (around where I’m at), but I assume that it’s more than practically nothing. Beyond talking to a cat with wings about my mother – of whom I know nothing and have no reason to care about – all this “origin story” business appears to be about as deep as the blurb you read on the character select screen.
Maybe things open up in the later Acts? But what I’m worried about is how that plays out narratively. Are there exclusive scenes that you only see if you are playing as Gale? That would be the ideal, I imagine. But I’m also worried about how much any of that really matters in comparison to just doing his companion quests. For example, I was all down for smooching Shadowheart until the awkwardly direct Karlach literally stole the show. What about Gale though? What is his personality like? What kind of hilarious banter would he be getting into with my current party? I’ll never know, because I am him, and I don’t say shit, apparently.
Well, I choose all the dialog, but you know what I mean. It’s not the same.
Kinda makes me wonder if this is a uniquely Larian game problem. Most other RPGs don’t have “Origin” characters, right? Or they do, with no option for a custom character, so you’re not stuck in this dilemma. Which apparently is only impacting me and the other 7% suckers. Oh well.
[Baldur’s Gate 3] (Un)Intuitive
I continue to play a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3. Indeed, I’m at 40 hours and still in Act 1.
Some of the problems I have with the game are my own fault. I was super into 3.5e D&D way back in the day, and a lot of my “intuitive” understanding of such systems are still based on that clearly superior ruleset. Just kidding – stuff like Short/Long Rests and similar refinements over the years are definitely welcome. But it did come as a bit of a shock that, say, Rogues are only able to get one Sneak Attack per round in 5e (and BG3). Back in my day, the only way a Rogue could keep up with spellcaster DPS output was being able to poke someone three times in one round and get a pile of d6s each poke.
Okay, that’s clearly my bad. But then the line starts getting a little blurry.
For example: Mage Armor says to increase a target’s AC to 13 + DEX modifier, as long as the target isn’t wearing armor. This sounds like a great bonus for a Barbarian who is already encouraged to not wear armor… but it doesn’t “stack” with their own Unarmored Defense ability (Add CON and DEX modifier to AC when unarmored). Like, I get that it would probably be a bit overpowered, but I had to reread the text several times to understand why it didn’t work – Mage Armor specifically puts AC to “13 + DEX” instead of simply increasing the base AC of 10 to 13.
Of course, that’s just the classical Mage Armor gotcha, that apparently has been getting people for 8+ years. Worked in 3.5e, by the way, but clearly if you read page 14 of the 5e Player’s Handbook: “if you have multiple features that give you different ways to calculate your AC, you choose which one to use.” Okay, Rules As Written, got it. But riddle me this, Batman… what does the BG3 spell Warding Bond do?
If you answered “create an unstoppable priesthood of clerics that only take half damage from everything,” you would obviously be wrong. Conspicuously absent from the BG3 description of Warding Bond is that the missing half of the damage you take can be found on the casting Cleric. Imagine my chagrin when I found that out, only after reading the “buff” that appeared on Shadowheart. But this is again a case of “just read the 5e Player Handbook to know how this 2023 CRPG works.”
Oh, hey, did you know that in BG3 prepared spells can actually be changed at any time outside combat? This is a big change from traditional (and 5e!) D&D rules that otherwise force you to, well, prepare which spells you can cast that day. What this means is that you can cast Mage Armor on yourself (which lasts until a Long Rest), and then drop it out of your list and put something else more useful in its place. You still use up one “casting” for the day, but now you get more options.
You can take things a bit further than that though, by having characters you’re not actively using cast things like Mage Armor while in camp. For example, you can have Gale cast Mage Armor on whomever, then swap Gale out for someone else. I had already been building my party in such a way that one person took utility spells and everyone else took offensive options, but knowing I could basically press the Camp button to essentially hotswap anyone at a moment’s notice took things to the next level. Now you can have your very own early-WoW era buffbot paladin, whose sole purpose is to stay at camp and buff your team.
A lot of this highlights perhaps the biggest issue I have with BG3 at the moment: its inscrutability. A lot of the media praise thus far as been for the exact opposite, that the game is making 5e D&D or CRPGs in general more approachable. And that could certainly be technically accurate. But consider this: there’s no in-game way to determine what your characters will get at the next level up… until you level up. You can’t browse a list of magic spells. There’s a staff you pick up that gives you +1 to unarmed attacks and I have no idea how that works. Do staff attacks count as unarmed? Do you hold it in your off-hand and then make unarmed attacks with your on-hand? Does it only work with Flurry of Blows? I don’t even have a Monk character for which this would be relevant, but it vexes me.
