Category: Uncategorized

The first Tuesday of September is here. What’s in the box?

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is probably great for someone, I dunno. I like Borderlands gameplay reasonably well but I also really like its aesthetic, and the existing set of four games (counting the Pre-Sequel) is already enough to mostly exhaust my interest in the mechanics, so I don’t need a fifth game that does away with the aesthetic. Also, Tiny Tina’s not that great? I don’t know why this character is so beloved. There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s one of the better Borderlands side characters, but nothing about her leapt out as needing an entire game of her shouting about dragons.

Deceive Inc. is a multiplayer game about being a spy trying to steal a thing before any of the other spies can steal it. This is a cool concept and I might give it a whirl, but it can’t be meaningfully completed so it’s not going on the backlog, and I’d be surprised if my hours of play broke double digits by the end of the year. This is one of those games that would probably be really fun if I had a group of 4-5 people who played these kinds of things regularly with each other, but I don’t.

The Forgotten City is a “mystery and adventure game” set in a faithful recreation of an Ancient Roman city. It seems like one of those things where someone really just wanted to recreate an Ancient Roman city and then realized if they wanted to sell the thing, some kind of gameplay would be required. Fair enough, and I might explore the city on a lark, but it’s also not going into the backlog because I definitely don’t care about completing it. If there’s a blogpost about it, expect one of the highest criteria for whether it’s any good to be how easy it is to ignore the main plot completely and just walk around.

Aces&Adventures is a “poker-powered deckbuilding adventure.” That sounds like a perfectly good basis for a game, but what few scraps of plot it advertises are very generic. It seems like it’s trying to sell itself entirely on its mechanics, and there it runs into the problem that I already quite like Slay the Spire and don’t really see what this game brings to the table over just replaying that. The obvious niche here is people who really love deckbuilding games the way I like Metroidvanias, but I am not those people.

Patch Quest is a Pokemon game except it’s also Bullet Hell, a Metroidvania, and a Roguelike. I went back and forth on this a bit, partly I just don’t like the art style very much, but also it’s a Roguelike, and I am extremely over those, and ultimately I decided not to put it on the list. My general policy is getting to be that if I’m on the fence, give it a pass, but I think that’s a good policy – when I’ve already got so many good games in front of me, avoiding wasting time with a dud becomes more valuable than one more good game on the pile.

Fore Tales is another card-based game, but this one sells itself a good deal on its story. It’s got that Redwall “anthropomorphic animals in a medieval setting” vibe and seems light-hearted and pulpy without being childish, which is a pretty good tone to strike for me. At 20 hours, it’s pushing it for a “try it out and see” game, but that is main story+, while main story only is less than 10 hours, so I can always just skip some side content if I decide it’s not working.

Who Pressed Mute On Uncle Marcus is an FMV game made during the pandemic lockdown. I appreciate the need to keep a career on life support during the lockdown, but it’s unfortunately true that basically every pandemic project a live-action actor participated in turned out to be strictly worse than live action content you can find on Netflix. Having not played Uncle Marcus at all, it’s possible this one’s the exception, but I’m not gonna spend two or three hours finding out. As short as that is compared to an entire month’s worth of playing games, it’s still time I could spend playing Grime.

Autonauts vs. Piratebots is some kind of economy-automating game except the end goal is to produce an army with which to destroy the piratebots. I’ve always liked the idea of an RTS game that focuses heavily on the base building while putting minimal pressure on unit micro to the point where it plays more like a city-builder where the end goal is to mass troops and send them out to crush an enemy, and this seems like it’s trying to be that, so I will definitely give it a try. It’s a sequel to Autonauts, so I’m slightly worried that it’s not going to stand alone well, but will rather expect all players to be veterans of the original, when as far as I’m concerned the original only exists so the devs could get some initial returns on the basic systems on the way to making the real game. We’ll see how that turns out.

