Endgame Viable - Gaming

Monster Hunter Wilds

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 14:55:00 -0400

I don’t know why I did it. I knew I was going to react to Monster Hunter Wilds in the exact same way that I did to Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise: A perplexed face and a burning curiosity about why these games are so popular.

But I was looking for something to play on the PS5 now and then and it’s a good game for that. I don’t feel bad about not recording it or not finishing it. (Although I am hitting the “save last 30 minutes of gameplay” button after every monster fight anyway.)

For context, as of this writing, according to the PS5, I’ve played 11 hours and completed 30% of the game.

I also need to make it clear that, following my standard video game practice, I haven’t looked up any guides on the Internet on how to play the game. So there’s a good chance I’m doing everything wrong. (Actually I did look up how to find endemic life for those side quests where you’re supposed to capture them, because the game doesn’t give you a marker for where they are. I just wanted to confirm that the expected game loop was to wander around in the world until you stumbled on them, like a cave man playing a game from the 90s. For other side quests, the game auto-runs you right to where you’re supposed to go, but this one thing it doesn’t.)

Here are the last several monsters I killed in the main story. I think they are “large monsters” in game parlance, or what the rest of the world calls “bosses.” (All the ones before this were really easy.)

There was an Alpha Doshaguma, which looked kind of like a big bear. It seemed like it was inevitable that I would win the fight, even though I “fainted” twice. It was the first time I fainted in the game, but it was no big deal–I just ran back to the boss and continued where I left off. (Reminding me of later Guild Wars 2 boss fights, where it was impossible to fail no matter how many times you died.)

Then I killed something called an Uth Duma, and I’m sure those two words instantly conjure up a vivid image of what it looks like (a gigantic seal with a snake head and gossamer flaps). This has been the hardest one so far for me, and the first monster that I actually failed to kill, because I fainted three times (mostly from bad luck, imo), so it took two tries to complete that kill. The second time I called in a “Support Hunter” Rosso (a bot, I assume) but it didn’t really seem to help much, other than yelling encouragement now and then in that “we can win with the power of friendship!” way that all anime stuff has. However, I did kill it with only one fainting spell the second time so maybe it was doing more than I thought. (It’s hard to tell because the bosses don’t have health bars.) This was the boss that I discovered you can jump on top of the monster’s back and hit them in the top of the head, a feat I don’t fully understand how I did, but I somehow managed to do it a couple of times.

Then it was a Rompopolo, a fairly easy monster that I described as a T-Rex with a crow face, covered with ballooning airbags. I just hit it repeatedly until it died, no fainting required. I had the ranged Support Hunter Rosso for this one too (because I forgot to turn that feature off), but it also didn’t seem to help much.

The last monster I killed was a Rey Dau, which at first I thought looked like a copy-paste of the Fallingstar Beasts in Elden Ring, but it has wings (with pretty strong arms attached somehow–Darwin sure would be interested in how these creatures evolved) and lightning breath. It was tougher, but not that much. I fainted once, and when I got up and rode back, I hit the beast exactly one time and killed it. (I had Rosso the ranged Support Hunter for this one, too. After this I finally remembered to turn them off… the setting is in a very obscure location so it’s easy to miss it.)

The fighting seems to go faster than the previous games, which I like a lot. I remember timing out a few times on quests in Monster Hunter World. I still don’t like it much when the boss runs away to a new location, because it just feels like it’s dragging the fight out for no particular reason. It doesn’t feel like I’m solving any game problems by simply following a monster to its new location. The only question the game is asking there is: Will you remember to sharpen your blade or not?

For the record I use the big sword thingy that you start with. After this last fight I’m Hunter Rank 4, and upgraded my armor to Rompopolo gear (which looks ridonkulous), and my sword to a Hope Blade III. (Previously I think it was a Bone Blade II.)

The story is telling me there is something called a White Wraith coming up, which is, for some reason, highlighted with purple. All the characters were awestruck on viewing it for the first time before it flew away, so I guess I’m supposed to be terrified of it too. But so far I don’t see any reason to change my complex go-to strategy of running straight up to things and hitting the triangle button until they’re dead.

As for the story, I haven’t been paying any attention and have skipped large portions of the dialog, so I don’t know why any of the characters in the game, especially me, are out wandering around killing big monsters. There’s something about a kid from a long-lost village who’s really mad at the White Wraith or something. I don’t know.

The music seems pretty generic. And the voice work. Most characters do a breathy exhale at the end of every line delivery, which nobody does in real life but is fairly common in the anime style. Once I hear it, I can’t un-hear it and it completely undermines any attempt at serious dialog because it makes me chuckle. Otherwise nobody seems to have any personality and I feel nothing for any of the NPCs. It’s pretty clear the story is only there because AAA games are expected to have stories, so they have to check that box.

I have two theories on why these games are popular.

One is that maybe the game changes into a completely different experience if you play co-op with other people, and that’s really the thing that people like. I have a feeling that a lot of mediocre games disguise themselves as really fun when you play them with your friends, because what you’re feeling is the enjoyment of hanging out with your friends, rather than anything intrinsically fun about the game. Which is fine, but when I play that game by myself I’m left wondering what all the fuss is about.

My second theory is that these Monster Hunter games are made for people who only like to do dungeons and raids in MMORPGs, because you can sort of skip right to the boss fights. There is a pretty strong MMORPG vibe to the game in general, especially if you like resource-gathering.

But the boss fights… aren’t that great. To me, at least. They’re faster than previous games, which is awesome, but they’re still pretty tedious, and there isn’t much tactical thinking involved, at least in the first 30% of the game. (Which is another reminder of MMORPG boss fights where “difficulty” is achieved by giving every boss a million hit points so that the biggest challenge is paying attention while you’re dying of boredom inside, like it’s an office presentation or something.) I haven’t had to do anything special to prepare for these boss fights yet, other than eating some food now and then. I haven’t had to learn any new combat skills or anything. I just run up and hit the big thing over and over until it’s dead or I’m dead.

The animations are kind of cool, though, and the scenery is nice. There’s a nice “feel” and “weight” to landing a blow with a huge sword on a monster, which I like. (I do tend to prefer heavy weighty weapons in games, rather than fast lightweight weapons that defy physics.) But it doesn’t feel like I’ve done anything particularly noteworthy when I kill monsters. It seems like literally anyone could do this.

Maybe these are the kind of games that only get good when you reach some arbitrary “endgame” point, which is another thing that reminds me of MMORPGs. World of Warcraft, for example, where so many people speedrun through the leveling process to reach the endgame, where the fun actually begins for them.

tl;dr

In conclusion, I’ll say that I’m liking Monster Hunter Wilds more than the previous two games, so I feel like they’ve successfully tweaked the formula for the better. It seems more streamlined and less clunky than previous games. It gets more fun the longer I play. With each new monster you kill in the main story, it unlocks a few more options you can explore. I think I just unlocked Armor Spheres. I also see there’s a bunch of Weapon Skills displayed on a page somewhere but I haven’t interacted with that system at all yet. It’s kind of fun to do the optional side missions so you can gather resources to make different kinds of armor and weapons.

Still, I don’t think this franchise is ever going to reach game-of-the-year material for me because I feel like I could leave the game at any time and not feel like I’m missing anything.

Tales of Fablecraft?

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 11:00:00 -0400

Some time within the last year, I wondered why TTRPG rulesets are still distributed as books. As opposed to being distributed exclusively through virtual tabletops, or some form of digital asset management system.

We currently have to buy D&D books six different times if we want to access them at a table, or on Roll20, or on DNDBeyond, or Fantasy Grounds, or Foundry VTT, or whatever other place.

That’s because the thing you’re buying is still, essentially, the text of a book. But surely the TTRPG hardback book full of cool artwork is a relic of the past by now, only of interest to collectors. (Disclaimer: I have two shelves of them.)

Then I watched the opening bit for a recent episode of Critical Role and saw an ad for Tales of Fablecraft, available for free on Steam.

It’s a TTRPG virtual tabletop distributed as a computer game on Steam. It has all the video and audio conferencing and chatlogs and dice rolling and rules and stuff built into one convenient software package. It’s not a tabletop that you bring your own rules to, it’s the rules and the tabletop together.

Is this the beginning of the future for TTRPGs? Is this the beginning of the end for the D&D empire?

It would be a massive chore to do something like this for D&D, since the D&D rules are so frickin’ complicated. But it’s kind of weird that Wizards of the Coast isn’t leading the way in this space.

I understand Wizards is working on their own virtual tabletop experience, but I’ve never seen it and I’m guessing it’s probably stuck in development hell. It’s probably going to be one of those things that’s developed in partnership with 50 contractors, and ends up being terrible for everyone. That’s just how software development works now.

Instead of Wizards, the leader in this space is apparently somebody called Riftweaver Game Studio, with something called Tales of Fablecraft.

It looks like a very rules light game system, which is perfect for getting people on board with it. It seems to fulfil the virtual tabletop promise of showing up and having everything there on the computer, but in a way that is tightly integrated and might actually work the way it’s supposed to.

Anyway, it seems like a noteworthy development to me, if you’re into the world of tabletop RPGs, and actual play media, and so forth.

P.S. I challenged myself not to just go to DALL-E and get a blog post image in seconds, but rather spend a frustratingly long time getting a picture from my phone to my image hosting directory. Anyway now I can use that picture for any posts related to TTRPGs.

Baldur's Gate 3 Completed

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 10:30:00 -0500

Where do I even begin to write about the epic story of Baldur’s Gate 3, and the even more epic story of playing Baldur’s Gate 3? There’s just so much to talk about. See: Some two hundred hours of videos I’ve uploaded.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has been my main game since August, so I spent nearly half a year with this game, not counting a two-and-a-half month break where I didn’t play much of anything.

I think overall I’d say it’s the best turn-based CRPG I’ve ever played, and certainly the best licensed D&D game ever made.

It’s not that surprising that only 17% of players (at press time) have finished the game, because it’s a long game. Even if you blitz through it on Explorer difficulty, I’m sure it would take quite a while unless you take a straight-line path. My Steam time is some 275 hours, and that’s only for one playthrough, where I missed a ton of story options (but I tried to do every quest I found). One of the companions was barely even in my game, because they died very early. There must be hours and hours and hours of recorded dialog and scenes that I missed.

I think The Witcher 3 was probably the previous record-holder for longest RPG, but Baldur’s Gate 3 smashed that record about fifty times over.

Despite being that long, it was still the best CRPG in a while. Usually the combat mechanics in an RPG become boring and repetitive by the end of the game, but somehow Baldur’s Gate 3 managed to make every combat encounter unique from beginning to end. The story wasn’t the greatest ever (I mean it’s no Last Of Us), but it wasn’t terrible, either. Somewhere along the lines of a Marvel blockbuster.

I’m so glad they decided to go with turn-based combat instead of the abomination that was the original Baldur’s Gate “real time” combat. Every recreation of the Infinity-style combat from recent Kickstarter titles has been really nostalgic, but they’ve also been really imprecise and random and frustrating. It’s really annoying to have to keep pausing the game every 2 seconds to keep your party from milling around like lost ants getting themselves killed.

The combat in BG3 is meaty and intellectual and felt like every encounter on Tactician difficulty was a grand master chess match. Good stuff.

I played about 95% of BG3 on Tactician difficulty, except for a period in Act 2 (after the catastrophic debacle at the Adamantine Forge) where I switched back to Balanced difficulty. And I gave up on the last fight with the Netherbrain on Tactician and switched to Explorer just to see the ending I wanted. (What I have to assume is the “standard” ending circumvented that last fight entirely. I mean why wouldn’t you use the “insta kill” option at the end of the game?) The difficulty of any given encounter was anywhere from easy to crazy hard, and you never knew what to expect.

The idea that they added an even more difficult setting (Honor Mode) is somewhat shocking to me, because I thought Tactician was already a bit over the line of unfair at times.