And who knows, I might well turn Gale into a Monk next time I gain a level.
Perhaps the “average” player doesn’t care about any of this and will just take their character to level 12 just as they are. But that doesn’t mean Larian shouldn’t also include some kind of indexed in-game encyclopedia or something. If you have time for a Show Genitals button, surely you can have a Preview Level button. I would settle for a Wiki worth a single god damn, because the Fextralife one is near unusable and filled to the brim with outdated Early Access nonsense.
Anyway. Larian has indicated that they are working towards a Patch 1 with a “gigantic list of tweaks and changes.” Here’s to hoping that a little more clarity and intuitiveness is amongst them.
Impressions: Baldur’s Gate 3
Basically Divinity: Original Sin 2.5. But (more) balanced this time!
First, let’s acknowledge the obvious: Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3) is already a smash hit. As of this post, Steam indicates a peak of 814,466 concurrent players, which makes it the 8th out of the top 10 of all time. Concurrent players doesn’t really mean much in a vacuum, but it is an impressive feat given its peers on that list. It makes me wonder if, like Elden Ring before it, BG3 will generate a renewed interest in an otherwise niche genre that no longer feels like such.
But what about the game itself? Is it as good as they say? Yes. And… sorta.
The game is gorgeous and highly, highly detailed. You have near-infinite freedom in designing your character(s), including the Cyberpunk-esque ability to mix-and-match genitals. There are Origin characters you recruit that have their own personal stories and special powers, or you can skip all that and just recruit mercs you make yourself. There are environmental dangers such as webs and oil slicks which you can combo with your spells. You can pick up damn near everything, including forks, knives, incense, exploding barrels, skulls, and most everything else your heart desires. Quests are detailed, dialog has multiple branching paths to take depending on skills, and there are many different ways to complete tasks.
Aside from the genitals though, all of that just describes Original Sin 2.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. My biggest issue with Original Sin 2 was the game balance, or lack thereof. A lot of those issues neatly evaporate in the near-RAW (Rules As Written) embrace of 5E D&D. There is no Physical Armor vs Magic Armor to worry about. Spells and abilities are much more limited, and (sometimes frustratingly) balanced thereby. You can still perform some crazy combos depending on the environment, but there is not an expectation that you will be electrifying pools of blood/water every battle without fail.
An embrace of “traditional” D&D rules can sometimes be annoying however. Spellcasters are limited to a finite amount of spell slots per Long Rest. This is perhaps more balanced than the alternative of being able to alpha-strike enemies all the time. The issue though is how the majority of attacks – at least at level 3 where I’m at – have, at best, a 65% chance of hitting. This naturally leads one to more highly consider the spells less reliant on attack rolls, which heads back into traditional Larian surface-prepping. And once you start heading (back) down that path, you start having your rogue collect explosive barrels and planting them next to foes while in stealth so you can blow up three enemies in the first surprise round of combat. While very fun to do, we’re right back into “Original Sin 2.5” territory.
Also, can I just say that I am immensely annoyed that the devs have surpassed even Witcher 3 in the ludonarrative dissonance department? The game opens up with you getting a mind flayer parasite planted into your eye, and everyone repeatedly talking about how you will turn into an mind flayer yourself after 7 days. I am not very far into Act 1 as I understand it, but I have Long Rested twice thus far, and so I should only have five days left before I turn. But I presently see no indication that a time limit actually exists, and would probably have heard about it on the internet by now if it did. While I understand that perhaps the greater narrative will eventually expound on why we don’t turn after 7 days, this false sense of time-sensitivity – combined with the game mechanics of Long Resting for spellcasters – really rubs me the wrong way. It was absurd in Witcher 3 when you “just missed” Ciri despite spending 40 hours dithering around, and is even more absurd here in BG3.
If it seems like I’m just shitting on Baldur’s Gate 3, well… sorry. I have played for 19 hours thus far and the game came out like four days ago. It’s a fun game! But I do recognize that it is benefitting from an unusual sort of marketing zeitgeist way out of proportion to what it is currently (at least in the early stages) bringing to the table(top). It isn’t even the first game to faithfully recreate 5E rules either – Solasta came out three years ago. I have played both Solasta and Divinity: Original Sin 2, so none of what I’m seeing is particularly groundbreaking.
That said, if someone hasn’t played either of those two games or perhaps never seemed interested in CRPGs before, Baldur’s Gate 3 is probably the best place to start. It’s popular, it’s shiny, and it is certainly the most approachable the genre has ever been.
