#computer rpg

The only problem is that I played it in a CompUSA, which just goes to show you how old that sucker has to be.

The other problem is that I don't know if it had character creation, in which case knowing I was playing as a female knight means nothing, or even what quest number I was on, so saying I was on a quest where I rode a horse could mean anything.

UPDATE: According to a $1000 investor who calculated using his dividends, the total costs came out to around $29 million, not $15 million. So the Fig campaign covered only 15% of what they actually spent. Good lord!

I got back into Pillars of Eternity II and checked the forums to discover that Obsidian Entertainment has been acquired by Microsoft. And Pillars of Eternity II sold only 150,000 copies and cost about three times the $4.4 million raised to “fund” it (which means Obsidian, after support, overhead, DLC development, etc. could be a good $20 million in the hole). It is likely Pillars of Eternity III, or any other serious CRPG project, will never happen, and Obsidian will forever be one bad chart performance away from ending up making tire textures for a Forza Motorsport game. Everyone is pointing fingers and arguing and blaming the media or the casuals or figures within Obsidian or the SJW hordes, but really? They brought it on themselves--excuse me, as a Pillars of Eternity II backer, we brought it on ourselves. This was our chance to have the game of our dreams made, and our outsized demands coupled to Obsidian’s outsized ambition blew the series’ future. Here is the post I made on Obsidian’s forums in case it proves too controversial and disappears:

Is anyone really surprised? The first thing I thought when it finally dawned on me how huge Pillars of Eternity II was, was "There is no way they could have possibly made money on this." The fans wanted bigger, the fans wanted better, and Obsidian gave the fans, including myself, exactly what we wanted. The biggest, baddest, most complicatedest Infinity-style RPG ever. A game nobody but us wanted.

PoE2 is huge, huge, huge. I'm 30 hours in and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of it. I ignored all the backer updates I received after pledging because I didn't want to know anything going in, and the sheer enormity of it blew me away. This feels almost Skyrimian in its breadth and content-richness, and that costs a huge amount of money, while drawing the potential length well past 150 hours and exacerbating the reputation that large CRPGs have of being scary and overbearing, which is further exacerbated by the fact that Obsidian have to tolerate RPGCodex and their legions of trolls, Trump cultists, and white supremacists because they donate and nobody outside the CRPG community was ever going to give a shit about this game. This is a game that was made for us, and only us. Made according to the specifications of a crowdfunding campaign that sold us our every desire, with little backer content bits to reflect our own vanity back at us. It turns out Infinity Engine/PoE nerds are (a) not even close to numerous enough to fund the promised game, and (b) unwilling to compromise for the sake of "casuals". I mean, that was the whole point of this whole crowdfunding thing, right? To make games that the fans want and make a profit? Funny, it looks we forgot that whole "making a profit" bit somewhere.

And for a focused, linear, and above all modest game like the first Pillars of Eternity, the money from the fans was enough to cover the budget and keep the lights on. But now we've "made it", we showed those AAAs and we're going to make a game that will blow everyone away. But we instead we got a baroque game, a niche product with a big-boy budget. It doesn't matter whose fault it is or which games journalism conspiracy is true or salacious rumors that would fail a difficulty 2 Bluff check. Pillars of Eternity II is a game too expensive to fund on the backs of CRPG nerds but seldom considers the needs and wishes of people who aren't CRPG nerds, except when it does the job so poorly it actually makes the problem worse. Let's talk about the mechanics.

For all its attempts to be fair and balanced and not screw you over for bad build decisions, the sheer number of mechanics and status effects and stats and systems makes the Infinity Engine look sleek and streamlined, if not exactly elegant. Not to mention that a lot of the people who played Baldur's Gate also played Dungeons and Dragons (which was huge at the time), while the people going into PoE2 have no such luxury. The micro-balancing with all the soft counters and clever trickery makes it more difficult to play on a truly expert level than an Infinity Engine game, so Easy and Classic are mushy and dumbed-down and basically let you coast, while the harder difficulties require you to learn far more obscure rules, some of which are virtually undocumented, than someone throwing themselves upon the rocks of Baldur's Gate 1 for the first time. However, the system is also less exploitable than the Infinity Engine, so there is also less reward for putting in above the minimum effort. So PoE2's game system is exceedingly complex, strongly favors PoE1 veterans over everyone else, hides information from the player, has too many rules, is easy to coast on by with, hard to play well, and won't ever give you the satisfaction you get from the sort of gambits even a mediocre Infinity Engine player can pull off.

Backstab instakills out of the shadows? Can't do that. Pre-buffing? Too OP. Contingencies? We'll have an ordinary spell that namedrops Contingency and pretend it's the same thing. Summoning? Nope. Incredibly powerful sword wrested from a lich's cold dead fingers? It's sure as hell not going to be as good as Daystar was in BG2. Even the simplest crafting (aside from food) requires money, just to make it less attractive. Fortunately there is a lot less of it now, and a lot more of the talking and plotting and loredumping, which is generally good if playing it a bit safe. But Eora is also a much more "out there" world than Forgotten Realms, and the comfy old Arthurian, chivalric, etc. tropes and themes no longer apply. Nor, unlike the similarly complex world of The Elder Scrolls, is it based (however loosely and occasionally disrespectfully) on archetypes from other cultures and mythologies--in fact it seems to strive towards the total obliteration of everything ready-made. Bhaal and Elf Jesus the Nerevarine are immediately relatable to the casuals in a way that Eothas and friends are not.