All through the game, I had a love-hate relationship with the Tactician difficulty setting. I like the idea of the game using advanced combat techniques and/or adjusting the encounter sizes, but I absolutely hated that they added hit points and armor class and bonuses to the enemy rolls for higher difficulties. I’m not a fan of enemy health or power scaling with the difficulty setting, because it feels like the least interesting way to vary difficulty. I greatly prefer adding more or different enemies, or changing the combat tactics.

Tavi’s Act 3 descent into madness begins.

Still, I kind of want to see how far I can get in an Honor Mode playthrough, with a different party composition. The combat encounters are likely to be totally different, so it should be a completely fresh experience. I imagine the early game will be the hardest, because it’s so easy to get yourself killed at low levels. (A couple of test runs has borne this out as I died at level 2 and 1 in my first two attempts, respectively. I wasn’t taking it seriously enough.)

I enjoyed the story in Act 1 and Act 2, but I felt like Act 3 took a weird turn, dragged horribly, and I wished it had been a lot shorter. I actually thought the game should have ended at the end of Act 2. That’s why I took a two and a half month break from the game; I got so bored wandering around aimlessly in Act 3, not fighting anything or progressing, feeling like I was playing an entirely different game, and not knowing how to reach the end.

The only quest in my journal that I didn’t complete was the one about finding Dribbles the Clown’s corpse. I found three pieces of it, but that was it.

How My Story Turned Out

The companions in my game had a pretty high mortality rate.

My base party for the majority of the game:

Tavi, a Halfing Lore College Bard with mainly crowd-control spells and a veritable mountain of scrolls. Didn’t use any illithid powers until a random impulsive romantic encounter with The Emperor in Act 3, then she gobbled up all the tadpoles and turned half-illithid, then she turned into a full Mind Flayer for the end (which turned out to be useless because I gave up on the last fight). Cull the Weak was an amazing passive power toward the end.
Karlach, a Wild Magic Barbarian and killing machine. Basically the entire party was built around getting Karlach into the face of enemies to tank incredible amounts of damage and, using either Haste spells or Potions of Speed, to deliver 4 crushing hits per round. And sometimes an extra Great Weapon Master bonus action hit, too.
Shadowheart, a Trickery Domain Cleric (I genuinely don’t remember making a decision to go Trickery Domain) who turned to Selune. Just a good all-purpose class that can tank, heal, sneak, do damage, and do some crowd control as the situation demands.
Gale, an Evocation Wizard and classical glass cannon. Mainly there for Counterspells and AoE attacks. Frustrating class. Sometimes amazing and perfect, but usually kind of a dud. I think the magic classes in D&D are generally better suited for solving problems in imaginative tabletop games rather than rule-based computer games.

After Tavi’s hair fell out from the half-illithid transformation.

The majority of my gear came from Act 1 drops, and I never got much of any upgrades for the entire rest of the game. I almost never had enough gold to buy magic items; only healing potions or food. It was far too much of a hassle to sell junk loot to get gold for purchases.

Prior to whatever level Gale got Counterspell, Astarion was usually in the party instead of Gale. After Gale had Counterspell, he became a permanent member and Astarion and the rest just sat in camp for the majority of the rest of the game.

Before Karlach became a permanent member, Lae’zel (or Lae’Z as I called her) was the tank, but I found her frustratingly unreliable.

Lae’zel. Murdered in the night by Shadowheart in Act 1, when I didn’t intervene in their struggle. I found her pretty irritating at the start of the game, but I heard somewhere that she has one of the best story arcs. I thought it was a bold story choice to murder one of the companions so early.

Wyll. Banished to hell or something because I pushed the wrong button and killed his patron Mizola in the Mind Flayer Colony under Moonrise Tower. Pretty irritating that pressing one unlabeled button killed a companion off-screen, but it wasn’t a big loss, since he never did anything but stand around in camp drinking. I found the Warlock class difficult to use effectively so he was constantly getting killed and not contributing much in battle.

Gale. Blew himself up to kill the Netherbrain to save the world. As soon as I found out Gale had a nuclear bomb in his chest (somewhere in Act 1), I thought that would surely be the most dramatic story ending to work toward. (Turns out it was also the most practical and expedient, seeing as how there’s no more need for him mechanically after that point. It’s not like there’s more to play after the last fight.) But then at the beginning of Act 3, when the game asks you what your personal goals for the Karsus Crown are going to be, during that one camp, I impulsively decided to try to betray everyone and conquer the world, and spent all of Act 3 trying to maneuver toward that instead. (I decided early on that Tavi’s main character trait was impulsivity.) Turning into a Mind Flayer myself instead of letting The Emperor do it, etc. But as it turned out, the final fight is pretty ridiculous on Tactician difficulty, and after two failed tries I just had Gale blow it up to get to the credits, which made much of my Act 3 maneuvering pointless. (As it turned out, the “conquer the world” story ending was pretty lame and unsatisfying anyway.)

Karlach. Her infernal heart gave out in the end. There were numerous opportunities to try to fix it, but I accidentally killed the infernal mechanic way back in the Grove, I accidentally killed Mizola in Act 2 (who I think might have been able to fix it), and I couldn’t find anything useful in the Steel Watch Foundry in Act 3, where I thought there might be a fix. There were breadcrumbs everywhere but they never led anywhere. I don’t know if that was railroading or I just played it wrong.

Tavi. That’s me, my character, a Halfling Bongo Bard. Survived, but since she turned herself into a Mind Flayer to try to take over the world, with the last vestiges of her former happy-go-lucky Halfling Bongo Bard humanity, she decided to lock herself in prison, where her soulless shell will forget everyone and everything. She’ll probably die a slow and painful death without any brain nourishment.

After Tavi fully transformed into a Mind Flayer to try to conquer the world.

Astarion. Astarion survived and replaced Cazodor as the Vampire Lord of Baldur’s Gate. He turned into quite an evil chap, killing children, exploding thralls, murdering Gur, and cackling about how much revenge he’ll be exacting on his enemies now that he has absolute power. He read the whole evil Necromancy of Thay book too. He always comes up as the adorable mascott of Baldur’s Gate 3 but he was a murdering psychopath in my game. Not the kind of person I’d want to hang out with.

Shadowheart. The only one (other than Gale I suppose) who made it through a somewhat redemptive story arc. She rejected Shar (her decision, not mine), defeated the Mother Superior (barely.. stupid Darkness spells), recalled her memories, and … um … well, killed her parents. But, you know, that’s what they wanted.

I had one romantic tryst with almost everyone who wasn’t dead, except Gale, who I punched in the stomach, and Wyll, who I thought was kind of sappy. And Shadowheart, who steadfastly ignored me the entire game. That includes The Emperor, who convinced Tavi, whose defining characteristic throughout the game was impulsivity, to embrace the illithid lifestyle. I was a bit disappointed there wasn’t an option for Tavi and The Emperor to ride off into the sunset together as a Mind Flayer couple.

In a lot of ways, it felt like they barely finished the game, and a lot of the ending scenes were minimum viable products because they didn’t have time to fully flesh it out. (Then again, only 17% of people apparently got there so what’s the point.) I imagine they could have easily taken another full year to polish off the rough edges of this game. They’ve done six months of patches and there’s still plenty of bugs.

NPCs

The party left some carnage in their wake.

Literally Everyone In The Grove. Dead. Except for the one kid we saved from the Harpy encounter, who stands around by himself among all the rotting corpses and blood-stained ground of his former home.
Owlbear Cub. Dead.
Druid Halsin. Dead. (Offscreen, weirdly.)
All the people trapped in the fires at Waukeen’s Rest. Dead.
Auntie Ethel. Vanished?
Isobel at the Last Light Inn. Dead.
Jaheira at the Last Light Inn. Dead.
Everyone else at the Last Light Inn. Dead. (Undead, actually, then Dead.)
Whatever kid was trapped in the Shadowlands. Dead, or still trapped.
Shadowlands. Still Cursed.
Duke Ravengard. Dead.
Most of the Gondians imprisoned in the Iron Throne. Dead.
Minsc. Dead. (Boo. Survived! But sad.) (Incidentally, I killed Minsc immediately in my game of Baldur’s Gate 1 Extended Edition too.)
Gondian Gnomes. Dead. Heads exploded or drowned.
Zhentarims. Dead.

Things To Fix in Baldur’s Gate 4

The number of bugs and flaws and annoyances in Baldur’s Gate 3 are numerous. Innumerable, even. Every game session, I encountered issues that I had to work around, and the inventory system is one of the worst in RPG history.

The closer you get to the end of the game, the more pronounced the problems get. I imagine the end of the game must have been a train wreck at launch time, but it’s at least playable now. I hope they fix all of this stuff if there’s a Baldur’s Gate 4. I assume there will be, after the massive success of this one. It’s just a question of whether it will be another labor of love like this one or a quick cash grab rushed out the door quickly.

A more intuitive third-person camera for mouse-and-keyboard.
- It’s “kind of” there but it’s so different from any other game it might as well not be there. Basically I want the same style of camera from the controller version with mouse-and-keyboard.
Inventory system. Dear god, the inventory management was such a hassle.
- You have to physically find and travel (walk!) to vendors to sell things. Ugh. So 1980s. So old. So boring. So repetitive. Put a permanent vendor in camp at the very least. Put fast-travel points next to vendors. Or put some sort of agent in camp you can give your excess junk to, and have them go out and sell them so you have gold for the next day. It was such a time-wasting chore that I basically never sold any loot I picked up, unless I absolutely had to.
- Books! OMG the books. Each book or note is a physical item that sits in an inventory slot. There are thousands of them! So antiquated! Like playing a game where you connect to a mainframe over TTY. Put them automatically into a library or codex that you can access and browse via. a menu. And for the love of god, add a search feature, too. It’s literally impossible to find a book that has key information in it that you picked up a hundred hours ago.
- There’s a primitive feature to tag junk loot for selling, but I didn’t even understand how it worked until almost the end of the game. In any case, you can’t press a key to mark an item as junk, you have to right-click and find it on a context menu every single time. The correct thing to do is never put junk loot into the game in the first place, but a lot of gamers and developers are weird about liking that. (I think they actually teach that in game developer school… something something “it’s actually good to have wasted down time in games! It’s important to the gaming experience!” Whatever.)
Tactical grid.
- I doubt they’ll change this, because it’s the foundation of all their CRPG games, but a tactical grid of squares would have been so much better than the free-form sort of pathing that they use. See Solasta: Crown of the Magister. It’s so much easier to figure out attacks of opportunity and positioning with a grid, rather than the random guessing game of whether you’ll be able to reach your destination or not. The number of times something bad happened that I didn’t expect because of the lack of a grid was innumerable.
D&D rules.
- I mean, they bent the rules of D&D a lot, and I’m not even that knowledgable about D&D rules. If you’re making a licensed D&D game, it seems like it should get the rules right. I suppose they can just claim it’s “homebrew” rules, so they don’t have to say “yeah it was just too hard to add flying up into our game engine so the Fly spell is actually useful.”

Replay?

I don’t want to spend another 200 hours with this game, but I can’t think of anything else I’d rather play. I’m just sort of waiting for Dragon’s Dogma 2 now I think.

If I make an entirely different party, make different decisions, use different combat tactics, a second playthrough could be an entirely different experience with little or no overlap from the first playthrough.

I haven’t yet experienced much of:

Lae’zel’s story
Wyll’s story
Fighter
Monk (I want to try one because they always seem crazily overpowered when I encounter them, both in BG3 and Solasta, and there’s a ton of monk gear drops in BG3)
Paladin (also very formidable enemies with those Divine Smites)
Sorcerer
Warlock
Druid
Not to mention different variations of Barbarian, Cleric, Rogue, and Bard.

And there’s an Honor Mode now. I have to at least try it once, right? I’m sure I could get to at least the end of Act 2 in an Honor Mode, where the first beast of a boss fight waits (the Avatar of Myrkul).

Update: I’ve tried Honor Mode six times now. Two ended on the first Intellect Devourer fight on the beach, which is incredibly dangerous, and two ended with the fight in the Refectory, which is also pretty hard if things go wrong. (I nearly died in both of those fights in my first playthrough on Tactician difficulty, too.) The other two have reached the vicinity of the Blighted Village. (I have one on the PS5 with a Druid main character and one on the PC with a Monk main character.)

