There's Bodies In The Streets! This Place Isn't Free, Not Any More

And I'm done! It's been a lot of fun to dig my teeth into a big ole' RPG again; I think the last major RPG I played through to completion was Torment: Tides of Numenara, nearly two years ago. Divinity Original Sin 2 is a ton of fun, and also feels nicely distinctive in many ways from the other major western RPG franchises I've played and enjoyed in the past.

I've got a lot to say, but let's start this off with a quick run-down of what I liked and didn't liked.

The Great

Challenging and finely-tuned combat. I've mentioned this in every post before, but it bears repeating. They're always interesting and significant and worthwhile.

Creative variety in combat. It took me a while to understand that every single fight in this game is unique: it's honestly shocking how many special enemy abilities only appear in a single encounter and never after. They're much more like puzzles to solve than traditional resource-based battles, which is all the more impressive given the vast number of potential solutions. All those useless water balloons you picked up over the course of the game? It turns out that they're incredibly useful for one specific area!

Beautiful environment design. You can move through some of these areas very quickly, but I always enjoy pausing and sweeping the camera around to look at my gorgeous surroundings.

The Good

Music. I was particularly attracted to Lohse's theme and the Hall of Echoes theme. There are beautiful and haunting variations that develop over the course of the game; Lohse in particular culminates in a mesmerizing and surprising performance. The songs take on more emotional import as the game continues and your relationship to the themes strengthens.

Humor. I kind of hated the [JESTER]-specific lines, but in general I appreciated the gentle fun the game indulged in from time to time, which kept things from getting too dark and didn't undercut the drama of the game.

Plot. It's complex and weavy and interesting; I don't know that we need another "Save The World From Total Destruction" storyline, but they did some original things within that framework, and I stayed curious about and engaged in the steady trickle of revelations.

Characters. Malady is a particular highlight, super well-written and fantastically voice-acted. She's intriguing and mysterious, really funny and engaging. She shoulders a lot of exposition while making you feel like you're in on the joke. For most of the major characters in general, you get a good and distinct sense of their personality, can predict how they will react to certain situations, and feel some level of investment in their fate (but note my comments in spoilertown below). Minor characters run the gamut from intriguing to aggravating, but nobody significantly outstays their welcome.

Puzzles. I occasionally had to resort to wikis to figure them out, but usually could solve them myself. The last puzzle in the game is one of the best I've played in any RPG and has prompted me to reflect on how to better handle puzzles in any future games I work on. Too often, puzzles are just something that confuses you until it snaps into place and you've suddenly got it; this is a great multi-stage one where you can try stuff out, see how things work, fail but make progress, partially succeed, and gradually work out how to do everything you need to do.

Voice acting. I often read ahead of the dialogue and skip before the line is delivered, but none of the voices are actively annoying, and some of them (Sebille, Malady, etc.) are fantastic.

The Medium

Crafting. It's a deep and vast system, it's worthwhile, resources are limited and useful but not excessively scarce, and the UI is pretty friendly; I particularly appreciate being able to learn recipes from both books and experimentation, and having those permanently recorded. But there's paralysis with having thousands of items in your bags and not knowing whether anything has multiple uses. I would have loved some way to see what known recipes a given item is used for, and then I could more confidently decide whether to sell it, use it, or save it for later.

Sharing teammate skills. This is a really cool idea, and I wish it was more widespread. It's very helpful to share Lucky Charm when opening containers so I can do that with any character instead of always switching to Beast, and it's a great quality-of-life to not need to switch to Sebille every time I want to identify something with Loremaster. It would be nice if I could use my highest character's Wits to highlight loose objects on the map. As it stands, I feel like I'm forced to explore with my Wits character in the lead, then hand off loot items to my high-Strength character to carry, then spend time in the inventory screens dragging all the high-strength character's Wares items into my high-Bartering character's inventory before selling it. Doing all that stuff doesn't make it any more fun.

Pathing is kind of inconsistent. Followers will automatically stay out of dangerous surfaces like flames, electricity, or poison. (Nicely, undead followers prefer to walk through poison to pick up the free heals.) They will walk around the surface if they can, or just stay put if there's no safe path; sometimes that's good and sometimes it's not, but on the whole it's much better than them always dumbly crossing. Given that smartness, though, it's perplexing that party members will happily walk right over a trap after you've discovered it and shouted "I've spotted a trap!" And even with high Wits, your lead character typically doesn't spot a trap until you're almost on top of it, and you don't automatically stop moving when you spot it, so very likely to hear "I've spotted a [CLANG] [FWOOSH] ARGH!" On the plus side, though, traps are normally clustered in an area, so once you see your first trap, it's usually worthwhile to slow down and explore more cautiously; if you haven't seen any traps lately, it's usually safe to run through an area without worrying about traps.