This gets me up to 162 in the backlog, despite having spent an embarrassing amount of time on Dungeons III DLCs. They’d completely run out of ideas for the last two, but by that point I was so close to done I decided to enable to cheat console just so I could say I’d gotten them all. I’ve also got Cook Serve Delicious 2 nearly finished off, been picking at that one for ages now.

Merchant of the Skies is one of those games where you sail/fly around a map to buy things where they’re cheap to sell them where they’re expensive in order to buy bigger ships and reach more distant locations. As the name suggests, it takes place in a floating archipelago and you have an airship to huck your goods around in. Its distinguishing feature is that it has significant base-building elements. As you explore the (randomly generated) map, you can find the standard collection of cities selling goods, but also several uninhabited islands that have some kind of resource on them: Wheat, wood, stone, whatever. You can build a little base to harvest the resource, and other buildings to process that resource, turning sand into glass into bottles and then supplying an alchemist with both bottles and apples to make apple cider or else with both bottles, tea leaves, and flowers to make medicine. Once you’ve rebuilt the lighthouse and figured out how to build your own recharging towers (all the airships are powered by electricity, even though they’ve got propellors and balloons and stuff) you can buy boats and program them to run routes to do things like ferry your glass bottles from the sand pit where they’re created to the apple orchard where you’ve built an alchemist to turn them into cider, then have the same ship pick up the finished cider to deliver to an inn for profit.

This is a cool idea, although the execution leaves something to be desired. Almost no one sells any resources above the first tier. You can buy and sell sand and wood, but not glass or lumber. If you want to make a killing from your base-building, you have to find a gem island and set up a mine, because gems are a tier 1 resource that regular towns buy but also super valuable. Some higher-tier resources remain useful for the whole game because of how common they’re used for base building, chiefly lumber and bricks, and there’s a set of four (depending on difficulty setting) inns on the map that you can keep supplied with bread (baked from flour that’s ground up from wheat, making it a tier 3 resource) and apple cider (made from glass bottles and apples, making it a tier 4 resource).

Others, however, are useful exclusively for a specific side quest that calls for them: Iron gears are used to repair a lighthouse, which means you need exactly 20 of them ever in the whole game and can pretty much shut down your whole iron gear production facility after you get them. There’s a side quest to deliver two bottles of medicine early-ish in the game, but it hints that you should track down the wise men on their giant flying turtle and buy it from them rather than try to manufacture it for yourself, and medicine will never be useful again, despite being probably the single hardest resource to create in the game. The game really would’ve benefited from somewhere to send your iron gears and medicine (and maybe also bricks and lumber) in the endgame, the way inns take bread and apple cider at a steady rate forever. This is especially true since you can’t just sell these high-tier resources at regular towns, so there’s absolutely no point in making them outside of satisfying quest requirements.

The game also has no combat, which I am pretty confident was an intentional choice on the part of the developer. That’s not a criticism, just something I found worth pointing out, since if I didn’t, someone might reasonably assume there’s some kind of simple system for fighting off pirates and engaging in piracy yourself, because that’s the standard for these games. Closest thing is that there’s a giant octopus who will show up and challenge you to a game of musical Mastermind and mug you if you lose.

If you want one of these ship-trade-y kinds of games with base building and resource harvesting elements, then Merchant of the Skies is the entire genre so there’s nowhere else to go. It does ultimately deliver on both flying around buying and selling stuff and on building up little resource colonies and production chains, and it ties those two gameplay elements together seamlessly, so despite its flaws I do recommend it to anyone who thinks that sounds like fun.

My father needed help moving lately, and between that and the sibling gatherings that have resulted, I have basically lost four full days out of my schedule, at the same time as this blog’s buffer was starting to run empty. I’m wringing a bit of extra space in the buffer out of this very brief explanatory update, but mostly if this blog goes quiet for a bit, then that is why.

The first three Borderlands games (including the Pre-Sequel) looked so similar to one another that I’m pretty sure they were made in the same engine. Characters got design updates occasionally and the entire weapon inventory seems to have redesigned between 1 and 2, but anything that didn’t specifically get a redesign looks exactly the same. Borderlands 3, released five years after the Pre-Sequel, is the series’ first major graphical upgrade.