And yeah, I bought Baldur’s Gate 3 for the PS5 so I could play it lounging around on the bed with a controller. The controller controls for BG3 are surprisingly good, at least for exploration. I kind of wish I’d known about it for my first playthrough. One of my complaints about BG3 all along was the lack of a third-person-style camera, but with the controller, it does use a third-person-style camera.

Starfield Impressions (No Spoilers)

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 11:55:00 -0400

This will be very short. I played Starfield for a little over an hour and then returned it. It’s a wait-for-a-sale game, in the same bucket with most all of the Assassin’s Creed games.

It’s pretty, and they’ve improved on the improvements they made in Fallout 4, but it’s nothing special. Just an ordinary, do-the-same-things-again, take-no-chances, factory-produced AAA game, like any other you can buy these days. It’s somewhat strange that it took them eight years to make this, when other studios can slam these things out the door just about every year.

I’ll start with some things I liked. I loved that the player’s character isn’t voiced, which is an absolute delight for anyone who makes videos or streams these games. I wish more AAA games would abandon the idea of voicing the player’s character, or at least provide an option to turn it off. I hate that my character talks with their own voice actor in Baldur’s Gate 3 when I click on them.

I also really enjoyed that I could make a character who looked like a frumpy, balding old man who has no business being in any kind of heroic story. Hilarious stuff. More games should allow that. Every character in Baldur’s Gate 3, for example, looks like a genetically-engineered, unrealistically-beautiful porn star.

I liked that there was a third-person camera option if you mousewheel out, with different distances, kind of. Would have preferred a little more control there, like every MMORPG, but it was certainly better than a first-person view, and an improvement on Fallout 4.

Now for the rest.

It’s yet another game where the NPCs deliver main story dialog while they’re walking around, but if your character is too far away, looking at all the interesting stuff they put in the environment, for example, you can’t hear what they’re saying. So you have to stick to their backs like glue while the NPCs walk around, jogging-stopping-jogging-stopping, because they walk way slower than your character does, while you listen to their dialog. It’s the most annoying thing that’s ever been introduced into video game engines, and developers just keep doing it over and over and over again. Just stop, okay? Make main story dialog front and center, all the time, so I can listen to it while I’m walking around other places. Yeesh. It’s been decades I think. Why doesn’t anyone else hate that and want to fix it?

That wouldn’t keep me from playing the game, though.

After the introduction and the character creation, there was a short little fight. Starfield has the same first-person shooter feeling that Fallout 4 did: You can make it work, but, as with every previous Bethesda game, you can tell this game was made by RPG developers and not shooter developers. It just feels awkward and unnatural. Most Bethesda games feel that way. Nothing new or unusual there.

It ran rather badly on my GeForce 3070 gaming PC with the default settings (I think it was “High”). But I think that’s because I installed it on a hard drive instead of an SSD. (A lot of AAA games in 2023 are moving to passively, if not openly, requiring an SSD.) It turned into a slideshow many times in that first combat encounter, but it never crashed.

That also wouldn’t deter me from playing the game.

After the little fight on the surface, you leave the starting planet or asteroid or whatever it was, and you fly a ship, and then have to fight some space pirates or something. This is where the game pretty much lost me completely.

I hate space combat in video games. It’s always the same: You fly toward the enemy ship, they fly toward you, you fill them full of space bullets or space missiles, depending on which mouse button you pick. You fly past each other, then you have to drag the mouse hard to turn around and find them again. Repeat many times. You have to wait for their space shields to deplete before you can really kill the enemy. Maybe you lock onto them with your space target lock and fire a space homing missile. Then you repeat the cycle fifty thousand times. It’s dueling yo-yos in space, constantly tracing these stretched ellipses around each other. I hate it. I didn’t need or want space combat in an RPG. Hopefully it’s entirely optional and entirely skippable because, as previously indicated, I hate space combat in video games.

But it’s part of the Starfield package, I suppose, and even that wouldn’t deter me from playing the game.

The biggest problem I found with Starfield was that I wished I was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 the whole time I was playing Starfield. It just … wasn’t interesting. It’s just another Bethesda game. They’ve spent eight years making the same game again, which is not a terrible idea for business reasons, of course, because gamers traditionally love to play the same games again and again and again.

But for me, they created a game that I’ve already played many, many times before, and the gaming demographic I belong to is not enthralled by games that don’t spark my imagination or break any envelopes or new ground. And for some inexplicable reason they focused on adding space combat and procedural worlds instead of a better first-person combat system, or a better conversation camera.

Ah well. It is what it is.

I saw enough to know I wasn’t missing anything by waiting. I’ll buy it in a sale a year from now, or maybe it will become the new Red Dead Redemption 2, which has actually been on my wishlist and on sale for roughly ten consecutive years, but I’ve never bought it and have never felt like I’m missing anything.

Incidentally, I didn’t find Skyrim all that interesting either. I played it a single time, sticking to the main story, which I don’t think took very long to finish. At present, I have no memory of–something about dragons? Anyway, I’ve never played it since. I never installed any mods and I didn’t do any side missions.

(I did install the Enhanced Edition once with an eye toward replaying it, but never actually followed through with that. The beginning of Skyrim isn’t very interesting, either, and I’ve never really loved the Elder Scrolls knock-off worldbuilding or their knock-off RPG rules. Also, sword combat in a first-person game was and still remains a pretty terrible idea, but they stubbornly stuck with it from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim.)

I did like Fallout 4 a lot, though.

I felt like the narrative conversation views in Fallout 4 were a lot better than what I saw in Starfield. Bethesda regressed from the superior, industry standard “over-the-shoulder” camera views in conversations, the immersive style we’re all used to seeing in every television show and movie, back to Oblivion’s original, straight-on face camera, like you’re looking at every NPC in the game through a Facetime chat over a phone, except the phone camera is a mile away and using a telephoto lens that creates intense depth-of-field, much, much farther away than where your character is actually standing. It looks very … video gamey, and dated, and unrealistic. Seemed like an odd design decision to me for an RPG that’s supposed to be immersive. I don’t know why nobody else notices these things, but I wish I didn’t notice them.

That might also be a Me Problem though. For various brain reasons that I’m sure a certain small percentage of the population understands but nobody else does, eye contact has unnerved me my whole life, and every NPC looks like they’re staring you right in the eyes, boring into your soul. They never look away like a normal person. Just staring right at you, all the time. Super creepy.

And one other thing I couldn’t unsee: I noticed everybody had exaggerated and slightly slow-moving blink animations, which was the same weird-looking effect that Mass Effect Andromeda had. Everybody’s eyes looked unnatural and distracting, like everyone was a lizard in disguise.

Anyway, those were my impressions. Probably a fine game, worth the purchase, delivering exactly the comfort food most people want. It’s just not particularly noteworthy or interesting to me, a gamer who thrives on the new and different and innovative and risky and exciting. It wasn’t any of those things in the first hour, at least, which you’d think woudld be where they would put all those things.

Starfield is easily saved for a rainy day when there aren’t any other games to play.

Death Shepherds at Trielta Crags (Baldur's Gate 3 Spoilers)

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 21:25:00 -0400

Spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 below, although not any story spoilers. Just combat spoilers, if that’s a thing.

UPDATE: Some people are probably here to quickly find out how to kill these Death Shepherds. The short answer is: Don’t let them cast that No Rest for the Wicked to instantly resurrect their fallen comrades, including the other Death Shepherd. I used things like Counterspells or Polymorph. Also I think it’s easier if you damage both Death Shepherds equally until you’re ready to kill both at the same time, rather than focusing down one at a time. Lesser Restoration was helpful to counter the paralysis from the ghouls and ghasts, too.

Note: I made some fuss about editing posts recently, but the first published version of this missive was a disaster, so I have, in fact, done some post-publishing line editing, mainly for clarification, and for grammar and typos. I also added some additional context, which somehow reached about 1,200 new words of material. I don’t know how that happened. I’m more of a putter-inner than a taker-outer, in editing parlance. I also figured out how to install a VSCode extension that uses Grammarly, because it’s very tedious to find typos in something this long.

In any case, there were way too many corrections to use the usual strikethrough and brackets. If you want to see the original, error-filled version, I made an unlisted post available here.

UPDATE 10/30: And it’s now been long enough that I can add links to the actual videos of these events.

I’ve had some pretty thrilling battles in Baldur’s Gate 3 on Tactician difficulty. In Act 1: The Gnolls, the Phase Spider Matron, the Hook Horrors, the Spectator. Dror Ragzlin. But this one in Act 2 was the most adrenaline-fueled thrill ride of a roller coaster to date. And as luck would have it, I’m off work this week so I can afford to waste nearly my entire day writing it down.

The First Attempt

My party lineup for this adventure was Tavi, the Bard with the Bongos, Karlach, the Dancing Barbarian with the Heart of Gold, Shadowheart, the murderous Dark Justiciar Cleric in Training, and Gale, the Wizard of Waterdeep and Mystra enthusiast. (I switched out Astarion for Gale, because the addition of Counterspell and Fly at level 5 suddenly made Gale less of a liability to the party.)

It all started after entering the Mountain Pass, ending up on the Rosymorn Monastery Trail, then choosing to go left at the fork at Trielta Crags instead of right. This is the very first decision in “Act 2.” The game doesn’t really say it’s Act 2. Only The Internet calls it that. [Update: In reality it’s more like Act 1.5.] Anyway, I walked straight into a pack of Ghouls, a Ghast, and two Death Shepherds, all level 5 undead.

It was my first fight in Act 2, and the party was level 5. I was very worried about the Ghast, based on my Solasta: Crown of the Magister adventures, but I couldn’t remember why. Then the Ghast paralyzed Karlach, my death-dealing machine, for two turns, and I remembered why I was nervous about Ghasts. Then the Death Shepherds started raising all the previously-killed Ghouls. Then the party died, though technically two of them managed to flee, but it was for nothing, since all the enemy undead were raised back to unlife.

It wasn’t even a named boss fight. Just some trash mobs on the road. But it was a hard rejection. A strong hint to go the other way.

I reloaded and went right at the fork, exploring the Rosymorn Monastery. There were some tense fights there, too, particularly against a pack of cute little Gremishkas, in which I was certain the party would die, but they managed to pull out a victory in the end. And then there was a fight in the Githyanki Creche, in which I was really certain the party would die, but they managed to pull out a victory, with only Karlach left standing at the end. Both of those fights could be their own narrative posts.

After all that, the party reached level 6, and there was nothing left at the Rosymorn Monastery to explore. It was time to return to that fork in the road at Trielta Crags. I needed to defeat the Death Shepherds, because I needed to get past them to head west toward the Moonrise Towers I keep hearing about, and, presumably, the remainder of the game.

The Second Attempt

I had a plan. The two Death Shepherds were the biggest threats with their apparently unlimited ability to casually raise any of their fellow undead with full hit points, so I planned to focus entirely on them and ignore the others. And I planned to get them both down to low hit points, but not kill them, until I could kill them both together, because I assumed (correctly) that each Death Shepherd would simply resurrect the other Death Shepherd, if one died before the other.

Also, incidentally, undead are resistant to Slashing, Bludgeoning, and Piercing damage, so Karlach’s monstrous weapon damage potential was largely nullified in this fight. It was slow work to whittle down every one of these undead with a great axe.

The second attempt at the fight also ended in a TPK, largely because Gale accidentally killed a Death Shepherd too soon with a Thunder Wave, and also because I discovered that not only do the Ghasts paralyze, all those Ghouls do, too. Fail a save and one party member is out of commission for two full turns, and every attack against them is an automatic critical hit. Not good. And I didn’t have Lesser Restoration prepared then to dispell it, either.

The Ghast also has a stench that renders a party member unable to use an action, too. Every Ghoul and Ghast has the potential to render party members completely ineffective for one or more turns. Nasty stuff.

Tavi died, then Gale died. Still, a victory could have been possible, but I didn’t realize that Karlach couldn’t do her massive damage Legacy of Avernus abilities while she’s raging, so I couldn’t do enough damage to kill the second Death Shepherd before it raised the first Death Shepherd, and that was the end of the second attempt.