Time will tell whether Larian can stick the landing past Act 2 or if it’s all downhill after the bear sex.
Impressions: Craftopia
A lot of developers, even in the indie space, like to play things safe. Even if the genre is something out of left field, a lot of the basic game design still feels like +10% skill bonus here, clearly defined tutorial there. Early Access is treated as a soft launch – which it definitely is – of the final product instead of an opportunity to just go nuts.
Meanwhile, Craftopia is the nuts. I don’t remember the last time I played something where you could just feel the devs sitting around a whiteboard saying “That sounds cool, let’s try it out.” And since the team is from Japan, they are already coming at design from sometimes extra weird angles.
On the face of it, Craftopia is… well, let me just post this from the Steam store page:
Craftopia is the brand new multiplayer open-world survival action game.
We have imagined what would happen when we combine our favorite video games altogether.
Chop trees and mine stones as in Sandbox,
Explore the world as in Open-world,
Fight the hunger as in Survival,
Cultivate and harvest as in Farming,
Collect loots in dungeons as in Hack-and-slash,
Automate activities as in Factory management,
Hunt monsters and creatures as in Hunting action,
Cast magical spells as in Fantasy RPG.Now we have a utopia for all of us. That is Craftopia.
After destroying the world in the opening credits, your character emerges from a tutorial cave and you can basically do whatever you want. The game looks like Breath of the Wild and/or Genshin Impact, including the ability to gecko-climb up every surface from the get-go (and build a glider soon after). Following the breadcrumb quests will take you to some NPCs and a small town where you can get acquainted to the crafting. The thing to know is that you can basically build anywhere, which will be important later.
Before the big Seamless World update in late June, the game was basically a series of instanced islands and you needed to unlock things to open portals to other places. Now, you can basically go anywhere you want right off the bat, although you will of course encounter higher-level enemies the farther afield you explore. One of the principle progression mechanics is unlocking special pillars across the landscape using crafted goods. Once you supply the necessary ingredients and then press the button at the top of the resulting pillar, you progress the “Age” and unlock new crafting possibilities.
Let me talk about the pillar for a second though, because it was amazing to me. I supplied the ingredients and then it shot up into the sky. I started climbing the pillar, which is something you can just do, but I started getting nervous halfway up because the ledges were very tiny and, admittedly, the game has a lot of jank. So I threw down a wood platform so I wouldn’t fall off. And then I slapped my forehead with the realization that I could have just built a spiral staircase to reach the top. Which I then did. There’s a floating island you need to reach to get some upgrades, and I presumably would have learned that lesson had I done that earlier, but whatever.
Aside from the crafting aspect, there is a lot of experimentation in the Skill trees as well. You can choose to use Magic of various flavors, enhance your normal weapon attacks, unlock basic movement skills like double-jump, and more. When I played, a large portion was simply unselectable placeholders, but what exists is plenty inventive and makes me feel excited for the possibilities. One Skill lets you throw a knife and then teleport to that location. I was a tad disappointed that its range is limited, but it reminded me how much fun I had with Rogues in WoW with Grappling Hook and Shadowstep.
Also, apparently there is an entire Pokemon element in the game wherein you can capture and breed anything in the game, including NPCs (!!), and ride them into battle (!?!). Actually, I haven’t tried to see if you can ride the NPCs, but I have ridden a cow and what looked like a Shy Guy from Mario 2, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
Also also, there are dungeons with traps and boss fights. Building is more limited inside, but there was a sequence where you had to come up with something to avoid fireball turrets and infinitely falling giant iron balls that roll down the main ramp. I hesitate to call the boss combat Soulslike, but you do need to dodge and counter-attack at precise moments to avoid damage. Or summon a bunch of pets/NPCs and spam attacks? Didn’t try that, personally, but maybe it would work.
What I will say though, is that currently Craftopia has a lot of jank. Like, a lot a alot. When I played, damn near half of the NPC dialog was in untranslated Japanese, and what was in English was very clearly machine-translated. According to one patch note the untranslated dialog was due to a bug, but let’s just say that this isn’t exactly an AA game experience at the moment. It certainly is A game experience, and definitely a BBB game if I ever saw one.
And that’s fine. What I love about Craftopia already is that it can improve in so many different ways and directions from here. That sounds like a backhanded compliment, perhaps, but my point is that these guys threw the entire box of spaghetti at the wall, instead of just a normal amount. With what they got going on so far, I am not worried about them necessarily cutting features and/or nerfing certain builds into the ground. Which means we could just have fun for once in completely unique ways. How many times does that happen?