They may as well not have bothered.

Because of the weird min-maxing of my processor and graphics card, I can only play Borderlands 3 on the lowest settings, while the Pre-Sequel and earlier games run no problem. This does bias me against the visual upgrade, but look, Borderlands isn’t a photorealistic series. Not being that is one of the things that set it apart. The graphics don’t necessarily benefit from being better because there’s no real world standard that everyone knows about and can compare it to and which even our strongest graphics engines can’t yet mimic. Borderlands 1 already looked exactly like a Borderlands game, so the only room for improvement is in new character designs, weapon designs, monster designs, and so on, to keep things from getting too stale and repetitive.

Borderlands 3 also has some redesigns, although the problem here is that I mostly don’t like them. For example, here is the Borderlands 2 light runner:

And here’s the Borderlands 3 outrunner:

Borderlands 1 had a vehicle called outrunner but which looks basically identical to the BL2 light runner, so I’m going to refer to the BL1/2 design as the light runner and the BL3 design as the outrunner. There’s nothing about the outrunner design that seems like it would be bad for general audiences, but I personally dislike how it’s now much more lightly armored and has lots of shock absorbers and thin struts exposed. The light runner had a rugged look that helped make Pandora seem like a place where roads and garages were rare and bandit ambushes were common. The outrunner more looks like a dune buggy you’d take for a spin on vacation – an off-road vehicle, for sure, but not one built to keep going in spite of a light sprinkling of small arms fire.

I’ve talked about the three pillars of Star Wars before, and other than the fact that Star Wars hates wheels (everything is either treaded or hovers), the light runner fits right in with the space western scoundrel pillar (I call it “smuggler pillar” in that article because I only later realized that “scoundrel pillar” is a much better name for it), while the outrunner does not. Personally, I really like Star Wars and the biggest appeal of Borderlands for me has always been that it feels a lot like that scoundrel pillar of Star Wars but with guns that make the dakka dakka noises, which is basically the only change I have ever wanted to that aesthetic. Borderlands 3 leaving that behind to do something else is really disappointing to me, although I’m not sure how general audiences would take it.

Also it’s really dumb that in 2019 they’re still so shy about saying the word “fuck” in an M-rated video game full of blood and giblets and dismembered body parts used as scenery doodads, and their heavy use of “slap” as a replacement really draws attention to it.

WotC is getting rid of half-elves and half-orcs. This is good. They claim they’re doing so to fight racism. This is bad.

Mixed race characters are a cool idea and one that makes a ton of sense in the ever-more metropolitan world of D&D. Back in the mists of the 1970s, being an elf or a dwarf could be a character’s defining trait. That was a sufficiently cool defining trait, and one with enough support in foundational work like Lord of the Rings, that it became common. By the 80s, elf and dwarf had moved from being character classes to the new category of race and could have classes of their own. Gary Gygax hated Lord of the Rings and wanted to play Conan and Elric instead, so he added a bunch of passive aggressive restrictions on so-called demi-human characters to try and discourage them, but it didn’t work.

It was perfectly common for humans, elves, and dwarves to be in the same adventuring party as one another, and because players generally assume that adventurers have a normal experience of the world (which is barking mad, but also comes up with regards to things like the value of money and how many class levels a random bartender has), the assumption was that humans, elves, and dwarves hung out together all the time. Elf-only and dwarf-only kingdoms were still a thing, but major cities were assumed to barely have a human majority with significant demi-human populations. Half-elves, originally added because Elrond is a half-elf and D&D nerds were the kinds of people who knew and cared about this kind of deep Tolkien lore, took on new connotations of not being the result of some rare contact between opposite worlds, but of being a naturally common occurrence anywhere human and elf territories (usually allies in the first place) bordered one another. Half-orcs got added in as a half-measure towards people who thought orcs were cool and wanted to be one without actually adding orcs to the adventurer coalition.