It’s really disheartening to see a Death Shepherd you worked so hard to kill over a bunch of turns raised back up in one turn with full hit points.

The Third Attempt

For the third attempt, I had a better plan. This time I thought it might be fun to prepare some spells I would need: Shadowheart took Lesser Restoration, which cures paralysis, and Gale took Fireball. And for the third attempt, I hoped not to forget that Shadowheart could turn undead until it was too late.

Round 1, A Hilarious Start

The battle begins. Before the battle, Shadowheart cast Beacon of Hope on the party, hoping it would help with making saving throws against paralysis, although it turned out to be useless for that. But it did mean all healing spells restored the maximum possible hit points.

The goal was to get a surprise round, like what the party achieved in the second attempt, but that didn’t come to pass.

Tavi the Bard casts Tasha’s Hideous Laughter on the closest Death Shepherd (we’ll call it Darren the Death Shepherd to try to avoid some intensely confusing writing later on), which succeeds and takes it off the battlefield, prone on the ground. With her bonus action, she gives a Bardic Inspiration to Karlach.

Two Ghouls advance from down the road to join the battle.

Karlach goes into a Wild Magic rage, and gets the flowers and vines effect, making difficult terrain around her. It’s not the best one, but also not the worst one. She can’t hit Darren, the nearby Death Shepherd succumbing to laughter, so the closest enemy is one of the advancing Ghouls, which she hits twice with her massive Blooded Greataxe, but only for 5 and 6 hit points of damage against the resistant undead. This is a pitiful amount for Karlach, who is more accustomed to doing some 15+ damage per hit.

Gale can’t attack Death Darren either, and nobody else is in range, so he casts a Fire Bolt cantrip from behind a wagon on that same Ghoul and hits it for a whopping 15 damage, leaving it with just 2 hit points.

Shadowheart tries to cast her own Fire Bolt on that near-dead Ghoul to finish it off but misses. In hindsight, missing worked better, because one of the Death Shepherds would have just resurrected it back to full health. She moves back and maintains her distance, to keep concentrating on Beacon of Hope.

The second Death Shepherd (we’ll call it Drusilla the Death Shepherd) dashes up close to Karlach. The Ghast also approaches Karlach. The badly wounded Ghoul claws at Karlach, but misses.

Round 2, No Turning Back

Tavi the Bard continues to concentrate on Tasha’s Hideous Laughter to keep Darren the Death Shepherd down. They hit hard, twice per round with those greatswords. Tavi uses her action to cast a Vicious Mockery cantrip on the second Death Shepherd, Drusilla, which succeeds for a point of psychic damage, but more importantly gives it disadvantage on any attacks, which will help Karlach in the thick of things. Tavi moves back as well, to maintain her distance from the paralyzing undead.

Darren the Death Shepherd makes its saving throw and stands up again from the Hideous Laughter, so it’s back in the battle. It’s standing near Karlach.

Gale sees Death Darren stand up, so he tries to cast another Fire Bolt cantrip on it but misses. He stays well back behind the wagon at the fork in the road.

One Ghoul starts to move past Karlach, and another one tries to claw at her but misses.

The plan is to ignore everything else and whittle down the Death Shepherds, so Karlach steps away from the Ghoul pack toward Death Darren, who is closer to the rest of the party. She receives two attacks of opportunity, but luckily they both miss. She’s now between the two Death Shepherds. She makes two attacks for 8 and (a critical) 13 slashing damage on Death Darren. That eats through the temporary hit points, but it still has a big 47 hit points remaining. With her bonus action, Karlach shoves a Ghoul away, which succeeds, but it has little practical effect.

Shadowheart sees that it’s time to Turn Undead. (Something I completely forgot about in the second attempt at this fight.) They’re all clumped together, but she’s a little too far away. She uses the jump-and-move trick to extend her movement range and get a maximum amount of distance. She runs forward near Karlach, within range of the clump of Undead surrounding Karlach. She casts Turn Undead, and every single one of the undead is in range. This is a big moment, a lot depends on this. I cackled, thinking most of the Ghouls and maybe even the Ghast would run away, and this fight would be off to an amazing start.

It wasn’t to be. Tavi chooses not to do Cutting Words on several Ghouls, hoping to save it for the Ghast, but when an opportunity appears to use it on a Death Shepherd instead, she takes it to make it fail its save. Unfortunately, Death Shepherds are immune to terror. None of the undead are turned, and Shadowheart is left vulnerable near the front line. My cackling turned to a grimace.

Death Drusilla attacks Karlach in the back with two greatsword attacks, hitting once for 2 damage. Seeing a new target, the near-dead Ghoul claws at Shadowheart but misses. The Ghast also runs up and claws at Shadowheart, hitting for 6 damage, but she maintains concentration on Beacon of Hope. Unfortunately, she fails her saving throw against the Ghast’s Nausea. She won’t have an action next turn.

Round 3, Paralysis

At this point, I learned that Beacon of Hope only lasts a short time, regardless of whether you maintain concentration. I thought it lasted forever, or at least until concentration dropped. Oh well.

Despite the failure to turn any Ghouls, we were holding our own. Karlach stayed up on the front lines, between two Death Shepherds, while Tavi and Gale stayed way back. Shadowheart was in some trouble, caught in a cluster of undead–the Ghast and some Ghouls.

Worried that Death Darren might leave the front line and run amok in the back lines instead of engaging Karlach, Tavi attempts to do another Tasha’s Hideous Laughter on it, but it fails. She gives a Bardic Inspiration to Shadowheart, to help her get away from the three undead now surrounding her nauseous self. Tavi creeps backward again.

Another Ghoul runs from the background into the difficult terrain surrounding Karlach but doesn’t reach anyone. Death Darren steps away from Karlach, not toward Tavi or Gale, but toward Shadowheart, and Karlach hits it for 6 damage as it leaves. Shadowheart luckily dodges one of Death Darren’s greatsword attacks, and then Tavi uses Cutting Words to make the second greatsword attack miss as well. Shadowheart escapes the onslaught without any damage.

Gale continues the tradition of casting a Fire Bolt cantrip on Death Darren from behind the wagon and misses again, disappointing everyone.

One Ghoul claws at Karlach, but misses. Another Ghoul tries to reach Karlach, but is slowed in the difficult Wild Magic terrain and can’t reach her.

(At this point I finally realized that it’s not a game bug after all, it’s the barbarian rage that prevents Karlach from using her Legacy of Avernus abilities.)

Karlach is still engaged with the second Death Shepherd, Death Drusilla, and a Ghoul. She strikes at the Death Shepherd, uses Reckless and hits for 10 hit points, but it makes its save against the Laceration effect. The second attack, with reckless advantage, hits for 7 hit points.

(At this point I learned that the paralysis save uses Constitution, not Wisdom, so the Beacon of Hope isn’t helping with that. Oh well. It’s handy to improve healing, too.)

Shadowheart is surrounded by a Ghast, a Ghoul, and Death Darren. She needs to get out of there if she wants to maintain concentration on Beacon of Hope. She uses a bonus action Misty Step (using her boots I think) to teleport away. Still suffering the effects of Nausea from the Ghast, she can’t take an action, and runs far away to the back, behind Tavi.

Karlach is left by herself on the road, surrounded by undead, while the rest of the party is back by the wagons. Karlach takes two greatsword hits from the Death Drusilla for 7 total hit points. The near-dead Ghoul, now that Shadowheart has disappeared, claws at Karlach instead for 2 damage, but even worse, paralyzes her! The Ghast piles on and gets an automatic critical hit against the paralyzed Karlach for 9 more damage. Karlach ends the round paralyzed, with about two-thirds of her hit points remaining, but on the plus side, she isn’t Nauseous.

Round 4, The Fog Cloud

Tavi tries again to cast Tasha’s Hideous Laughter on Death Darren. It fails again. What is she doing? In hindsight, I’m not sure. She doesn’t exactly have damaging spells, so crowd control is her thing. She does a bonus action Healing Word on Karlach, and restores the full 7 hit points thanks to the Beacon of Hope. All four of her first-level spell slots are gone now.

One Ghoul tries to maneuver around to Karlach, but the difficult terrain means it can’t reach her. Death Darren, perhaps chasing Shadowheart, who teleported away, dashes out of Karlach’s difficult terrain and into the back lines, and there’s nothing left between the Death Shepherd and Gale, Shadowheart, and Tavi.

Gale casts a Fog Cloud surrounding Karlach, in the hope that all the undead surrounding her will have a harder time hitting her while she’s paralyzed. Three Ghouls and Death Drusilla, congregating around Karlach, are blinded. Gale continues to move backward, away from Death Darren lumbering down the road at them.

Sadly, the fog doesn’t help, because two Ghouls get automatic critical hits on paralyzed Karlach for a total of 11 more damage to her.

Shadowheart, staring at Death Darren running towards her and Tavi, considers her options. She’s no longer Nauseous so she has her actions back. She can’t see Karlach in the fog, so she can’t cast Lesser Restoration to remove the paralysis. Gale considers that the fog cloud may have been a mistake. Shadowheart casts a 2nd level Blindness spell at Death Darren and moves further back. It’s not a concentration spell, so the Beacon of Hope remains in effect.

The fog still doesn’t help, because Karlach takes two successive critical hits from Death Drusilla for another 14 damage. She’s losing hit points quickly, and she’s still paralyzed. The Ghast claws Karlach for another 8 points of critical hit damage. Thank god for barbarian rage or Karlach would have been dead long ago.

That first wounded Ghoul, who is still quite alive, rushes away from Karlach into the back lines as well, joining Death Darren.

Round 5, The Fireball

Tavi worries a lot about Karlach going down. The barbarian only has 13 hit points left. She moves forward a little to get in range and tries to cast a Healing Word, but the fog prevents her from seeing Karlach. She glares at Gale. Instead, Tavi tries another Tasha’s Hideous Laughter on the approaching Death Shepherd, and it fails again. Three in a row now. Another wasted spell slot.

Things are looking grim. A Ghoul claws at Karlach. It’s another automatic critical hit because she’s still paralyzed. Then, Death Darren senses an opportunity, abandons running toward Shadowheart and Tavi, and returns to hit Karlach with two more greatsword critical hits, downing her in the middle of the fog cloud.

Gale ponders his life choices. Maybe that fog cloud didn’t help. Maybe he needs to make up for it. The undead are probably going to keep hitting Karlach on the ground until she’s dead. Bold, decisive action must be taken. Gale drops the fog cloud, then throws a 3rd level Fireball right where the cloud used to be, centered roughly where Karlach lies in the road, using one of his three 3rd level spell slots.

It works. Three Ghouls are instantly incinerated for about 30 hit points of fire damage, so they won’t be hitting Karlach anymore. The Ghast and both Death Shepherds also take half of that damage, too.

Karlach takes no damage because Gale has a Wizard feat which prevents his spells from hurting friendlies.

Shadowheart casts a second-level Healing Word on Karlach, restoring the full 11 hit points. (Beacon of Hope is still in effect, even though the game says she’s not concentrating on it anymore, and weirdly says each party member has a different number of turns remaining on it. I think there’s some bugginess with that spell.)

Karlach’s turn is simultaneous with Shadowheart and Gale, so after Shadowheart’s Healing Word, she stands up and drinks a Potion of Greater Healing, restoring 20 more hit points and returning her to nearly half health. She doesn’t have an action, though, since, for some reason, players don’t get an action after they stand up from being downed, which seems like cruel and unusual punishment. Anyway, she tries to move away and takes 11 hit points from one attack of opportunity, and wonders why she did that. It won’t be the first time she does something like that.

Shadowheart, continuing her simultaneous turn, has an action left, so she casts a Blade Ward cantrip on Karlach to protect her from further harm. Then she realized that Blade Ward only affects the caster, not a target. Oopsie.

Now the undead take their turns. The Fireball was only a temporary respite, because Death Drusilla, as expected, casts No Rest for the Wicked to raise one Ghoul back to life. Gale chooses not to Counterspell, to save his third-level spell slots for when it matters most.