Activating Spirit Vision. I had to resort to wiki lookups several times in Act 2 to figure out how to proceed, and almost always it was because I had to use Spirit Vision in a particular place. After a while I got used to it, and would automatically tap the icon as soon as I came across fresh corpses, which is usually (not always) what Spirit Vision is good for. I do kind of wish that Spirit Vision was just always on, so I wouldn't accidentally miss content; but it is probably more gameplay-y to have it be something you actively do than just a passive story-based power. I dunno.

The Annoying

Vast inventory. I keep harping on this, and it's by far my least favorite aspect of the game. One specific annoyance: finding a particular item, like the blackroot I needed for one of my quests. You can search for recipes, and I really wish there was a similar way to search your inventory, both when crafting and just in general.

Containers. I'm still confused why Alt highlights loose items and corpses but not containers, which is the opposite of how Infinity Engine and similar games work. It's been that way since Original Sin 1 so I'm sure it's intentional, but I'm not sure why. I feel like I'm getting too old to play hunt-the-pixel.

Repeating ambient dialogue. If you stand in the same spot in a town, you'll hear the same dialogue over and over and over and over again. This is particularly bad in places like the Driftwood Square, when you're spending what feels like hours managing inventory and keep hearing "How are you holding up, Bree?" "All right, so long as I don't think about it." AAAAARRRRRRGGGGHH.

After-combat DOT effects. There were a whole bunch of times when I would win a fight, but surviving party members would still be on fire or poisoned or bleeding or whatever, and they would die after winning and before I could heal them. It's pretty frustrating to be shoved right back into non-pausable real-time mode after so carefully and successfully managing everyone during a long turn-based fight. I eventually started addressing this by keeping a bedroll in my quick-action bar and tapping it after combat, but this doesn't always work. If the party is too scattered, or if the one carrying the bedroll died, then I won't be able to quick-heal. The worst is when you're forced to talk at the conclusion of a fight and your party bleeds out while you're stuck in the conversation interface.

Okay, I have a lot more stuff to talk about! Let's jump directly into the

MEGA SPOILERS

Let's talk about romance!

I mentioned in an earlier post that I wasn't sure if this game had "real" romance arcs, or just the occasional option to flirt. Welp, it turns out that there is true romance. It feels a little underweighted, particularly early in the game, which I think is at least partly because of the sheer scope of the game: if you're playing for 100+ hours, romance will necessarily just be a small fraction of that. Early on I often wished there was more content. At least in my romance (playing as Lohse, romancing Sebille) it was pretty much just saying occasional nice things when the opportunity presented itself, then eventually reading about some kissing. That said, it's a recurring complaint of mine for any RPG: I always want more, more, more romance. Which does seem like an unfair burden for a roleplaying game to bear; I should probably play romance games if I want more romance!

I do need to say, though, that that was a great sex scene! It's maybe one of the best I've come across in a game. Visually, it's weird and laughable: you're reading text about sexy stuff going on with your naked bodies while visually the two characters are silently staring at one another while wearing full suits of plated metal armor. But that text is terrific, way more explicit than I was expecting. In some ways it's an opposite presentation from BioWare, which is visually much more ambitious in attempting to animate sex scenes while being very light on the actual sex content, while Larian doesn't even try to do something visual but really delivers sex well (without making the encounter just about the physical connection). Oh, and there are interior choices where you can guide and respond to the action, and good attention to all of your senses like touch and taste and smell, utilizing all of the tools at a game-writer's disposal to make the experience as vivid and engaging as possible. It's so good!

Let's talk about choices!

Some of the big choices in the game feel a bit muddled, such as the part on The Nameless Isle with the conflict between the Shadow Prince and the Heart Tree. It's a big choice, and was kind of hard to make, but I felt pretty adrift and unsure about the world and the context in which it occurs, as opposed to unsure about my choice. Can I really trust these people? What are the consequences to my actions? I think the game periodically dumps new information on you right before demanding you decide something, which is probably intended to raise the stakes and make it more exciting, but generally just makes me more baffled about what is going on and why I should care.