The one negative I’ll say is that it’s difficult to justify playing exactly right now. For one thing, there is apparently some kind of critical Save Game bug, which is about the worst thing that can happen with a survival-crafting game. But more than that, I worry about playing through things, getting my fill with the novelty, and then them releasing a whole bunch of new elements that I don’t get to experience because I’ve moved on. That’s a Me problem, 100%, but it’s there. The roadmap suggests that an official release may come in or after September, which isn’t too far away, and may be just as well considering that’s when Starfield comes out.
But overall, if you want to experience a game where it feels like almost anything can happen, Craftopia is where it’s at.
Dog Days
I have a tag called “ennui” and that’s what is currently going on over here:
a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement.
Usually the ennui I experience comes as a sort of post-game depression after-effect of spending 6+ hours a day on some particular videogame and then beating it. That is not the case currently – in fact, I have found myself incapable of completing anything lately. The motivation just isn’t there. The proximate cause in these situations is typically that I really want to play X game but cannot, for whatever reason. You know, because the game isn’t on sale or some equally asinine thing.
This time around, it’s possible there are two things going on. First, I have a number of games in my “Early Early Access” Steam category, which I am deliberately not playing. Well, deliberately stopped playing in some cases. The second is that we have the imminent release of Baldur’s Gate 3 and some other titles, to which I want to play quite a bit. Hard to enjoy an independent experience when you know you’re under a time crunch to finish before heading to something you are anticipating more.
We’ll see where things go. By many accounts, BG3 is supposed to be 75-100 hours of playtime just for the main story, which is a bit absurd. On the other hand, I’ve been “throwing away” about a dozen hours on 7 Days to Die (and some other random titles) these past few days. I feel guilty doing so when I have Elden Ring and other meaty games waiting for completion, but that’s just the mood right now.
7 Days to Die, Again
7 Days to Die (7DTD) received a new patch a few weeks ago. So I had to boot it up.
If you haven’t heard of it, or read any of my posts, 7DTD is a zombie survival-crafting game that has been in an alpha state for almost 10 years. It has survived this long because A) it’s a fun, more realistic zombie Minecraft, and B) it continues to receive updates, albeit on a more yearly cadence. I came in around Alpha 15 or so, and this most recent release is Alpha 21. Supposedly the game will go gold with Alpha 23, but the dev team never had anyone with project management skills, and it kind of shows.
Case in point: the devs have spent a majority of A21 overhauling the leveling system and mucking with the early game. Again. For the 3rd/4th Alpha in a row. When I started playing, the skill system was a “learn by doing” sort of Oblivion system, wherein you crafted hundreds of stone axes to increase the potency of future stone axes. Then they moved towards a Skill Point system, so you needed to focus on leveling up and assigning points into Skills that improved your crafting ability. With A21, you now need to find and consume skill magazines in order to level each of dozens and dozens of skills. The Skill Points are still there, but are more focused on 10% (etc) bonuses, although you will find more corresponding skill magazines by spending points in specific areas, e.g. Spears, Shotguns, etc.
Are these changes bad? Yes and no.
In principle, I am fine with devs trying to figure out their preferred method of player progression. This is what Alpha states are supposed to be about, after all. The problem with the Fun Police Pimps (their actual studio name) is that they are almost actively hostile to the way most people play their game. Over the years, the Minecraft elements have been nerfed into oblivion because they didn’t like players just basically digging into the ground and smelting iron and crafting all corresponding items (guns, etc). So, they nerfed the XP gains from digging and tied blueprints to either levels or loot (Skill books). When players still Minecrafted their way to castles, the devs started adding things like “gun parts” as uncraftable items you had to loot. Which, fine, whatever, but that also leads to ridiculous situations like how you need “baseball bat parts” to make a wooden bat, but can engineer a working gyrocopter out of scrap metal just fine.
Meanwhile, over the years the devs started adding “dungeon” Points of Interest (PoIs) into the game. Whereas existing homes and shops were set up in a logical manner, these new PoIs were designed around players going along set pathways and encountering zombies in scripted ways, with extra loot at the end. These are cool… the first time you encounter them. Unfortunately, the devs has since turned every PoI into a dungeon, making looting a bit of a slog. Until/unless you have memorized where the main loot in located and can just break through doors/walls/ceilings to bypass everything.