Then Death Drusilla demonstrates that restoring undead to full health doesn’t even use up an action, by running at Karlach and hitting once for 11 hit points, and a second time for 14 hit points, downing the tiefling again. (Without Rage, she doesn’t take half damage anymore.) The Ghast then claws at Karlach’s body, gets an automatic critical hit, and causes her to fail two death saving throws immediately.

Karlach is in big trouble.

Round 6, The Ghouls Are Back

Things are looking bleak. Karlach is one death saving throw away from full death. The Death Shepherds are raising the dead Ghouls back to unlife. They still have a lot of health left.

Tavi casts a third-level Plant Growth in the area of all the undead, to try to hinder them from reaching the rest of the party, then casts a bonus action Healing Word at second-level on Karlach to restore the full 11 hit points, thanks to the Beacon of Hope. Karlach stands up again.

Death Darren uses its turn to raise a second dead Ghoul with No Rest for the Wicked, but at least it doesn’t hit Karlach.

Gale can’t do much except try to cast another Fire Bolt cantrip from the back, but it’s at disadvantage because of a “too dark” effect that makes no sense whatsoever, because it’s broad daylight. It misses, of course, because all attacks at disadvantage are statistically guaranteed to miss.

Another Ghoul runs up and hits the badly wounded Karlach for 5 points of damage, and she’s barely standing. Karlach fails a Nausea save from the nearby Ghast and can’t use an action on her turn.

Shadowheart casts a third-level Healing Word on Karlach and restores 15 hit points. With her action, she tries to get back to the plan of whittling down the Death Shepherds by casting a Fire Bolt cantrip at Death Darren and does 11 hit points of fire damage. After this and the Fireball, it now has 17 hit points remaining, the most wounded of the two.

With no actions, Karlach can’t do much, and she only has a few hit points left. She can either stay where she is and get pummeled by undead, or try to move away and get pummeled by undead. She tries to move, takes 3 immediate attacks of opportunity, is paralyzed, and goes down again in a heap.

Death Drusilla then raises the third dead Ghoul, and all three Ghouls that had been killed by Gale’s Fireball are back again. Having finished that, the Death Sheperd leaves Karlach’s body and dashes fully into the squishy back lines toward Gale, hitting him once for 10 hit points of damage. The Ghast also runs into the back lines toward Shadowheart and attempts a claw attack, but luckily misses.

Round 7, Missed Opportunity

The front lines are in shambles, Karlach is down again, and the undead are all up in the party’s back lines.

Death Darren is badly wounded, but Death Drusilla still has most of its hit points.

Tavi notices the Plant Growth hasn’t worked to hinder the enemies, and nobody else is doing any damage, so she hatches a plan to start whittling down the other Death Shepherd by casting Heat Metal (a favorite spell of mine) at third level on Death Drusilla, who is still looming over Gale. It doesn’t drop its sword, but it takes a big 21 points of fire damage, leaving it with only 19 hit points. And that spell remains in effect as long as Tavi keeps concentrating on it, so it will do damage on subsequent turns, too. With her bonus action, Tavi casts a second-level Healing Word on Karlach, restoring 11 hit points (again). Karlach stands up again, saved from a fatality for yet another turn. Tavi has been burning spell slots like crazy, and now only has one 3rd level spell slot remaining, and runs further away.

A Ghoul tries to claw at Karlach but misses. Death Darren inexplicably doesn’t try to attack Karlach on its turn. Random luck, I suppose.

Incidentally, a big section of the road is now on fire from the Fireball, and the undead are taking a few points of additional fire damage now and then from that.

Gale has two third-level spell slots remaining. The first Fireball worked well, and there’s another opportunity here. With Death Drusilla standing in his face, he slides around to get a better angle without taking an opportunity attack, and throws a Fireball in Karlach’s vicinity, where the Ghouls and a badly hurt Death Shepherd are clumped.

Death Darren fails its saving throw and is killed by 24 points of fire damage, along with one of the Ghouls. Now only two Ghouls, a Ghast, and the second Death Shepherd remain standing. Karlach still takes no damage, thanks to Gale’s handy wizard feat. Gale drinks a small healing potion with his bonus action.

Now the real fight begins.

Death Drusilla’s turn is coming up, and it will certainly try to raise the Death Shepherd that just died back with full hit points. The party has to stop that. Gale has one third-level spell slot remaining and stands ready to Counterspell it with his reaction.

Karlach is Nauseous from the Ghast and can’t use an action. She’s been out of this fight for a while now. She begins Raging with her bonus action, hoping to take half damage from any attacks. It’s all she can do. This time, the Wild Magic effect is damaging tendrils, but almost everyone succeeds on the saving throw. She tries to move away from the Ghouls, but takes a hit and is paralyzed again. Arg!

Only Shadowheart and Gale’s Counterspell can stop the Death Shepherd from casting the resurrection now. Shadowheart trusts that Gale can deal with the Death Shepherd, and casts Lesser Restoration on Karlach to dispel the paralysis, but it’s a touch spell and there’s a Ghast right in her face! She has to run away from it and take an attack of opportunity, which could paralyze her too.

The Ghast misses, and Shadowheart escapes to dispel Karlach’s paralysis. Whew! That would have been a disaster. Karlach is no longer paralyzed, or nauseous, and Shadowheart does a bonus action Healing Word to restore 4 more hit points to Karlach. (The Beacon of Hope has ended.)

Karlach has movement remaining, so she runs up to Death Drusilla, preparing for the next round. If nothing else, she’ll get an attack of opportunity if it tries to move.

The battlefield is a shambles, everything’s on fire, but the situation is under control. Gale still has a Counterspell, which is vitally important to stop Death Drusilla from raising Death Darren with its upcoming turn. Karlach will get her actions back and be able to go a long way toward killing Death Drusilla next round. Nothing could go wrong now, right?

Wrong.

In a surprise move, Death Drusilla runs from Gale and Karlach and tries to get away. Gale has a chance to do an opportunity attack, and the game pops up the dialog asking if I want to do so.

Then, out of nowhere, the game glitches out, and the graphics go all weird and flashy, and I’m staring at a very distracting strobe light effect while deciding on whether to do an opportunity attack. I’ve never seen this before in 80+ hours of gameplay.

I take the opportunity attack without thinking, and it’s a CRUCIAL BONEHEAD MISTAKE, in all caps, with exclamation points. Gale misses the attack, but Karlach also gets an attack of opportunity and does 12 points of damage to the escaping Death Shepherd. It only has a few hit points left, but it’s still alive.

While the graphics are having a full-on meltdown– strobing and flashing all over the place, and I’m frantically quicksaving, thinking the game is about to hard crash to the desktop–Death Drusilla casts No Rest for the Wicked and raises Death Darren, with full hit points. I didn’t even notice it.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but when Gale used his reaction to do that opportunity attack, he threw away his chance to do a Counterspell to stop the resurrection.

When the graphics clear up enough that I can even see what’s going on, a Ghast has jumped over and paralyzed Gale to add even further insult to injury.

Round 8, The Sheep

I still think things are under control in this fight. I’m thankful the game hasn’t crashed, and I’m still able to continue without having to reboot.

Tavi still has the Heat Metal applied to Death Drusilla, who only has a few hit points left now, and re-applies the damage with a bonus action. It does 14 fire damage and kills Death Drusilla just like that.

And I’m celebrating, because I think both Death Shepherds are dead now, and the rest of the fight will be easy.

Then I see it.

Death Darren is back in the initiative order with full health.

It fully sinks in what an idiotic move it was to take that opportunity attack, and how it led directly to this disaster. At this point, it’s been almost an hour since I began, and I’m just catching on to the fact that I’m nearly back where I started.

I’m not pleased about this development. I’m extremely disheartened, you might say. Not only am I probably going to have to reload and try this fight again, but it wasn’t because of some random dice roll, it was entirely because I made a careless mistake.

Instead of being in a fantastic position to win the fight with both Death Shepherds dead, the party was in a dire predicament with one Death Shepherd still alive with all their hit points, standing by and ready to resurrect the other. Karlach is nearly dead, and Gale is paralyzed. There’s no way we’re going to win this fight now.

Never have I wished to be able to save scum more. But the quicksave I did was after the mistake. (I rarely quicksave during combat encounters anyway.)

After refreshing the Heat Metal, Tavi still has an action remaining on her turn. She had to stop Death Darren from returning the favor and resurrecting Death Drusilla for the party to have any chance of surviving. Death Darren’s turn is right after hers.

Tavi digs through her inventory and casts a desperation Polymorph from a scroll on Death Darren. It works! The last Death Shepherd turns into a harmless sheep for five turns. That just left a horde of paralyzing Ghouls and that pesky Ghast over by Gale and Karlach.

One remaining Ghoul runs up and hits Shadowheart for 5 points of damage, but she’s still fairly healthy. The Polymorphed sheep runs for Shadowheart, and there’s some concern it might get hurt in some environmental damage on the battlefield, but the fires have died down and, importantly, it stays a sheep.

The situation is this: After the Fireballs and the leftover fires, there are two Ghouls left; one has 7 hit points, the other has 4 hit points. The Ghast has 32 hit points left. Death Darren is a sheep. Shadowheart’s and Karlach’s turns are coming up, but Gale is paralyzed.

The Ghast is the biggest threat on the battlefield, so Shadowheart finds a scroll of Banishment in her inventory and casts it. (Something I used in the previous attempt at this fight.) The Ghast is banished and won’t be able to afflict anyone with Nausea, but only for two turns. Shadowheart runs away so nobody can break concentration on the Banish. She casts a bonus action Healing Word on Karlach.

Karlach is finally able to do something on her turn. She pops an Infernal Coin into her Infernal Engine, for the first time. I have no idea what it’s going to do, but this seems like a great time to find out. We have to win this battle, we’ve never had a better chance, and if we don’t, we’ll just end up reloading anyway. The coin sets her on fire, so she does a little bit of extra fire damage from Infernal Fury. A little disappointing, to be honest.

Only the two Ghouls and a sheep are left on the battlefield. She can’t hit the sheep, obviously, so she decides to get rid of those Ghouls. She attacks one, and misses, but with a Reckless attack, gets to reroll with advantage, so she hits and kills it. She runs to the other Ghoul. (The sheep gets an opportunity attack and hits her for 1 hit point of damage.) With her second attack, Karlach slashes the second Ghoul and kills it, too.

And suddenly Karlach’s doing a lot more damage, as if the undead aren’t resistant anymore. I don’t know if it’s from the Infernal Coin, or because the Death Shepherds aren’t doing their undead protection thing anymore, but it’s a welcome surprise.

Gale remains paralyzed, but since Death Darren is still a sheep, he doesn’t need to Counterspell anything.

Things are looking good again. The pendulum has swung back. It’s still possible to win this fight. Death Darren isn’t going to resurrect anyone, the Ghast is banished, and all the Ghouls are dead. There’s no fear of paralysis or nausea, Karlach can attack and possibly kill Death Darren in the next round, Gale will come out of paralysis, and he’ll be able to Counterspell any attempts to raise Death Drusilla.

Round 9, Not So Fast

Tavi has one 3rd level spell slot remaining. With her bonus action, she casts a Healing Word to heal Karlach for a lucky 11 hit points, giving her a total of 32 hit points. She continues to concentrate on Polymorph so Death Darren stays a sheep and can’t do anything on its turn.

Death Darren Sheep just sits there by itself.

The Ghast is still banished. Gale comes out of paralysis and moves away from the cloud of fumes. Unfortunately, he’s still Nauseous, so he can’t use an action. But that’s okay because for what we’re about to do, we’ll only need him to do a reaction.

The plan is for Shadowheart to cast a Fire Bolt on the sheep to knock it out of Polymorph, then for Karlach to attack with two big swings from the Blooded Greataxe. The Fire Bolt does 11 points of damage. The Death Shepherd has 46 hit points left, and I groan because that’s probably more than Karlach can dish out in one turn.