To me, the gold standard of choice in an RPG remains Caridin's Forge in Dragon Age: Origins. I agonized over that decision for what felt like an hour precisely because the stakes felt so clear: you've spent days fighting alongside the dwarves, can viscerally feel the helplessness of their eternal battle against the Darkspawn, you've witnessed the impassive tenacity of the golems as both friend and foes, you've spoken with many dwarves who've lost loved ones, you've pieced together the horrors of the sacrifices Caridin demanded. You've really felt and experienced the stakes directly, as opposed to having them related to you through exposition, as happens in many of the significant plots of DOS2.

As another example, I'd been moderately intrigued by Beast's long-running personal arc with Justinia. Conceptually it was one of the more compelling dynamics in the game, a revolutionary uprising to overthrow an oppressive monarchy. I wish more games would feature revolutionary struggles! It would have been significantly more compelling to me if Beast wasn't himself a royal by blood, but whatever. Anyways, though, we never see any of this: we never witness Justinia's rule in action, we never spend time with Beast's comrades, we never see the dwarven homeland or get a sense for the class structure there: the entirety of the scenario is based on Beast's conversations with us. And then when it's time to make The Big Choice, Beast is just like "I don't care, do whatever you want." And Justinia is all, "I sorry :-(". It just feels really toothless. We haven't met any victims of her reign, and the choice is kind of re-framed as "vengeance or mercy?", which is a far more conventional and thus less interesting choice. I ultimately chose mercy once it's framed that way, and it doesn't really seem to matter at all: she's still deposed in the closing slides and nothing changes in the rest of the game. (Contrast this with, say, DA:O's choice of supporting Prince Bhelen or Lord Harrowmont, which had profound repercussions that affected Orzammar during your time there and significantly affected the Darkspawn threat long after the end of DA:O.)

BUT, there are other cases where the stakes in DOS2 feel significantly more vivid than in most RPGs. One is Gareth's ongoing plot. It seems like there's a clear "good" path to his storyline: you need to pass Persuasion checks to convince him to show mercy to his enemies and remain true to his calling. But this has enormous consequences! His parents get murdered as a direct consequence of the mercy he showed! There's follow-up, too, where he's understandably pissed and you can talk him down again... but by this point I was seriously questioning my own counsel to him. Why is it so important that he remain loyal to an order that we now know is thoroughly corrupt and evil? Why are we making him endure such suffering? Aren't our short-term virtuous decisions causing greater long-term evil? These stakes feel very real because we're in direct contact with these people, like Gareth and Jonathan and his parents' home and other magisters and paladins, so there's a big resonance to this storyline that (for me) was missing in some of the ostensibly "bigger" plots.

Likewise, one of the first villains we defeat is Kniles in Fort Joy. He seems like a straight-up baddie: he was responsible for creating the Silent Monks and is a gruesome sadist. In the next act, we meet his mother, an innkeeper in Driftwood, who talks proudly of her boy. Errrm... Suddenly it becomes an awkward social encounter. Do you blame her for the monster her son became? And of course you start thinking about how everyone has a mother, there is a human network around every opponent you come across. But it isn't over yet: the situation becomes even more complex once you encounter the mother's soul inside Adramahlihk's dimension. You discover that she knew her son wasn't normal, that she felt guilty and worried. She didn't want those bad feelings, and over time she instead grew proud of him. This is all really messed up and interesting! This probably wouldn't be nearly as compelling if we only had some random person delivered by exposition in the demon's dimension; it's fascinating because we've met and interacted with these people over a long period of time.

So, yeah, despite a few plots feeling underwhelming, DOS2 shows that it can strike powerful emotional and thematic notes. One of my favorite parts of this game, and something many other franchises don't do well, is reminding you of the complexities within an organization. By the time you arrive in Arx you know Dallis's plot and all the bad stuff the Magisters are up to; but, as you meet individual rank-and-file Magisters outside the city, either escaping or deceased spirits, of course most of them have no idea of the faction's true aims. Should you hold them accountable for the evil they unwittingly help commit? I appreciate the options for mercy shown here, without feeling like it's the slam-dunk right choice.

I've chatted a little about Beast above: On paper, I really dig his "fight the power!" storyline, but in practice he was honestly the most boring PC to me. I'm not entirely sure why. It feels like he has less banter and dialogue in general than the other characters. It probably also doesn't help that he has a super-boring and super-predictable Scottish Dwarven accent; the voice acting definitely isn't bad, but it feels like such a tired and hackneyed presentation of Tolkienian dwarves by now. 