By the 90s, when Drizz’t was rising to fame, rogue members of traditionally evil races started gaining traction, and the popularity of WarCraft II and especially III mainstreamed (within the context of fantasy nerd culture, at least) the idea of shades of grey in your standard elves vs. orcs conflict. This made fewer inroads towards actually adding orcs to the adventurer coalition, probably because the source material still depicted orcs as consistently opposed to humans, just also that their own coalition was an equally valid perspective. It’s probably not a coincidence that this coincided with 3e’s explosion of poorly balanced monster races, with the goal of making just about anything sapient playable.

It didn’t catch on, but considering how well the return to that well went in future editions (especially 5e), it’s probably because the weirdest and hardest to balance races were also given the least attention, seen as an afterthought. Trolls were technically playable, but the balance on them was a nightmare. Their abilities were massively overpowered, and they were smacked hard with level adjustments, which totally failed to solve the problem because while the troll’s natural abilities might make them equivalent to a 6th-level Fighter, a troll with one level of Fighter is not equivalent to a 7th-level Fighter. The abilities you get at 7th level are worth way more than the abilities you get at 1st level. The exact breakpoints for when this monster with that class was hideously under- vs. overpowered varied for every single monster and class, but in general, playing a monster with a level adjustment was a sucker’s game. This prevented the population of the generic D&D city from getting any weirder, but only temporarily. People clearly wanted bizarre races, 3e just failed to deliver.

5e remained as reluctant as ever to include orcs in the player coalition, reserving them for expansion content and giving them otherwise unheard of stat penalties, but petulantly holding out on orcs, specifically, didn’t change the fact that dark elves had fully migrated into the player coalition, along with dragonborn and tieflings, mostly breaking down what few barriers remained to what might be considered a “standard” adventurer race. The infrequent nature of expansion material in 5e also led to the general assumption that it was all core. Whereas earlier editions had new books coming out so frequently that to declare that all of them would be allowed was to invite chaos (which is not necessarily a bad idea because some groups like chaos, but most GMs like to worldbuild and don’t like having the party consist exclusively of expansion races from obscure sourcebooks they don’t own, haven’t read, and never even thought about while building the setting), the slow release of 5e books led to the attitude that books like Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything are effectively core – including Volo’s Guide to Monsters and its drastically expanded list of options for player races.

At this point, it’s assumed that most major D&D cities not only have significant populations of elves, dwarves, dragonborn, and tieflings, but that obscure races like tabaxi and tortles are considered unremarkable even if they’re few enough in number to not show up in demographic breakdowns. So-called “monster races” like goblins and orcs are regarded with, at worst, mild suspicion, and are frequently treated as uncommon-but-unremarkable just like the tortles. Major cities are jampacked with all kinds of bizarre creatures. So it’s becoming simultaneously much harder not to notice that elves and orcs are, for some reason, the only races that breed with humans (and non-human races never breed with one another), and also much, much harder to write stat blocks to change that. The solution of cutting the half-elf and half-orc is the best one – the alternative is to write a system for combining any two races that is begging to be powergamed to death. Add a sidebar saying that mixed characters can pick the stats of one ancestry or the other. This is completely reasonable if you want to keep normal sexual reproduction as a trait of most creatures (personally I favor the “humans have babies, everyone else does something weird” approach, but that’s probably never going to be popular).

But this perfectly reasonable ditching of a legacy mechanic that’s long outdated in the modern hyper-cosmopolitan world of the D&D default is not striking a blow agianst racism. In fact, if it’s a purely narrative decision rather than a mechanical one, it’s actually pro-racist. Not Nazi-grade or anything, but removing mixed-race characters as a mechanical option does add slightly more friction to playing them, and while there are no real half-elves to worry about, there are people who use half-elves to evoke the experience of being, like, half-American half-Mexican or something. You can have a D&D backstory that evokes that same experience while mechanically being either a human or an elf, and you could also have a D&D backstory that evokes that experience by being mixed between two human ethnicities, which obviously provides a better parallel, but in fairness it is a fantasy story and sometimes you want to add an element of the fantastical to the experience.