Why did this happen? Because we wanted it. We wanted more. More. More. More. Pillars of Eternity was good, so Bigger Pillars of More Eternity will be more good. The incentive structures of the crowdfunding model (stretch goals, etc.) encourage and exacerbate this mentality. A pirate ship! Many pirate ships! Pirate ship battles! New Vegas style politics with intersecting schemes by several power players! A reputation system underneath that makes New Vegas' implementation look primitive! Webs of intrigue! Webs of treachery! Webs of adultery and relationship drama! Voice acting for almost everybody with lines! Half-hearted commentary on colonization that pulls all its punches to avoid making white people feel bad and angering the RPGCodex crowd who gave us a big chunk of our budget! It had everything except a workable business model.

Hardcore CRPGs are not competitive on a big budget, and they never will be. There's a reason this game put Obsidian's future in jeopardy and the guy behind the Avernum series has been able to crank game after game through thick and thin, for over 20 years. If the Infinity-style RPG has a future it will involve smaller, simpler games with less elaborate graphics, less voice acting, and a much lower budget. A game with production values more similar to PoE1, Wasteland 2, or even Siege of Dragonspear. But that's what we wanted. We wanted big. We got big.

So, given how much time I spent on the Gold Box games lately, I wanted to share some notes on the games, maybe also some relevant bits.

Pool of Radiance

Overall style: Mega Dungeon and Sandbox.

Overland Map: Traverse on grid, random and hidden locations

Quirk: Extensive level scaling which ups the challenge, especially in the beginning.

How does it fit in the line: This is probably the hardest title until the very end of the series. You find your bearings with the engine, its quirks, how the spells work, you have to sort out effective combat tactics. And then you're set. It's a great intro to both the Gold Box line and AD&D, but it surely does not tutorialize you. At. All.

Variety: You get the feeling of visiting many varied locations, some quests/sites have a different feel, some missions bypass the focus on combat. They crammed a lot into this one. Due to the limitations of the early engine you still feel like you battled a lot of the same enemies, over and over, and in waves. Still, many challenging set piece encounters that break the mold.

Notable NPC: Cadorna the Traitor.

What I think: See this article.

What can we learn from it: Healthy mix of environments. All missions lead to the end goal, but not all derive from the same big bad. Good, explorable individual locations. How to vary the same enemies into evolving encounters that keep challenging you. And it really did a good one on backtracking - more of that would have done the series good.

What it could have done better: Give a tutorial or intro to the game, or guide you at the start. Maybe. Sometimes figuring stuff out the hard way is also very rewarding.

Curse of the Azure Bonds

Overall style: Separate locations, spanning multiple maps each (episodic).

Overland Map: Point crawl. Mid-game, additional optional locations become available to explore.

Quirk: Cameo by Elminster... if you happen to know him.

How does it fit in the line: Curse of the Azure Bonds feels like a sequel. It is not as tight as POR, nor as focused. It evolves the engine somewhat. You get a bit of a feel for the politics / conflicts south of the Moon Sea.

Variety: Yes, there are many varied locations, but to me most of them don't have much flair. Dracandros' tower and the thieves' guild / sewers at the beginning seem most memorable in terms of dungeon design. Definitely a lot more variety in enemies. It has a damn beholder - probably one of the most complex monsters in the whole line.

Notable NPC: Dragonbait, the saurial paladin whose emotions you can smell. (Nacacia, my ass!) He's on the cover, too.

What I think: COTAB feels a bit weak compared to POR. It starts a trend in Gold Box games' dungeon design - you can enter a lot of rooms in a non-linear way, but most of them feature just unrewarding combat you may skip. And you want to skip lots of it, really. Most of the game I don't remember, having played it one week ago. In POR, set piece encounter rooms often featured some reward - a clue, a story, a piece of gear, needed money and XP. You often had to do many of them, anyway, might as well tie them up in a good way. Not in COTAB - they just feel so skippable! And while you may spend your sweet time exploring optional stuff and could do the middle part in any order, the game rubs a recommended order in your face, so it narrowly escapes feeling linear after all. (The illusion wears thin but holds, I guess.)

What can we learn from it: COTAB tries its best to keep the point crawl lively by tying stories to each leg of the journey, and tries to avoid being too repetitive by making routes previously traversed safe.

What it could have done better: While it works for COTAB, the idea of "the GM can do things to me" bonds is... highly questionable. The party suffers "consequences" for things they never intended to do and had no chance to avoid - and for example gets banished from a whole country. In the context of a CRPG that's no big deal. But in your campaign, this could suck big time.

Gateway to the Savage Frontier

Overall style: Separate locations, spanning typically a single map each (episodic).

Overland Map: Huge map. And yet almost completely unused except for conveying amount of travel needed - there's only one location you visit which isn't a city and it is in the most obvious place imaginable.