In contrast, Fane really grew on me over the course of the game. Particularly in the early acts, interactions with Fane are mostly about his personality, which is really vivid: he's prickly and arrogant and condescending, which sounds awful and at first is awful but becomes surprisingly endearing over time, and it feels very earned when he finally begins to pay attention to you and value you as an individual. That's a nice change from Beast, whose interactions are always talking about people you haven't met and things you don't care about. Unlike Beast's arc, which takes place almost entirely off-screen, Fane's arc is extremely closely tied to the main plot of the game, which was surprising and makes him even more compelling of a character.

Sebille was awesome, really scary and intense. I smacked my head during the closing credits when I realized she was voiced by Alix Wilton Regan, who did a brilliant job voicing the Inquisitor in Dragon Age Inquisition: I hadn't recognized her voice during this game (acting!!), but it's the same high quality, being brought to a considerably more troubled person. Anyways, since I was intent on romancing her I constantly supported her in everything, which felt a little weird ("No, no, it's perfectly normal that you dream of stabbing out peoples' eyeballs with your needle!") but I enjoyed it. As I noted above, the romance arc felt a little abrupt or even thin early on: the gap in meaningful dialogue between "Sebille, I think you are not a terrible person" to "Lohse, you are the eternal love of my life and I will sacrifice everything to be with you" was razor-thin, but the actual content once you're in the romance felt really powerful: unlike other RPG romances that peter out or vanish after the initial sexual encounter, the arc here has some nice and meaningful development; I particularly enjoyed that at the end of the game you don't spend the rest of your lives together and happily agree to go your separate ways without turning that into a tragedy.

I liked playing as Lohse, but honestly had a difficult time getting a lock on my interpretation of her personality. Sometimes I was a straight-up "good person", other times I was like "I've suffered through a LOT and I'm gonna get some POWER around here so I can FIX ALL THESE PROBLEMS." It is a little weird to be such a semi-voiced character in the midst of full VO; unlike Origins, where you're silent, and DA2/I, where you're fully voiced, most of Lohse's lines here (with me as the PC) are silent, but some lines are still spoken. Anyways! I murdered the Doctor and that's what's important.

It's... interesting that two of the six playable characters are women, and both of their personal plots are about them being mind-controled by evil men. I'm not sure how I feel about that... it isn't necessarily a bad plot, but it does seem gendered. (n.b.: Maybe the Red Prince and/or Ifan have mind-control-based personal plots as well, in which case I withdraw my observation.) It seems particularly weird that, while Sebille and Lohse do occasionally have dialogue, they never talk about them having a similar struggle in common.

Oh: At the end of the game, I was thrown yet again by the final choice. I was expecting to be able to pick between ruling as the Divine (getting immense power and influence over Rivellon, at the cost of keeping the world vulnerable to the God King and the Voidwoken) and purging the Source (sacrificing yourselves and upending the religious hierarchy but saving the world from the Void). I was startled to see a third choice: to return the Source that Lucian had been hoarding to all the people of Rivellon. I was kind of flummoxed by this, as I don't remember it being floated as a possibility earlier in the game. As with earlier choices, I was baffled by what I was being asked: What would this mean? What were the risks? I did really dig the democratic/egalitarian sound of dispersing Source equally, so I did it.

I thought the ending was very well done. By now I feel like there's a gold standard in how to wrap up a long RPG: Have a cool final battle, have some big final choices & big final reactivity, have time to say goodbye to the most important people you've spent time with, and then have a ton of slides that describe how your various choices have affected the world. DOS2 adheres to this formula with aplomb, and I was highly satisfied with how everything wound down. (I should admit here that I know very little about the broader Divinity universe; it's my understanding that these games span over a thousand years, and they aren't told in consecutive order, so there are necessarily some limitations on how much of the world state you can alter at the end of a given game. That said, it does feel like a big impact.)

END SPOILERS

Phew! This game has been a big part of my life for months and months, and for the most part it's been a very welcome part. I can't think of another RPG whose combat I've enjoyed more, and it told a compelling story with some memorable characters. I complained at length above about some of my mechanical irritations with the game, but none of those are remotely fatal: many have to do with my own personal preferences for more streamlined gameplay, others are just nitpicky interface quirks. Playing a game this big is an investment, and at least for me, that investment paid off well. And, while this is certainly not the main point, it makes me more confident than ever that Larian will do a good job at ushering my beloved Baldur's Gate franchise into the future.