Meanwhile meanwhile, the devs have also been tweaking zombie AI over the years to counteract players. The eponymous 7 Days horde is a bunch of zombies who attack at a sprint, always knowing your exact location. When I started playing, they couldn’t dig straight down, so if you found or built a bunker, you were basically immune. Clearly, that was a bit too easy. Zombies were then allowed to dig, making underground bases problematic. Players then started just driving around all horde night on motorcycles, so devs made zombie vultures move at 300% speed when you’re in a vehicle. People then started making zombie mazes. Devs wildly overcorrected and gave all zombies perfect omniscience as to the block HP of everything between you and them, so that they make a direct beeline towards the weakest part of your base. Not only was this nonsensical – how does a zombie know this concrete block has 495 HP instead of that one? – but it invalided all “real-world” defense strategies like installing spiked walls everywhere. Players then made zombie obstacle courses that end in impossible-for-AI jumps, so the devs reduced zombie fall damage and made them “rage” a bit, attacking any nearby blocks (e.g. support pillars).
Oh, and new to A21: glass jars and tin cups have been removed from the game. The stated goal was to make water a more important concern in the early game, as otherwise you could craft/find tons of containers, fill them up at a nearby lake, and boil your way to eliminate thirst. I mean… sigh. Maybe being able to craft glass jars in a Forge with just sand is a bit much. But that just makes bodies of water useless, throwing out another element of rational post-apocalypsing in favor of abstract game design. Instead, we must imagine you drinking bottles of water and throwing the container away, while you desperately collect enough coins to purchase a Water Filter from vendors, which you use to craft Dew Collectors, which generously grant you 3 Water (containers!) per day… from the aether.
Games change over the course of Alphas, especially when they have gone on for ten years. But at a certain point, you have to question whether the devs even want to finishing make the game they started. One of the leads once admitted on the forums that if they could go back in time, they would not have allowed players to dig into the ground. Which… is kind of a big deal for a voxel-based game.
All of the changes mentioned above though make digging immaterial to begin with. There used to be a tension between looting buildings and still saving enough time to build your own base to survive horde night. Now the optimal, dev-directed course is to spam quests from vendors – oh yeah, quests were introduced a few Alphas ago – to get PoI loot + quest loot, and just camp on the roof of a bank or whatever for the hordes. The zombies will eventually tear down the building after a few weeks of hordes, but by that time you will have enough high-level loot to kill them with ease, especially after creating a little obstacle course.
The good news is that 7 Days to Die has already attracted some quality mod authors over the years that have put out some transformative overhauls. So even if the Fun Pimps continue to go all-in on making the game just a series of scripted zombie encounters, there is still hope for an experience more akin to the game it used to be. Which is more than can be said for many titles out there.
Microsoft (All But) Acquires Activision-Blizzard
The FTC has lost its injunction case against the Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard merger. Minutes later, the remaining regulatory holdout in the UK appears to be in back-room discussions with Microsoft. Although the FTC can still technically appeal the decision, in all likelihood things will be buttoned up by the time this post goes live.
I have not been following the court case itself too closely. The armchair legal experts on Reddit though suggest that the FTC’s arguments were weak, but don’t really go into convincing detail as what alternative arguments would have been stronger. On the face of it, everything seemed to hinge on Sony – who currently owns 45% of the entire console market – being negatively impacted by the merger. Considering Xbox is just 27.3%, one might surmise that the merger would actually increase competition in the console space. At least the UK’s argument was about cloud gaming… something that basically doesn’t exist, with even Google and Amazon unable to get it to work.
I am sympathetic to the argument that buying publishers and game companies is detrimental generally. There are no doubt millions of PS5 owners who probably wanted to play Starfield on their console of choice. Sort of like how I would have liked to play Ghosts of Tsushima on PC, which isn’t even considered a console by Sony/courts, but nevermind.
Perhaps it’s a bit myopic, but I’m obviously in Team Game Pass. I don’t care about Call of Duty and I doubt WoW will change, but potentially seeing Diablo 4 show up without having to spend $70 on it is a welcome surprise. No doubt the good times will come to an end at some point, especially considering the recent subscription price hikes, but it’s still worlds better (and cheaper) than the alternatives.
Will everyone come to regret this outcome 10 years from now? I kinda hope so. Because that means things are normal enough in 2033 that we can still give a shit about video games and not play Fallout 5 by walking outside our front doors.
Reddit Protests, pt 2
Almost a month ago, there were a series of protests on Reddit concerning a pivot to essentially ban all 3rd-party apps via charging a ridiculous amount for API calls. These 3rd-party apps were not just better from a user-perspective, they also made moderation easier (or even possible for blind users). However, these apps did not run ads, so the revenue (if any) Reddit received was minimal. There can be a debate as to whether the Reddit admins were “justified” in basically shutting them all down, but I think in the aggregate it is/was clear that a better approach of A) charging less, and B) giving the apps more time to adjust to changes would have cooled things down.