All this to say that removing half-elves and half-orcs isn’t at all a pro-segregation move if you’re doing it for mechanical reasons, that’s just an acknowledgement that you can’t keep up with the number of potential mixes you’ve introduced with all these new ancestries so you’re giving up and people will just have to fluff stuff. But drawing attention to banning mixed races as a culture war move actually does come across as pro-segregation.

Like, OSR projects are sometimes run by normal people and are sometimes run by racists. If I heard about some obscure OSR project but all I knew about it was some mostly-generic title like “Monsters Down Below” or something, I wouldn’t assume they were racists based on that. And if I heard they weren’t including half-elves and half-orcs, I would default to the charitable assumption that it’s because of the mechanical issues that these imply half-dwarves and half-halflings and half-dwarf/half-elves and so forth, and they didn’t want their race section to sprawl with all these fiddly pairings. But if I heard they made a point of banning half-elves and half-orcs to make a statement on real world race issues, I would at that point guess that yeah, these guys are racists who don’t like having mixed-race characters as part of the default good guy coalition.

The only reason this move comes across as racist is because they went out of their way to frame it as a race thing.

Far Cry 4 is mainly something to give the visual and hands-controlling part of my brain something to focus on while I listen to podcasts and audiobooks. This is something I really like to do, and I’m having a pretty good time with Far Cry 4, although I suspect it would be much less so if I’d played Far Cry 3 on PC. Because I played Far Cry 3 on console, Far Cry 4 is my first time experiencing the full potential of these game mechanics. But Far Cry 4 could’ve been a great game even despite the looming shadow of its predecessor, if it had picked one of the two games it’s trying to be and committed to it.

Even having switched to one post weekly, my queue has run empty so I need to write something up. Problem is, I’ve been extremely busy in January trying to pivot away from 5e as fast as possible, so I haven’t played that many video games. Turns out I needn’t have bothered, everything just kinda worked out, but I did bother so now my blogging queue is empty.

I’m less than halfway through Far Cry 3, I’ve played a little bit of Moonlighter but not quite gotten past the first dungeon of five, and I still haven’t quite wrapped up the last side quest I want to bag in Hades before calling it finished. And when I have been playing video games, it’s usually been in a state of absolute exhaustion, a point where I realize I can’t do any more work so the smart thing to do is recover so that I can work at a reasonable pace later – and that’s not a great place to be in when trying to figure out if Moonlighter is any good. I’m kind of generous on games in the first place, but in that state of mind any game will hold my attention for 1-2 hours and then immediately lose it as I feel able to get back to writing and panicky about reaching my deadline.

So these blog updates might end up being a 2022 thing? I dunno, we’ll see how things go.

The hottest take of twenty years ago.

I bring it up, though, because Far Cry 3 is one of those games released in the early 2010s that won’t run on my computer even though games both newer and older will. This is probably at least in part due to the bizarre processor/graphics card min/maxing I’ve done, where I bought a really garbage graphics card because I was buying my current PC before the blockchain crash so graphics cards were expensive, and balanced it out with a really beastly processor. That processor has been able to carry quite a few games (for example, Far Cry 2 runs fine, and that’s also a PS3 game), but for some reason it struggles with 2012’s Far Cry 3 where it doesn’t with 2015’s Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate. I suspect multicore processors are involved somehow, like, sufficiently old games can run on just one core of my processor, sufficiently new games are optimized for multicore, but at just the right age we get games that one core of my processor can’t handle without backup from a better graphics card, but which can’t use multicore properly. That’s a blind guess, though, I have no idea if Far Cry 3 does or doesn’t take advantage of multicore processors.

Anyway, I solved this problem by finding a used copy of Far Cry 3&4 collection for PS3 and dusting off my console. And man, putting first person shooters on a console is really not a good idea. I’ll still probably get through it, but unfortunately my opinion of the series’ star title will undoubtedly be affected by the fact that I am playing it on a vastly inferior platform. I don’t generally buy into the whole “PC master race” thing, but for first person shooters there really is no competition, here.