Edit: Just remembered I forgot to include my top-level stats. According to Steam, I've spent over 150 hours in the game; that does include time when I had it backgrounded while looking up wiki articles or whatever, but I think I'm definitely over 140 hours. I was playing on Classic difficulty. I had a pretty completionist playthrough, closing out almost all of my journal quests and doing every fight I could find, including optional ones; I probably could have squeezed out a bit more XP from a few places but not much. I finished the game at Level 20, hitting that value shortly before the end of the game. I had something like 250k gold pieces left at the end of the game, and I was much more generous than I typically am in RPGs when it comes to buying equipment and supplies from shops. The end!

Take Your Stations

Most of the post-apocalyptic fiction I've consumed, particularly in recent years, features zombies. There are lots of potential apocalypses, of course: nuclear fallout, biological warfare, the rapture. No matter how you get there, the end results look similar: a much smaller remnant of humanity, struggling to survive within the carapace of the much larger race that preceded it. Easy access to the fruits of civilization; no more worrying about whether you can afford something or need permission to enter a building. But the factories are silent, the grid has powered down, and there's no way to replenish those things once they are consumed.

One of the more distinct and haunting post-apocalyptic visions I've seen lately is "Station Eleven," a novel by Emily St. John Mandel that my brother Pat gave me for my birthday. As I was reading it, I found myself making (positive) comparisons to The Walking Dead: that offered a singularly grim view of human nature and famously makes its people more monstrous than the zombies. Station Eleven's future is definitely a challenging one: besides the obvious hardships that come with the collapse of civilization, there are still dangerous people out there, using guns and violence to take what they want from the few remaining survivors. But those are the exception rather than the rule; most of the people we meet are wary but optimistic, working together for common goals, holding grudges against one another that would never boil over into bloodshed.

MINI SPOILERS

The structure of the novel is interesting too; in every piece of apocalyptic fiction that I can think of, the action starts during or after the collapse of civilization. Station Eleven, though, alternates between telling what happened in the week leading up to the catastrophe, and what is happening twenty years after. And what we're reading doesn't directly have to do with the Georgian Flu itself; we aren't following officials reading reports of the pandemic and marshaling their doomed response. Instead we follow a quiet, beautiful, mundane story about the aging actor Arthur and the constellation of people around him: ex-wives, estranged friends, adoring fans. What's especially poignant about this is how, as we return again and again from the bleak future, those mundane actions become extraordinarily meaningful. This will be the last time he argues with her, because in a week they'll both be dead. That cup of coffee will be an unimaginable luxury once international shipping breaks down. That uncomfortable airplane ride is an extraordinary achievement of man's ingenuity over the force of gravity.

The future feels somewhat familiar, as we're following a band of survivors who travel the roads on their caravan. But what's beautiful about Station Eleven is that they aren't hard-bitten mercenaries staking out territory or scientists searching for a cure. They are artists: musicians and actors. They travel with their musical instruments and costumes and props and backdrops. We learn that, after the early anarchic bloody years that immediately followed the Georgian Flu outbreak, survivors have started forming small villages and settlements: a roadside motel, a big-box store, a ranch house. The Shakespearean acting company and orchestra travels between these hamlets, putting on plays and performing symphonies. It's strange and wonderful.

I think what I ultimately love about Station Eleven is that it doesn't just answer the "what" and the "how" of surviving the apocalypse, but the "why". One recurring message in this novel, quoting Star Trek, is "Survival is insufficient." There's a primal hunger for art, for stories, for producing and performing for others, for witnessing the art that others create. The nihilistic message of works like The Walking Dead is that we're all ultimately animals, that when you strip away the trappings of civilization you uncover the ugly truth beneath. Station Eleven makes it clear that we're not animals, that we carry within us the spark of beauty and creation, and it's that spark that helps drive us towards creating society, towards building civilization, that gives us this impulse and lends us the motivation to do the hard work it requires.

MEGA SPOILERS

Part of me almost wishes that The Prophet wasn't in the novel; at first it kind of seemed like he was shoehorned in for the sake of creating a conflict to overcome, which felt more traditional and less exciting than the general sweep of the novel. But by the end of his arc I was pretty happy with it. I'd figured out who The Prophet was after the flashback with Elizabeth and Clark making the emergency landing and realizing that his age lined up to be Arthur's son. I am kind of curious if his time in Israel helped fuel the religious "savior" mentality that eventually took hold.