So, what is the status of Reddit two weeks after the implementation? Simmering to boil.
The subreddit blackouts clearly did not effect much change in of themselves. However, the admin overreaction to the blackouts – mainly in the form of threats and disparagement of mods – has emboldened said mods into new forms of malicious compliance. Seriously though, the Reddit CEO went on NBC and said this:
If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders. And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.
“Landed gentry.” It is difficult to imagine a bigger slap in the face from someone who gets paid for what he does (spez) despite producing zero content, to all the unpaid (!!) mods who spend donate dozens/hundreds of hours of their time to ensure that subreddits aren’t just filled with trolls, hate-speech, and/or porn. According to this article, Reddit mods are (very conservatively) doing work worth $3.4 million per year. But, sure, they are all easily replaceable via “democratic processes.” Like… how?
The new front in the guerrilla protests is making subreddits NSFW. The notion is that by changing the classification to NSFW, Reddit will no longer be able to monetize that subreddit due to advertisers not wanting their product ad displayed next to something graphic. I have heard a few different arguments that this doesn’t actually work, e.g. ads are still displayed, but the reaction from the admins clearly suggests otherwise.
The first step was made by the mods of /r/interestingasfuck who basically all-but-encouraged their users to submit porn. Which they did. While I don’t believe it was a default subreddit, it does have 11.2 million subscribers, so what ended up happening was a flood of literal porn started appearing on peoples’ homepages. The Reddit admins quickly removed all the mods from the subreddit and essentially archived the whole place; there has not been a single new post there in 18 days. Presumably new mods will be installed via “democratic processes” at some point, but who knows when.
Other major subreddits are taking less explicit, but still hilarious routes. /r/Pics is default sub with over 30 million subscribers, for example, and the mods changed the subreddit rules such that “All posts must feature John Oliver.” This was done in a democratic fashion, just like the admins doubtlessly wanted. The mods also changed the overall subreddit category to NSFW with the justification that what constitutes NSFW by the admins themselves applies to the subreddit (profanity, potentially “offensive content”). Unfortunately, the admins have threatened the mods with removal for changing the subreddit category against its historical norms. While the mods are debating their next moves, they have let everyone know that all /r/Pics users can now label any post as NSFW.
True to their name, the mods on /r/madlads took it a step further and basically gave every one of their 1.7 million subscribers mod privileges. Now everyone is landed gentry! /r/politicalhumor did it too with their 1.6 million subscribers, but it’s less funny.
The admin threats do appear to be resonating in some ironic circles. For example, /r/NonCredibleDefense flipped back to SFW despite the purpose of the subreddit being military memes that frequently display graphic blood/gore. /r/DnDMemes mods also blinked, despite demanding an Intimidation check from spez. There will still be goblin smut and related porn allowed there, but apparently all is well as long as the individual posts are labeled NSFW.
The fundamental issue is that mods are not (easily) replaceable, but neither are the communities. Back in the day, there was a lot of concern that when /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/the_donald got banned, there would be “contagion” insofar as the users would migrate and infiltrate other subs. This basically didn’t happen – deplatforming works.
A 2017 study published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, examining “the causal effects of the ban on both participating users and affected communities,” found that “the ban served a number of useful purposes for Reddit” and that “Users participating in the banned subreddits either left the site or (for those who remained) dramatically reduced their hate speech usage. Communities that inherited the displaced activity of these users did not suffer from an increase in hate speech.”[12]
When you zoom into a micro level with just your own life, it makes sense. How you act with one set of friends is typically different than how you would act with a spouse, your extended family, work friends, etc. Everyone has masks for every occasion. So, I do not begrudge the mods who blinked in the face of potential subreddit annihilation, as there are often times nowhere else to go.
As with Phase 1 of the protests, we will have to see where things end up with Phase 2. Is it another flash in the pan, to be smothered by the wet towel of admin threats? Or will things continue to boil under the surface, with mods “laying flat” and/or “quiet quitting” and/or “acting their wage”? And what of the meat of Reddit, the user-submitted content? Will people get over it and move on to the next meme, or have things been permanently overcooked?