Quirk: We're the heroes, and we're gonna walk into every house in town. Oh look! We surprised some spies!

How does it fit in the line: As a game Gateway seems considerably less complex, it feels almost like a tutorial to the other games. You spend considerably less time on each location, making each feel even less memorable than COTAB locations. Given the restrictions of character import/export you should play Gateway right after COTAB. Could of course be considered its own line.

Variety: Quite a bit, it reuses a lot of stuff all over. You don't spend enough time anywhere to let it bore you, anyway.

Notable NPC: Krevish, the harmless-looking fighter. He actually has quite some useful stuff to say over the course of the game.

What I think: This is the tutorial for gold box games you never got. The game is easier, features difficulty controls. It is actually fun in its own way but also rather simple - it's essentially a MacGuffin hunt with some clues, and if you fail to decipher the clues, you can traverse the map and ask a friend. A super quirky sage friend.

What can we learn from it: Gateway, by virtue of having a big map, helps us envision the sheer size of the frontier. Different regions of the map have matching encounter tables - something you quickly learn if you travel through the Troll Moors...

What it could have done better: Gateway should have utilized that map better, placing locations in the wilderness you need to look for. Instead it opted to place practically all its crawling in cities - and adding some "cities" / "dungeons" off the world map on islands. In comparison, POR's overland map was smaller and more condensed, and yet there was plenty of original content to discover, including randomly placed monster lairs. What seems bizarre are all these city maps that double as explorable dungeons, so you get attacked by barbarians or stirges on your way to the inn.

Secret of the Silver Blades

Overall style: Mega Dungeon all the way.

Overland Map: None. Instead you have a central teleport hub you can use to avoid traversing the huge ass dungeon over and over. Only Gold Box title without an overland map, and it shows.

Quirk: Enormous plot convenience with a wishing well oracle that can generate riddle answers for money and has teleporters wherever you need them to break the game into manageable chunks.

How does it fit in the line: Even at the time, I read a review of the game that was rather dismissive and biased me against it. It is, in a sense, the most linear of the games. On the other hand, it broke the mold in making all these maps that were not simple 16 x 16 grids but huge-ass sprawling and branching dungeons to explore and map out by hand.

Variety: The game sends you through a sequence of locations - ruins, mine, dungeon, glacier/frost giant village, boss castle. Each area is themed. It sticks to its themes well, and yet that makes it feel less varied, somehow.

Notable NPC: Vala, the original plate mail bikini girl. To complement her picture (eyes up here, buddy!) you get a combat icon that shows a lot of mid riff. No wonder she takes way more damage than my (overleveled) party!

What I think: This game shows the importance of imagination in early computer RPGs. It might have fared better and distracted better from its linearity if these locations featured in a modern remake in third person or 3D style. But by lacking any overland map and you returning to this village for resupplying the game feels smaller than it is. It actually took me the most time to beat due to its sheer size. And it still feels like you're nowhere, getting nowhere. They tried to break the mold on this one, but psychologically they failed. You need to manage your players' perceptions, too.

What can we learn from it: Most people probably would get bored of the same Mega Dungeon sooner or later, no matter how much variety you contrive for it. (Leaving "Diablo" aside, an entirely different gameplay experience.) It's not that they failed to try for variety, they really tried, it's just the psychology of the whole thing. Which tells us that in RPGs, the setting matters a lot. If you feel cramped into this tiny nowhere psychologically, the actual total size of the combat maps doesn't matter much. The story feels terribly local and limited through the way it is told. The game itself is massive.

What it could have done better: Lots, actually! - Combining size with lots of random encounters is rather tiresome! I kept lowering the difficulty to finish combats faster and since the manual said it lowered the likelihood of encounters. - The game treats giants as regular encounters, making you wade through hill, fire, frost, and cloud giants like they are a nuisance. By the end, even three Ancient Red Dragons at once become a mere blip on the difficulty curve. This shows us rather neatly why even AD&D 2e did a rebalancing there. If ancient dragons feel like somewhat challenging enemies, then it reduces the sense of adventure. - The game massively relies on a particular sort of enemies in mid- and end-game: Monsters with flesh-to-stone gazes. If you don't have mirrors, this is basically a save-or-die encounter and winning initiative is extremely important. If you have mirrors and equip them in time, it trivializes a lot of encounters instead. It's rather satisfying to turn a medusa to stone, though. (The Gold Box games do not consider the penalties, I think, for fighting while averting your gaze.) Most sought item in the game: Reflective magic silver shield - total: 1. Save-or-die needed to go away and won't be missed. 5e does this much better. - Iron golems suck big time.

A Nerdy Moment With: Pillars of Eternity 2 Deadfire (A Review)

For the longest time I have felt that cRPGs in this style were no longer to my liking. After trying games like Torment Tides of Numenera, Pillars of Eternity 1, Tyranny, and so on, I felt that the genre as a whole just was not for me anymore. Then I tried Deadfire….and played it for 81 hours and still want more. Turns out, its not the genre at all, but maybe the setting and systems…. Let me…