I did really like how the surviving characters from the earlier section of the book were only gradually re-introduced in the aftermath and belatedly learn of each others' continued existence. It's interesting how the book so forthrightly reveals future events and strips away potential tension; early on, it reminded me a little of Kurt Vonnegut when Mandel would end a scene and say "Alice would die in two days, Bob in a week. Carly would last ten whole days." Perhaps because of that sense of candor, I was genuinely surprised to learn that, say, Elizabeth had survived.

Jeevan is a bit of an odd case. He's the first viewpoint character in the novel, the first one we know who hears about the Georgian Flu, and the only person taking specific actions to prepare for the onslaught ahead. It's strange how he just disappears for much of the book, and then pops up in Virginia, far removed from the other survivors we've been following in the Great Lakes region. He's such a major connector character, particularly illuminating every phase of Arthur's career, but also crossing paths with the major survivors. It seems a little odd to have him missing from the big reunion at Severn City Airport at the end, his only real contribution to the post-apocalyptic storyline being to receive some narration on how The Prophet operates.

But... I dunno, I ultimately like how things end up sort of messy and incomplete. There are some wonderful connections, like Clark seeing himself in the Station Eleven comics; but it's also kind of cool that he doesn't see the paperweight again, even after we've traced its very long journey through the decades. The world of the future is vast and largely unknowable, the maps filled in with lots of darkness and question marks, and those enduring mysteries make all the discoveries feel more significant.

END SPOILERS

I'm pretty sure that this is a stand-alone novel and we won't be returning to this world, but it is a pretty wonderful piece of worldbuilding. I was reminded of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, and while this book speaks to the powerful hold these devastating scenarios can hold on our imagination, it's also a startlingly hopeful book, one that focuses on our resiliency and capacity for creation. I'm really glad to have it as an example of the other sorts of stories we can tell in these kinds of worlds.

Twitch Reflexes

Like a lot of older people, the very concept of Twitch has been somewhat baffling for me. Why would I spend my precious free time watching someone else play video games instead of, y'know, playing one myself?

Over the years I've come to understand it more. For certain games, like competitive player-versus-player ones, it can be really exciting to watch highly skilled players performing well; watching those, I realize one could just as easily ask "Why would I spend time watching televised basketball instead of, y'know, playing basketball myself?" Beyond the content of the game itself, much of the appeal in Twitch lies with the broadcasters, and watching a stream is often at least as much about their performance as with the game they're playing. That used to always turn me off when I would watch streams of games I liked, as it can seem very distracting and undercut the content of the game; but just as often it can enhance my enjoyment. Maybe the streamer finds something that I'd missed, or can offer some funny commentary, or does fun impromptu voice acting for a text-only game.

In the last couple of months I've come to realize that Twitch can be a phenomenal tool not only for game publishers, who notoriously use the platform to advertise and promote their existing games, but also for game developers, as it gives access to see how real people are actually playing your game. In my case, I've been able to watch people play through my Shadowrun mods. This is the first time I have ever seen another human being actually play my games, and it is a fascinating, illuminating experience. I get plenty of feedback from my players, via comments on my Steam Workshop pages or direct messages or blog posts, but they're inevitably condensing their experiences of playing 10+ hours into a couple of sentences. Watching what actually happens during those hours is a whole other level.

One impact is that I feel a lot better about giving players copious hints and directions. I provided more and more of these with each new campaign, and would often worry that I was "dumbing down" the game too much, over-communicating their goals and objectives. But, many players tackle these games in chunks: they're definitely not playing through the whole campaign in one sitting, and probably not over consecutive days. A Twitch streamer will typically play once a week for a few hours; in real life, people might go even longer between sessions. It's actually helpful for me to hear someone at the start of a stream say something like, "We're in San Francisco, but I forget why, I think we're supposed to meet someone or kill them or something?", and then over the next hour or so reconstruct the current state of the game. This is also an argument for keeping plots simple: not dumb or boring, but I think that if you make a few vivid things (colorful personalities, high-stakes problems, anything to stick in a player's mind), it really helps orient them.