I myself have deigned to download the official Reddit app so as to continue consuming memes and information away from my PC. Amusingly the 3rd-party Reddit is Fun app still technically works, but I cannot log in, so all I see is the myriad of default subreddits and popular posts with no customization possible. Which means it is functionally useless to me. I have been following Wilhelm’s reviews of other social media sites with interest though, to see if any might possibly be an overall Reddit replacement despite not really being advertised as such. Discord sure as shit ain’t it, after all.
But as mentioned earlier, it’s likely that no replacement is possible. Both Reddit and Twitter are apparently not profitable as-is, so who in the world is going to try (and succeed) at making a replacement? I mean, other than the half-dozen venture capitalists doing exactly that. I have the various subreddits I enjoy but I am not married to them to the same degree that mods might be. If something is better, I will go there today. Unfortunately, it’s looking more like “you get what you get, and you won’t throw (much of) a fit.”
Impressions: Elden Ring
God damn.
I do not necessarily want to rehash everything about Elden Ring, as you probably have already heard loads about it. As of May 2023, Elden Ring has sold over 20.5 million copies, which made it the second best-selling game in all of 2022 (with Call of Duty taking the top spot). This is truly a stupendous achievement considering the type of game FromSoftware makes and where the Dark Souls series has come from. Although, yeah, this isn’t a Dark Souls game per se.
The overall formula has been shaken up quite a bit. Yeah, combat is still super tough, requiring patience, precise reflexes, and usually trial-and-error. Death still results in all your souls runes dropping on the floor and you possibly losing them if you die before picking them back up. You still level up in a deeply unsatisfying way, raising stats one at a time and getting vague bonuses on even vaguer secondary stats you will probably never actually use at any point in the game.
At the same time, the game feels entirely different. Dark Souls offered freedom of a sort once you got to the first main area, but nothing like Elden Ring. After unlocking three bonfires Sites of Grace, you get a double-jumping magical horse that you can call at a whim and even engage enemies while mounted. As a spellcaster, there is essentially zero downside for me to not be mounted 100% of the time. Your foes can knock you off the horse, but the mounted shenanigans fundamentally change how I approach open-world combat. I never felt comfortable just running past everything in Dark Souls, but here? Anything you actually engage is on purpose.
Amusingly, there are even pseudo-stealth mechanics at play. Clicking the left-stick (these games demand a controller IMO) will cause your character to crouch, and there’s even a tutorial screen about hiding in tall grass. Again, you could backstab mobs sometimes in Dark Souls, but it typically only occurred during combat after they missed an attack, or with certain mob pathing. Now, you can practically Solid Snake your way through many areas, up to and including firing arrows at walls to make enemies turn around and investigate the sound.
I also appreciate that combat feels a lot… tighter? And more gamey at the same time? Dodge rolling is super important as always, but unlike in Dark Souls, I actually saw several times where my character clearly was hit by a sword or whatever but I had i-frames and thus took no damage. Enemy attacks seem to be telegraphed a bit better, or at least it feels that way.
At the same time, some of the weaknesses of the Dark Souls series are amplified in Elden Ring.
I already mentioned leveling feeling unrewarding, but exploration (thus far) feels both encouraged and kinda punished. Caves act as Skyrim-esque mini-dungeons, filled with enemies and traps, with a mini-boss at the end. If you are successful, you are accumulating runes that you will need to spend to level up or upgrade your gear, lest you lose them. But the freeform exploration means you can never really tell where anything is, or what you are building towards. Do you spend resources upgrading your starting gear, to help you in the encounters to come? What if the very next chest or body holds a vastly superior item? What are the Intelligence requirements for spells you find soon? Where the hell even is the Sorcerer trainer?
These known unknowns are part of the “mystique” of Dark Souls and certainly would sell a lot of game guides back in the 90s, but it’s all part of the sort of design bullshit I hate. I don’t need to be optimizing for the endgame from level 1, but I do need to feel confident that the devs aren’t being obtuse on purpose. Can you miss crucial game mechanics (Ashes of War) for not fully exploring one of the beginning camps? Yes. Could you technically get by without using them? Yes. Can you complete the entire game just using Glintstone Pebble? Yes.
Would this lead to a richer, more fulfilling gaming experience? No.
It’s a fine line to walk, I get it. It’s also useless to complain about degrees of hand-holding in a FromSoftware title… although they clearly do give way more hints with the “lines of grace” on the map (or having a map at all). But I bring all this up because the end result is that I hit up the Wiki or Youtube to get one minor frustration answered and end up seeing “How to become OP in the first 15 minutes without fighting a single enemy.” Which, cool, good job constructing your game in such a way that it rewards technique and mastery in learning routes. But also, WTF, mate? I’m over here playing Elden Ring like a standard videogame with progression when I clearly should have been running past every mob just yoinking all the upgrades off the ground from horseback.