Karlach considers dropping rage and using a Legacy of Avernus Searing Smite ability because it does a ton of damage and potentially does fire damage every following turn. But, dropping rage uses a bonus action, and the Legacy of Avernus abilities require an action and a bonus action, so she can’t. She can only take two regular attacks. She goes Reckless to gain advantage on these attacks because we don’t want to miss now. She hits for 20 damage on the first attack, and 21 damage on the second attack, which is at least twice as much damage as I expected to do. Are they no longer resisting slashing damage? Is it a weird bug? Who knows? But I’ll take it. She drinks a healing potion with her bonus action.

But it’s still not quite enough. Death Darren still has 5 hit points remaining, but nobody can do any more damage. Shadowheart has a bonus action left and does another Healing Word on Karlach to give her as much chance of staying alive as possible.

We’re still in a good position, because Gale can Counterspell anything that Death Darren tries to do next round.

Then the wild card Ghast’s banishment ends. It runs straight for Gale, hits him for 12 points of damage, and more importantly, paralyzes him, stopping any possibility of doing a final Counterspell against the Death Shepherd.

Disaster. Again.

Round 10, 5 HP or Else

The battle teeters on a razor’s edge. Death Darren’s turn is coming up right after Tavi’s, and it will surely cast No Rest for the Wicked and raise Death Drusilla again, with full hit points, sending us right back to square one and an almost certain TPK.

The Death Shepherd only has 5 hit points left. Tavi has to find a way to do 5 hit points of damage or it’s game over. Again. For, like, the third time in this fight.

This was it. This was the end. Clawing and scratching for well over an hour of fighting now, almost all the enemies were dead, but we were probably still going to lose if this Death Shepherd managed to cast a resurrection on the other Death Shepherd.

Tavi desperately thumbs through her collection of scrolls for anything that does a minimum of 5 hit points of damage, because she’s too far away to do a melee attack, she has no spell slots left, and doesn’t have any reliable damage spells anyway.

Melf’s Acid Arrow looks promising, but for some reason, the Death Shepherd was “too dark” (standing outside in full daylight) so all ranged attacks will have disadvantage, and that’s a statistically guaranteed miss.

The only other option is an Ice Storm scroll, an area of effect spell that would not suffer disadvantage. She was able to line up the targeting circle so it would hit the Death Shepherd and the Ghast, but not Tavi or Karlach. Fingers crossed!

Both of the enemies made their saving throw, but it worked anyway! Death Darren dies, again, and the Ghast takes a big chunk of damage, too.

Everyone breathes a huge sigh of relief. It’s over.

Except it isn’t. The last Ghast still has 20 hit points left, and Ghasts are no joke. Gale’s still paralyzed, and the party’s nearly out of resources. But surely, in a three-on-one scenario, we can finish it off. Surely?

It’s not a promising start to the end of the fight. Karlach leaps over to the Ghast to try to finish it, right into the ghastly fumes, where she immediately succumbs to Nausea, and can’t take any action. She tries to back away from the fumes and takes a hit from an attack of opportunity.

Shadowheart casts a Fire Bolt, but it’s at disadvantage because the Ghast is “too dark,” for mysterious reasons. She misses. She casts a bonus action Healing Word on Gale because he’s hurt badly.

Gale remains paralyzed, and the Ghast lives to fight another round.

Shadowheart’s Healing Word was timely, because the Ghast hits Gale with an automatic critical hit, nearly downing him, then walks over to Tavi and covers her with the noxious fumes that prevent her from using any actions.

Round 11, The Last Ghast

The last Ghast is proving stubbornly difficult to kill. Tavi can’t use any actions on her turn. She tries to run away and takes an attack of opportunity. She has no spell slots left to cast any bonus actions, and can’t do anything else.

Gale returns from paralysis, but he’s nauseous from the Ghast’s stench and can’t use any actions. He moves away and drinks his last healing potion with his bonus action. The hope is that if the party spreads out, the Ghast will have to pick only one party member to affect with its noxious fumes, and the rest can kill it.

Karlach lost her Rage on the previous turn because she wasn’t able to hit anyone. Staying back to avoid the noxious ghast fumes, she fires a crossbow shot with her first attack but misses.

It’s starting to get comical now. The party can’t kill one Ghast.

With her second attack coming up, Karlach realizes she can use a Legacy of Avernus Searing Smite now. Hoping not to run into any ghastly fumes, she takes a chance and runs up to smite the Ghast. This is the last attack before the next round, where the Ghast will get another turn.

Karlach misses. Arg!

But she gets a chance to use a Reckless attack and rolls again.

And hits! She does 29 total damage in one massive strike, fueled by the infernal fury of Avernus, or something like that, and it’s enough to kill the Ghast.

FINALLY.

It’s over.

It took three tries, and almost an hour and a half in the third one, but the road is finally cleared.

The accursed resurrecting Death Shepherds and their accursed paralyzing undead friends are gone.

It’s one of those victory moments where you do the fist pumps and celebrate like you’ve just won the World Cup finals. It’s a victory as satisfying as any Dark Souls boss fight I’ve ever experienced.

And it wasn’t even a boss. Just some undead on the road. Sheesh.

But it was the hardest fight in the game so far for me, not counting the Grymforge cave-in, which, after 4 tries, I assessed as unwinnable without extensive turn-by-turn save scumming.

But yeah, watch out for those Death Shepherds.

P.S. I didn’t really edit this so it’s probably got tons of mistakes in it.

P.P.S. This is a revised and expanded version published on 8/30, which fixes most of the mistakes and adds another 1,200 words of additional context.

The True Story of Dror Ragzlin (Baldur's Gate 3 Spoilers)

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 13:00:00 -0400

I read Wilhelm’s post on Dror Ragzlin and I had to set the record straight on what actually happened in that room.

Massive spoilers below, at least for the first areas of the game (I believe this is all Act I). Readers beware.

When I first read his post, I didn’t read the full post because after 45+ hours I hadn’t encountered Dror Ragzlin yet and didn’t even know who it was. I was struck by how different Wilhelm’s playthrough sounds from mine. Apparently there are people who simply walk from the Grove to the Goblin Camp and that’s that. I actually started to do just that, but what actually happened was:

I found some cultists on the way which led to fighting an owlbear in a cave, then explored a Blighted Village, then went into a cellar and found an underground laboratory and a cursed book, then went looking for Karlach, then had to fight through some gnolls blocking a road, then helped with an inn burning down, then talked to some githyanki dragon riders, then tangled with a hag in a swamp, then got impatient and killed the druid leader, causing every living soul at the Grove to be massacred, then rescued a kid from some harpies at the beach, then explored some caves under a well in the Blighted Village.

Then I went to the goblin camp, some 30-40 hours after I first left the Grove. I, too, was level 3 when I left the Grove, and was still only level 4 when I entered Dror Ragzlin’s room (about three-quarters of the way to level 5, but not enough yet for that sweet, sweet level 5 power increase that I remember so well from Solasta).

The full narrative story of my sordid adventures are over on my Baldur’s Gate 3 Progress page. 4,400 words and counting!

Anyway, the point is, I’m playing my first playthrough very differently. I’m playing on Tactician difficulty, and I’m trying very hard to avoid having to reload the game if I make a horrible mistake. I hate losing progress in games, and I hate to replay sections of a game repeatedly. (I wish games would stop using the antiquated load-and-save mechanic and always make death and failure a normal and expected and fun part of the game.) So, after I learned that you can essentially continue without losing any progress if just a single party member can manage to flee from a losing battle (and if you have enough gold to buy resurrections), I only reload if one of the many game bugs forces me to, or I’m completely overwhelmed by an encounter and everyone dies. Which, so far, hasn’t happened since I learned you can flee.

My adventure with Dror Ragzlin occurred only last night, starting with Nightwarden Mithera next door, who is level 6 and made me very nervous. Especially after, in my first fight with her, she downed Karlach, the unstoppable killing machine in the party, from nearly full health, with one flurry of attacks. Not a good sign. The party fled for their lives immediately. Everyone got away except Karlach, who would have gotten away, except a goblin kicked her down a chasm and killed her instantly, something I didn’t know could even happen until just then.

After resurrecting Karlach, I decided to try again, this time with recently-rescued level 5 Druid Halsin, to get all the advantages I could. I had planned to dispatch the goblin leaders without him, because Halsin warned us that if he accompanied the party, there would be no more talking and battles would break out immediately. And he was right.

The second attempt at the Nightwarden went much smoother (partly because we killed one of her bodyguards the first time), and there were no casualties. The hardest part of the second fight was getting rid of that stupid Scrying Eye, which was nearly impossible to hit or damage. Luckily we shut it down with Silence spells so it only managed to call in one reinforcement.

It took so little resources I felt reasonably confident going next door to tackle Dror Ragzlin without even taking a long rest. I wasn’t the slightest bit worried about his horde of goblin buddies, because I had a decent idea of their capabilities from previous fights. I was mainly worried about what Dror himself might do. Was he a caster? Was he a fighter? I didn’t know.

My lineup for this fight was: Halsin, the ridiculously broken and overpowered 5E druid class who can wildshape into a bear and immediately gain 36 temporary hit points multiple times per combat. Karlach, the wild magic barbarian, wielding a massive magic great axe picked up from a dead vendor, who cuts down weaker enemies in a single blow, and a host of magic items giving her various bonuses. Shadowheart, the cleric with an all-around balanced and useful skillset. Astarion, the Rogue Vampire who is not my favorite character but a rogue’s ability to do a cunning action dash or disengage makes him absolutely crucial for fleeing any battle, and rogues are a fairly reliable source of steady damage every round from a near-guaranteed sneak attack. And, of course, the hero of our story, Tavi, the Bard with the Bongos, who mostly plays a supporting role in combat by dishing out advantages or disadvantages on an as-needed basis.

I couldn’t walk into the room with Druid Halsin in tow, or combat would immediately break out. So I sent Shadowheart in by herself to survey the scene. I was worried about what kind of magic Dror Ragzlin could cast, and there were a couple of little goblin casters nearby, so I began the combat by having Shadowheart cast a Silence sphere in the general vicinity. Silence is how you beat casters. Many of them aren’t smart enough to walk out of the silence zone, and will engage in melee combat instead. (A vital lesson I learned in Solasta: Crown of the Magister that also works in BG3.)

It turns out Dror Ragzlin doesn’t cast magic at all. He’s a barbarian and he hits hard. And he jumps around a lot, using the stupid broken jumping mechanic that somehow allows you to move way further than your movement speed will allow. Jump first, then move–you’ll get like twice as far if you have a high strength. It’s nuts. Anyway, Dror frequently hits one party member, jumps halfway across the screen, then hits another party member, both for crazy damage. Not fun.

Astarion went down from a Dror blow, but we got him back up, and he spent most of his time hiding at the top of the stairs with very few hit points, because he ran out of healing potions. In the end, hiding at the top of the stairs was a poor decision, because Dror leaped over to Astarion later in the fight, then kicked him straight into a bottomless chasm below, and Astarion died instantly, and we were down one rogue for about half the fight. That ratcheted up the stakes immediately for my self-imposed “iron man” playthrough because there would probably be no running away from this battle without a rogue.

Two can play at the kicking game, though. BG3’s AI had taught me numerous times how effective kicking someone in combat can be. I lost count of the number of times an enemy had unexpectedly kicked one of my party into an environmental damage area, like a burning patch or electrified water or a grease slick.

Early in the battle, a goblin warrior stood right at the edge of the giant spider pit. Karlach charged him and kicked him right into the pit below, and from that moment on, about half of the goblins in the room spent their time fighting with the spiders instead of us. In the end, one of the two spiders was killed, but many goblins also died, because those spiders also had ranged attacks.

Most of the action took place on the right side of the room around the bottom of the stairs. The main and only tactic I used, really, was to ignore the goblins (and a warg summon) and focus fire as many heavy hitters as possible on Dror Ragzlin to get him down as fast as possible. Every turn that Dror had was a chance someone (or more than one someone, really) in the party could die. Early in the battle we were doing a lot of damage to him, but about halfway through he must have used some spell or ability that gave him a lot of damage resistence, and it was slower work toward the end. A lot of healing potions and bonus action healing words were used in the battle. Shadowheart and Tavi both had bonus action heals that were used to top people off. This was not a situation to conserve spell slots. This was a burn-everything-or-probably-die situation.