One of the mortifying experiences I had came a few months ago when I was watching a player attempt to navigate the Sacramento map in CFiC, one of the more puzzle-and-exploration-heavy scenes in the game. After many agonizing minutes had passed, I started to yell at my monitor: "Click the icon! It's right there! It's glowing and blinking! The compass is pointing right at it!" I watched as he paused, walked his character over, see the mouse slooooowly move towards the icon... then he would turn around and wander over to the other side of the map. Stuff like that keeps me from wanting to stream myself: not being able to solve a puzzle feels kind of embarrassing to start with, I don't think I'd be able to handle knowing that other people are watching me not get something.

For the most part, though, it's been encouraging to see how rarely players get stuck. Most of the riddles and similar things work like I would hope, with the player mulling things over and maybe failing a couple of times before figuring it out. Other times they brute-force their way through, which is fine too; I'm sure that for both players and their viewers, it would be annoying to get stuck on a single part of the game for very long, and in general it seems like even the more obtuse puzzles in Antumbra Saga don't hold them up for very long.

Another unanticipated finding has been how many players almost exclusively use the default attacks: the basic single-bullet attack on a gun, Powerbolt on mages, and the basic deck attack in the Matrix, never using more powerful cooldown-limited abilities like Aimed Shot, Flamethrower, or Killer. In my own playthroughs I make heavy use of these, using Aimed Shot any time it's available and a given shot has a 50-80% chance of landing, and using Killer or Flamethrower any time an enemy has more health than my default attack. Not using the special attacks makes each fight longer and harder than I planned while designing the combat, though this is mitigated since the streamers seem to be playing on Easy mode. This is one of the few cases where I would genuinely like to interview the players and figure out why they so strongly prefer the basic attacks. Are they deliberately holding back the special attacks so they would be available if needed? Are they trying to keep things fast-paced for their viewers (a single click to attack is quicker than one click to select a mode and a second click to attack)? Do they think the special attacks give themselves an unfair advantage over enemies who eschew them? Are they unsure what they do? I'm now curious to see what those same streamers would do when unlocking custom attacks in the Caldecott Caper or CalFree in Chains: if there's a small plot and some dialogue introducing the attack, will they be any more likely to use it than if it just appears as an option in the UI?

There's a ton of useful information in these streams, and I've even pushed out a few new updates as the result of what I've seen: typos in the dialogue, clarifying some plot points that were confusing, noticing that some events wouldn't properly fire in all cases. I'm already thinking ahead to a hypothetical future (non-Shadowrun!) campaign and wondering if future beta testers would be willing to privately stream their runs; my existing system is great for identifying game-breaking bugs and the most important feedback, but there's so much more that I get from seeing people actually, y'know, play the game.

That said, the experience has also reminded me that, my best intentions aside, I can be kind of thin-skinned when it comes to criticism of my work. For the most part streamers have been very complimentary and excited, and it's a very fulfilling thrill to see others derive joy from something I put many, many hours into creating. But when I hear complaints, even made idly in passing, I instinctively want to put up a defense: "This part is supposed to be hard!" "It will all make sense in an hour!" "That's because you didn't talk to anyone back at the bar!" "You could have sided with the other faction!" "The engine doesn't support that!" Of course, I'd never actually pull a Brett Stephens over this; it seems petty and creepy for a creator to argue with players. And my focus should be on the experience my players are actually having, not the one I wanted them to have. I do think that, even for smaller dev studios, this is probably the sort of thing that could benefit a lot from some mediation: an intern or professional sifting through this raw footage, synthesizing the common, valid feedback, and propagating it up the studio as actionable feedback.

By far, my favorite part of dipping into Twitch has been watching players have emotional reactions to the stuff I've made. My entire motivation for creating these campaigns has been to instill a certain feeling, hit certain emotional beats, and I put a lot of thought and effort into reaching those points. The written feedback I've received so far has been really encouraging and validating, helping me recognize that at least some people are connecting with my story. Actually seeing it is even better, and makes all the long nights of work feel worthwhile.


It does feel a little narcissistic to focus on my own games like this, so I'll probably try and wean myself off of these particular Twitch streams in the near future. But it's been a very illuminating experience! I've gotten a ton of useful feedback for the games I've made, have made some discoveries about the different ways people play games that will help inform any future projects, and have some new tools that may help with future development and playtesting efforts. None of that is what Twitch was originally designed for, but it's a pretty darn good reason for it to exist.

Stop The Clock! New No-No!

I just wrapped up the sixth book of Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series. I haven't been blogging about intermediate books since the first one; partly because I haven't had a lot to say about them, but more because it's so clearly a single continuous story. At the end, I find I still don't have a ton to say - much less than Fall! - but I'd like to say what I do have.