I dunno, man. The problem is: when does that stop? When do you start “playing the game” and actually tackling bosses? I encountered one open-world mini-boss recently and got clobbered, even on horseback. The typical Souls solution is to Git Gud and/or farm some more levels. I did the latter, but also spent an hour riding around and getting two additional flasks plus one flask upgrade before coming back. Beat that mini-boss and was rewarded with… crap I’ll probably never use. Not quite as bad in some RPGs wherein you can out-level gear rewards entirely, but certainly not at all on par with how powerful I had become to beat the boss. That’s certainly a unique sort of freedom, but I don’t exactly want to praise the freedom to make the game experience worse for myself.
We’ll have to see where things go from here. I’m 15 hours in, zero major bosses down, still dithering in basically the first map of the game. Will things improve? Will it get worse in new ways? Who knows. If I’m casting the same two spells another 30 hours from now though, I’ll be very disappointed.
In An Age 
Asset Flip
Aug 3
Posted by Azuriel
One of the games I was looking forward to during the previous Steam sale was one called Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival. The trailer was amazing, the premise novel, the gameplay was survival-crafting, it had it all! So, imagine my dismay when I read this review:
You can read the full review yourself, but the gist is that the one-person “dev” downloaded a bunch of Unreal marketplace assets and just dumped them as-is into his game. These environmental assets have demo areas already built, along with tools to customize that area or create new ones, but apparently the dev just used the demo areas. Other reviews point out that the dev has a very cynical marketing mindset wherein he publishes a lot of similar asset flips in Steam trying to determine how to generate traffic (and revenue) using as little effort as possible.
This is further supported by the fact that “Karagon (Survival Robot Riding FPS)” – yes, that’s the actual name – was another indie title this dev released three months ago. I had been looking forward to Karagon too, as a sort of ARK substitute to hold me over until the remaster/sequel got released. The reviews further reinforce the notion that the dev swoops in, dumps a game with recycled assets, and swoops away with whatever cash wasn’t refunded.
The concern about asset flips is not limited to this one specific dude, of course. In my last post, I was talking about Craftopia and all the cool things (and a lot of jank) going on there. What I had not realized was that the devs of Craftopia are the same ones as the upcoming Palworld. If you haven’t seen the amazing trailer for Palworld, take a quick peek now, because it’s worth it. Big publishers can have multiple teams working on different products, but something tells me that that isn’t exactly the case here. In PocketPair’s defense, Palworld is slated for an Early Access release January 2024 and Craftopia has a roadmap that ends in September of this year.
In PocketPair’s non-defense though, their latest trailer showed this area for a split-second:
Is it exact? No. I suppose there are only so many different ways you can construct a stone bridge. And, you know, if you need to put out a trailer for an alpha game to generate buzz, you may as well use whatever you have laying around in any case. That said, the shenanigans with Grand Emprise have made me a bit sensitive to this situation. Was Craftopia’s “Seamless Update” really intended to enhance the game? Or did they want to beta-test their Palworld alpha?
There is potentially a conversation to be had as to whether asset flips are bad at all. Things like microtransactions and DLC put the monetary side of the industry front and center, but it is easy to forget that these things that bring us joy are a product being sold. Therefore it is a bit presumptuous of me to characterize someone as being lazy and cynical when that can technically describe all capitalistic aspects of product development. I’d very much prefer devs to have a passion for the game they are making, but as long as it’s fun, who cares? There are apparently many people who played Grand Emprise and had fun with it.
…yeah, no, can’t do it.
I try to have at least one paragraph where I take the opposite side of the argument just to see if there is something I’m missing, but I don’t think so in this case. Asset flips are shitty and it’s especially frustrating to be a fan of the survival genre when it’s apparently ground zero for this chicanery. We are indeed deep in this bizarro world in which even “completed” games feel like abandonware, but Grand Emprise is a whole other level of nihilism.
I suppose we as gamers are not “owed” the same level of passion as ConcernedApe (Stardew Valley) or the people behind Terraria, but it’s still just sad. We become invested in these gaming experiences in a way that we don’t for other products. So, to me, exploiting that investment oftentimes diminishes my very capacity to be invested in things in the future. That is… just restating the definition of being jaded, but the actual diminishment feels much more personal somehow.
Oh well. Caveat emptor and all that.
Posted in Commentary
2 Comments
Tags: Asset Flip, Craftopia, Cynicism, Grand Emprise, Palworld, Survival