Once Dror Ragzlin went down, things got a lot easier. We weren’t out of the woods just yet, though, because right around then, the spider-versus-goblin fight had died out and the remaining goblins were turning their attention back to us. Fortunately they were relatively easy to dispatch, even with most of our resources depleted, and Shadowheart and Tavi mainly being down to cantrips and crossbow shots. Karlach and the wildshaped bear form of Druid Halsin dispatched most of the remaining goblins in one or two hits.

The party was beat up (mostly Karlach), Astarion fell to his death and had to be resurrected, but overall it was a successful operation to bring down Dror Ragzlin on the first try. Druid Halsin was ecstatic that his Grove would no longer be threatened (we didn’t mention that all his druid friends along with all the tieflings in the Grove were already dead).

Dror Ragzlin was the third and final goblin leader defeated in the Shattered Sanctum, which now clears the way for … something. I don’t really know what comes next. Something about a Moonlit Tower I guess, wherever that is.

And that was how things really went down with Dror Ragzlin.

Baldur's Gate 3 Impressions (No Spoilers)

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 10:00:00 -0400

What is there to say about Baldur’s Gate 3 that hasn’t already been said? I genuinely don’t know, because I haven’t read much of what anyone’s said so far.

But I’ll start with something I haven’t seen mentioned in the casual enthusiasm so far: This game is riddled with bugs. It’s the buggiest RPG I’ve seen since any average MMORPG launch in the late 1990s or early 2000s. You can’t take two steps in the game without running into a texture bug, or a camera pointed off into space, or a model that looks weird, or some interactive feature of the world that isn’t working right, or a disappearing UI, or supposed allies that suddenly start attacking you, or something. To be fair, it’s usually the kind of bug we software developers would classify as a “cosmetic” bug–something you can put off fixing until later because it doesn’t really stop customers from using the software.

Despite that, I have no doubts whatsoever that I’m going to keep playing this game and work around or ignore all the quirky bugs and annoyances, because there’s definitely something compelling about it, something that elevates it above the rest of the field, so that it might actually be that roughly one game a year that is actually worth taking time out of your busy schedule to play. It’s the kind of game that’s an experience, not just a game.

I’ve played about 12 hours so far (not counting a couple hours of false starts), and I’m playing really slow, talking to everyone, reading all the text out loud, reading books and item descriptions and whatnot, extended hour-plus tactial combat sequences, stopping to play bongos for the crowds, so that’s probably like 2 hours of content that everyone else is blowing through in their race to see the end of the story. (I imagine streamers are probably finishing up the game when I post this.)

Tavi the Bard entertaining some tieflings while dour companions look on.

In terms of basic gameplay mechanics, it’s essentially a mashup of Divinity: Original Sin and Dragon Age. The influences from those games are heavy.

Divinity: Original Sin, obviously, because the same studio made it, and at times it looks like they genuinely just swapped different art assets into the exact same game, undoubtedly saving tons of development time.

The Dragon Age and BioWare ancestry, however, was a pleasant surprise. It has the same “camp drama” mechanic from that game, where you go around talking to all the people in your party every night at camp. (Or, in my case, after almost every combat encounter, because I’m playing on Tactician difficulty so far.) At camp is when you find out all of your companions’ Secret Tragic Backstories(TM), something that is apparently required to play modern D&D.

Your companion characters have very obvious and differing personalities and you quickly form opinions about them, just like most BioWare games. Although I will say that none of them really stand out as being more likable than any other ones, to me personally. They all have that kind of generic heroic fantasy Secret Tragic Backstory(TM) kind of personality that’s easy to laugh at. (The Secret Tragic Backstory(TM) usually boils down to some variation of abuse or addiction. Sorry to spoil literally every story related to D&D in all of human history.)

In terms of a D&D combat simulator, I find it lacking. I think Solasta: Crown of the Magister sets the bar there, and BG3 does not meet or exceed it. It’s actually very annoying that it doesn’t lay down a tactical square grid to make things easier. With the game’s gridless system of auto-pathing, I constantly have problems getting my characters to go to the exact spot I want them to go, following the exact route I want them to take to avoid opportunity attacks, which can sometimes be the difference between life and death.

But I still find the combat fairly exciting. On Tactician difficulty, almost every fight so far has been a near-TPK. The [redacted] in the Refectory, the [redacted] in the Dank Crypt, the [redacted] in the cave: All those early encounters, I had to scratch and claw my way through them, using up almost all my resources, and there was never any certainty of winning. Update: Even the very first encounter with the [redacted] in the wreckage of the crashed ship, after both enemies’ turns, I was exactly 1 hit point away from a TPK.

Tavi and new hireling Brinna Brightsong jamming on bongos and violin.

I tried to make my character an antithesis to the typical Heroic Fantasy Secret Tragic Backstory(TM) character that D&D 5E always wants you to make: Mine is Tavi, a Halfling Bard with Bongos, always trying to lighten the mood with a drum circle, but so far, none of the broody companions have wanted to join in. I even hired a second halfling Bard to play the violin with me. By the end of the game, I might replace all the broody companions with a full Halfling Bard Band. (Note: Two halfling bards does not help make combat any easier on Tactician difficulty.)

That’s good enough for a first look, I suppose. I’m really enjoying it so far and don’t anticipate playing anything else for a while, despite all the bugs. I can’t ~~under~~ overstate how many bugs are in this game. It’s a ton of bugs. But they’re more the endearing kind of bugs, you know? The kind of bugs you look back on fondly and laugh about as being part of that nostalgic game experience. They don’t seem to matter to my enjoyment of the game. So far, at least. So far, I haven’t actually lost anything to a bug.

Bendy and the Dark Revival

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 13 May 2023 10:50:00 -0400

As luck would have it, May’s Humble Choice includes Bendy and the Dark Revival, which is a game that I picked up on Steam a few months ago.

Bendy and the Dark Revival is a stylish first-person spooky game. I bought it mainly on the strength of the funny-sounding title and the screenshots. I was playing Resident Evil games at the time, and it promised to be another game in the survival horror genre, and it had decent Steam reviews, so I gave it a try.

I don’t particularly like writing anything resembling a game review, so I’m not sure why I keep volunteering to do these. Almost all of my game reviews, from tiny indie games to AAA blockbusters, can be summarized in one phrase: “It was okay.” There are so many games coming out every year now that almost none of them stand out as anything but average, and this is another one of those games.

Just another typical late night working in a creepy office during a thunderstorm when the power goes out.

It was okay.

It’s billed as a horror game, but I didn’t find it the slightest bit scary. I have a pretty high tolerance for horror, though, so your mileage may vary. There’s a lot of darkness and some jump scares and creepy situations, but none of it felt “real” to me.

One sub-game I like to play when I look at a new game is to guess which older game inspired the developers of the new game. There are so few original ideas in gaming anymore that you can almost always trace the ancestry of every new game back to a handful of original games from the late 90s or early 00s that inspired it.

If I were to pick the game that Bendy is most descended from, it would have to be BioShock. I didn’t find BioShock very scary either, but I’ve heard many others describe it as such.

(Incidentally, BioShock is descended from Half-Life, which is descended from Quake, which is descended from Doom, which is descended from Wolfenstein 3D, which is loosely descended from a million Maze games. A fun project someday would be to build a Family Tree of Every Game Ever, and find the Adam and Eve of Every Game. It would probably be something like prehistoric people playing with sticks and rocks.)

The cartoon world is very dark.

Back to Bendy: It has an interesting art style, being made to look as if you’ve been pulled into a classic Disney-esque hand-drawn world. There’s a lot of environmental storytelling–a lot of posters on the walls to look at, and letters on desks to read, and audiologs to listen to. There’s some NPCs to talk to; some friendly, some not so much.

Dark Revival is supposed to be a sequel to a game called Bendy and the Ink Machine, which I haven’t played. Dark Revival seems to stand alone fairly well, though, but there isn’t much explanation in the beginning for why this weird cartoon world exists. There’s a vague sense that something happened before but it doesn’t really matter. There isn’t much of a story to follow anyway: You’re an animator who gets stuck in a cartoon world you have to escape, and it’s populated with strange creatures and people, and that’s about it. The worldbuilding seems irrelevant to the game.

Definitely inspired by BioShock.

In the cons department, I found the pacing of the game very slow. I only managed to play for about an hour and a half before writing this, during which the main gameplay activity was holding down the “forward” key. Occasionally I had to activate a switch or hide from an enemy. It wasn’t until the end of that time that I picked up a BioShock-style pipe wrench (oddly called a “Gent pipe”) with which to defend myself.

I was determined to play a third game session to try to get my play time up over two hours before closing the book on this blog post, but I just couldn’t summon the motivation to do it. There’s so many other games to play and things to do and not that much time to do them in. Perhaps Bendy and the Dark Revival will be the game you’ve been waiting for, but it’s not the game for me.

If you haven’t played BioShock, it’s one of the seminal works in video game history. Bendy and the Dark Revival, however… it’s a valiant effort in the complex and thankless work of assembling video game assets together and publishing them, but it doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression other than: “It was okay.”

Humble Sir Brante

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 20:50:00 -0400

It’s an average choose-your-own-adventure game.

April’s Humble Choice selection includes The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante: In Times of the Fall of the Blessed Arknian Empire, an indie game which I got on Steam last year mainly on the strength of its title alone, and have played for about five hours.

Sir Brante tells the story of, you guessed it, Sir Brante, a man who grows up in a somewhat grimdark heteronormative patriarchal fantasy theological setting which is obviously modeled after a historical European medieval period. The tale unfolds over five parts of Sir Brante’s life, each containing a series of short chapters. At the end of each tale you make a choice that determines how the rest of the story plays out.

I bought it because I had an idea for a video series, and I was looking for a “choose your own adventure” style of narrative game. I was going to roll a die onscreen to make every narrative selection randomly.

I suppose Sir Brante could also fit into the “visual novel” genre of games, but I tend to think of visual novels as heavy on the narrative and light on the choices, whereas I was looking for something that had meaningful choices on every page, so to speak.

The writing is servicable but not inspired, with themes revolving around religion and the divisions between nobility and lower classes. The setting wasn’t entirely uninteresting, and there were hints of compelling conflicts to come, but I found the storytelling ran out of steam after four to five hours (of reading out loud). The plot felt like it developed too slowly, the characters weren’t very deep, and I couldn’t tell how my choices changed the story for the better, so I gave up with Sir Brante barely reaching the end of adolescence.

Kudos should go to the developer for making the font readable by default. I liked the visual style of the game’s artwork–the stark monochromatic sepia-and-black line art and so forth. The music and sound effects didn’t detract from the experience. (But neither did they really add to it.)

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it’s not the worst example of this kind of game I’ve ever seen, either. It sits in that broad space that’s … well, average, which is unfortunately faint praise in an ocean of similarly average games.

Video Essay - Making Game Videos

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 19:30:00 -0500

I’ve been uploading game videos to my YouTube channel for about eight years now, and as my first foray into video essays, I decided to make a video about how I do it.

This is the original script for that 8-minute video, for the folks who would rather read text. It’s a little longer and includes some deleted sections. I deleted parts mainly because I couldn’t find an interesting video clip to go with them, but one time because Davinci Resolve bugged out and kept rendering an annoying audio click in one spot for no apparent reason and I gave up after a week of trying to work around it (hilariously, it was right after I said “nothing annoys me more than audio problems”).

There are basically three steps to recording game videos. First I setup how I’m going to record the game. Then I play the game. Then I process and upload the videos. Those first and last parts are the most time-consuming.

I use two PCs to record now. Since my last gaming PC upgrade in 2021, I converted my old gaming PC into a recording PC.

SOUND

I used to do home recording in the 90s, so I’m obsessed with sound quality. The audio part of a video is the most important part to me.

I use XLR microphones and a small mixer, which feeds the audio interface into my recording PC. Technically I could simplify things and plug the microphones directly into the audio interface but the mixer gives me more flexibility.

In the past I’ve had great results with an old Rode condenser microphone, but right now I’m using an Audio Technica dynamic headset. I record in a very “live” room and it’s very easy to pick up excess noise and echo from the wooden walls and floor. It’s worth sacrificing some microphone quality to reduce room noise. Room noise is the main thing that gives you a headache when you listen to other people’s videos.

I used to use a Shure headset, which was even better at reducing noise, but I found the hypercardoid mic sounded a little harsh, and more importantly it was uncomfortable to wear. But if you need to record next to a vacuum cleaner, I’d recommend it.

I prefer dynamic over condenser microphones because condenser mics are really good at picking up “mouth sounds” if you’re not careful. A condenser mic will pickup the sound of your tongue sticking to the roof of your mouth which results in tiny little moist “clicking” sounds, especially if you’re quiet and use a lot of compression like I do. I don’t want to think about that when I’m playing a game.

I use a cheap Behringer compressor as a mixer insert on the headset. I set the compression at about 4:1. It also has a noise gate and a built-in de-esser which I have cranked because the mic is so close to my mouth.

OBS can technically do all of the microphone processing (and my mixer even has a built-in compression knob) but I prefer the outboard compressor, and I’ve just gotten used to it.

I found out very early on that I have to do a lot of compression on my voice because I mumble quietly while playing but then I’ll suddenly yell at something out of nowhere, and I need to smooth out those levels.

I use a Mackie USB mixer because it has essentially two outputs, one analog and one USB. The analog output goes to the audio interface in my recording PC, which goes into OBS. But the USB output goes back to my gaming PC, so I can add voiceovers in post-processing if I need to. Editing on the gaming PC is much faster than it is on the recording PC.

(Incidentally, I recorded most of the voiceover for this video with an Audio-Technica AT2035, a new condenser microphone I’m trying out. I had some suspicions that my old Rode microphone was dying.)

VIDEO

I use an AverMedia PCI capture card in the recording PC. I used to use an Elgato capture card, but I kept having random audio dropouts so I replaced it. Nothing annoys me more than audio problems.

To get the video from my gaming PC to my recording PC, I mirror my gaming PC display to the capture card’s HDMI input at 1440p resolution.

I don’t usually use much in the way of camera equipment for game videos.

I experiment with recording a webcam from time to time, but I very rarely publish it. I find that “face cams” are useless unless you’re good-looking and/or you’re doing something interesting with your face, and 95% of the time I’m just staring blankly at the game screen. It just draws the viewer’s eye away from the game for no good reason.

Still, I recently got a Logitech BRIO webcam, and before that I used a Logitech C920 webcam. Sometimes I try recording both at once.

I also got a Sony ZV-1 camera which can be used as a very high quality face cam for recording, but it’s a pain to stream video from it, and I think it uses some weird beauty filters that I can’t figure out how to turn off. It’s better for other kinds of video. (Like some of what you’re seeing in this video.)]

I got some cheap LED lights that I can turn on when I’m recording at night. Quality video is mainly about lighting, which isn’t a subject I care much about, so I do the bare minimum I can get away with.

Another reason I avoid camera video is that I have to clean the house. Yuck.

Not to mention it’s a lot easier to edit the audio tracks if you don’t have to synchronize them with any camera video.

OBS

Like the rest of the world, I use OBS to record the videos. I have it setup to record multiple audio tracks: One for the game, one for the headset, and one for a backup microphone track in case I accidentally leave the main microphone muted.

The backup microphone is just a Blue Snowball USB mic, and it sounds awful whenever I have to use it, but it’s better than silence, and way better than having to re-record a video or a voiceover.

Unfortunately there’s not much you can do as a backup if you lose the game audio though. Good luck fixing that.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with recording multiple video streams as well as multiple audio streams. That’s more of a pain to deal with, though.

For video encoding I use the Nvidia constant bitrate encoder at 10 to 15 megabits, depending on the size and complexity of the source. I usually set keyframes to 1 second intervals to give me more flexibility in editing.

For audio encoding, I record at 48khz and encode anywhere from 192 to 256 kilobytes.

I try to keep my raw recordings to 45 minutes or less, but sometimes they go up to an hour. They average about 4 to 6 Gigabytes each.

After all that setup, I finally get to play a game.

PLAYING

I can only play for an hour or less before I need a break from the screen. I have back, neck, and shoulder problems so I can’t sit for long periods of time anyway. I could never be one of those streamers that plays for 8 hours a day or for 24 hour marathons.

On weeknights I can only record one or maybe two videos, but on weekends I might record four or five or more videos, depending on how much I like the game.

I have to have a mute switch available at all times to cut the microphone whenever I cough or sneeze or something. I’m plagued by mucus and phlegm so I’m constantly having to clear my throat or cough, especially if I record in the mornings.

So last year I splurged on a fancy schmancy Elgato Stream Deck and an Elgato Footpedal to use during recording. Before that, I just used a cheap wireless numeric keypad, which works just as well.

Otherwise I just play the games and say whatever comes to mind. There’s a mysterious skill and a kind of performance art to talking out loud while you’re playing a game, which is something I’ve been working on for seven years now. It activates a part of the brain that otherwise goes unused, and it doesn’t come naturally. But I’m used to talking to myself in my head all day, and I’ve found that it’s largely a matter of disabling the social filter that keeps me from doing that in public.

As for what to say, I just try to convey what I’m thinking about the game at any given time. I talk about what I would be interested in hearing if I were watching someone else: The thought process that goes into game decisions, the things about the environment or the story that stand out as unusual or interesting. And dumb jokes, of course.

The most influential YouTube Let’s Play series that got me started was a Dark Souls series by a guy named Masterkizz, which I first saw around 2015. It’s the one that made me think “okay, this is what this art form is supposed to look like.” His is rough at the start but I’ve mostly been trying to copy his basic template ever since.

He has a way more exuberant personality than I do, but there’s an authenticity to it that I like. You get the sense that if he wasn’t recording and you were sitting next to him in the same room watching him play, it would look exactly the same as the YouTube uploads. You can tell he just likes to play games. There’s a lack of a performative veneer, and that’s what I try for too, even though it is a performance to some extent.

I like to think of a game video series (I hate calling them Let’s Play videos) as more of a documentary, something that tells a narrative story of how I experienced the game. I want to go through a character arc of my own, as a player, from the beginning of the game to the end–separate and distinct from whatever the game’s story is–as I discover new things and learn the ins and outs of the game along the way. It’s an elusive goal.

POST-PROCESSING

Once the game session is over, finally there’s the post-processing, which can be quick or very time-consuming.

This is probably the part that I’ve spent the most time trying to streamline over the years. I’m constantly tweaking the workflow and trying to automate things to make it easier on me, and I change something on almost every game series I record.

I lean heavily on ffmpeg command line scripts. I’m a programmer in real life so that stuff is fairly easy for me. If you don’t know, ffmpeg is a command line tool to read and write video files, and it’s packed with processing tools.

In a perfect world, I wouldn’t do any manual editing on my recordings. Usually, I just run a script that mixes the game and microphone audio tracks together the way I like and spits out a final MP4 file. Usually one high quality version for uploading to YouTube and one lower-quality version to archive onto an external USB hard drive somewhere. The script works about 75% of the time.

But sometimes I need to cut out boring parts of a recording. The first thing I’ll try is a program called Avidemux. If you can manage to make the cuts on keyframe boundaries, it doesn’t require re-rendering the video, which saves tons of time and preserves the original quality.

Avidemux is also a very good tool to scrub through a video very quickly to remember what’s in it, or find a place to grab a video frame for a blog post.

Sometimes I need to edit only the audio tracks. Usually to fix a section of the commentary where I accidentally muted the main microphone, and I have to copy over a section of the backup microphone track.

In those cases I’ll use Audacity for simple edits or REAPER for more complicated edits.

But sometimes I need to use a full-blown video editor. When I go into a video editor, it’s usually for complicated montages like condensing five hours of boss fighting down into a half hour video, or perhaps adding titles, and it’s very time-consuming. It could take five times as long to edit those videos as it does to record them, so I try to avoid it.

I used Movie Studio Platinum for many years but lately I’m starting to use Davinci Resolve as my video editor of choice. It’s quirky and has a bit of a learning curve, but I’m finally warming up to it. (I used this video as a practice project for Davinci Resolve.) (Just beware that it crashes A LOT, but thankfully it has a good crash recovery system.)

And that’s it. Just a few simple steps and eight years worth of mistakes, and that’s how I make videos. That’s the secret to it, really. Just keep making new videos and try to learn from the mistakes you made in the old ones. Good luck!

Attributions

Most of the game footage is from playing the Resident Evil 0 HD Remake on January 31st, 2023, which I haven’t uploaded yet but probably will in a couple of months.
The Avidemux footage is from Nier: Automata played in 2022, which I also haven’t uploaded and probably never will because I doubt I’ll ever finish that game.
Dark Souls II - Part 59 - Velstadt (2015) https://youtu.be/c79tOHIsjXw
Cataclysm DDA Short Stories - Sharleen and the Pickup Truck (2022) https://youtu.be/8D9DgH0D8qk
Elden Ring Pt 245 - Melania the Sword of Miquella (2022) https://youtu.be/bzwYl5ZBoBs
The intro sting is a track I came up with in 2017 for my Guild Wars videos, but I don’t remember if I’ve ever used this version of it before now.
The main background music is a track I made with Renoise for my Dwarf Fortress videos in 2019, but I never uploaded any of those videos.
The outro music is from my Cut The Chain music video in 2021 https://youtu.be/q3FN52rYaMY which has samples from the commentary of my Resident Evil 3 PS4 demo video https://youtu.be/DPlSXw8JSTE, both of which still makes me laugh.

Equipment Reference

Audio Technica BPHS1 https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/bphs1 (great bang for the buck) (it turns out almost none of the audio in this video was recorded with one, but almost 100% of my game recordings since 2022 are)
Shure BRH50M https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones/brh50m-lc?variant=BRH50M (very expensive, not recommended unless you’re rich or have a very specific need to record next to a vacuum cleaner) (games recorded in 2021 used this)
Audio Technica AT2035 https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/at2035 (a new condenser microphone I’m trying, most of the voiceover in this video was recorded with this)
Blue Snowball https://www.bluemic.com/en-us/products/snowball/ (way bigger than you’d think)
Rode NT1 https://rode.com/en/microphones/studio-condenser/nt1 (I love this mic but they don’t make the one I have anymore, mine looks more like the current Rode NT1-A)
Mackie ProFX10v3 https://mackie.com/en/products/mixers/profxv3-series/ProFX10v3.html (I’ve always liked Mackie mixers but they aren’t as good as they used to be)
Behringer MDX2600 Composer Pro XL https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0CCX (good enough, not sure they still make this model)
Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 https://focusrite.com/en/usb-audio-interface/scarlett/scarlett-18i8 (more for recording music, a bit overkill just for games, and I’d rather have a MOTU because I used to have several MOTU audio interfaces that worked very well in the 90s)
AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K https://www.avermedia.com/us/product-detail/GC573 (working well so far but I don’t actually record in 4K)
Elgato HD60 Pro (don’t think they make this one anymore, thank god)
Sony ZV-1 camera https://www.sony.com/en-ci/compact-cameras/products/zv-1 (used for B-roll of equipment shots, but any phone camera would have also worked)
Logitech BRIO webcam https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/webcams/brio-4k-hdr-webcam.960-001105.html (I don’t record in 4K though)
Logitech C920 webcam https://www.logitech.com/en-gb/products/webcams/c920-pro-hd-webcam.960-001055.html
Elgato Stream Deck v2 https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-mk2 (too expensive for what it does, but it looks neat I guess), Elgato Stream Deck Pedal https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-pedal (also kind of pricey for what it does, but it works and it’s hard to find alternatives)
Cheap Wireless Numeric Keypad https://www.newegg.com/p/0GA-00D9-000V5?Item=9SIA72533B2377 (there’s a million of these out there)
None of those companies pay me.