 
MEGA SPOILERS

My favorite aspect of this series is just how over-the-top the plotting is. It gets more and more audacious and ridiculous and epic with every book. Very roughly, the progression looks like:

• A biotech company is secretly involved in the drug trade!
• The high-tech media is part of the conspiracy!!
• They sent assassins after the reporter who figured it out!!!
• The assassins are from a parallel universe!!!!
• The reporter can also travel to that universe!!!!!
• The assassins are part of the Clan, a quasi-governmental organization that's been trafficking drugs for decades!!!!!!
• The reporter is a princess!!!!!!!
• There's a civil war within the Clan!!!!!!!!
• There's a secret faction from a third universe!!!!!!!!!
• The reporter is an industrial capitalist now!!!!!!!!!!
• The US government knows about what's going on!!!!!!!!!!!
• The US government has known for a while about all this!!!!!!!!!!!!
• The Clan is secretly raising a generation of multiverse-traveling babies!!!!!!!!!!!!
• The reporter/princess is betrothed! Oh no her groom was assassinated!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• There's an even more secret conspiracy to raise a generation of test-tube world-walking babies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• The reporter/princess failed to expose that conspiracy, and has been artificially impregnated with the heir to the throne!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• The US government is preparing to invade the other worlds!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Oh shit, Dick Cheney has been behind all this from the start!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• The Clan stole atomic bombs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• They nuked the White House!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• President Dick Cheney is gonna nuke the other world in retaliation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Cheney died of a heart attack, now President Donald Rumsfeld is gonna do the nukes to shock-and-awe Russia and China!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Like, everyone on that world has been vaporized or is gonna die of radiation poisoning!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• THE END

I'm skipping over some stuff, but that's the general thrust! There's just constant escalation and stakes-raising, to a pretty absurd degree, but it keeps things super-interesting.

One of several odd aspects of the series is that Paul Krugman has blurbed the books, appearing on the back cover with glowing praise. It feels a bit odd to have a lefty NYT columnist praising a gonzo speculative fiction book. My favorite parts of the series probably were those that weighed in on economic issues, looking at how different timelines were faring under different political, cultural and business regimes: there's some ongoing discussion of runaway inflation in New Britain, a development trap in the Gruinmarkt, arbitrage of weight and illicit materials via the Postal Service, etc. One of several frustrations I had with the book is how fleetingly these are covered, though. I was particularly disappointed that Miriam's business enterprise, which seemed so interesting and cool, got completely axed; likewise, we get lots of details about New Britain's woes, and some speculation on how to fix it, but nothing is ever done with them.

The series ultimately felt pretty unsatisfying: lots of exciting things are happening, but many plot threads are completely dropped, character arcs unfulfilled, not much really wrapped up. The last book features a kiss between two characters who I guess are in love but who I'd forgotten about; meanwhile, Miriam and Erasmus are just building up some "will they or won't they?" energy that will never be explored. There are all these really interesting doors that get opened during the series, but most of them are left unexplored, with just a pure testosterone burst at the end. Miriam herself feels unfairly sidelined in her own series, losing the cool agency she had and suffering as a powerless victim for multiple books.

END SPOILERS

The Trade of Queens opens with a note that it is the final entry in this arc. As it stands, I find it hard to recommend. The first few books have likeable characters but the writing can be kind of dodgy; the middle books are pretty wonderful with lots of fun surprises, more believable dialogue, and the pleasure of watching talented people make the most of their situation; the final books ramp up the excitement and stakes considerably, but lose much of the most impressive plot and wind up to an abrupt, arbitrary conclusion. It looks like there is another trilogy coming that follows a new plot in this same world. There's enough about the setting that I like for me to keep an eye on it, but I'll probably read the reviews before committing.

While this didn't end the way I would have liked it to, it does remind me that Stross is a very versatile writer: I've enjoyed all of his other books more than this, and it has been a lot of fun to see him work in another genre and style. I don't plan to return to the Merchant Princes soon, but this does remind me that I should check out some more of his books.

That Game You Like Is Going To Come Back In Style

Things have picked up in Divinity: Original Sin 2 (henceforth DOS2). This is more due to me than the game. I felt a bit pokey at first: playing for a little while, then getting frustrated and overwhelmed by the cruft in the game (the ginormous inventories, encumbrances, crafting, and hard-to-compare equipment: do I want a ring that gives +31 Magical Armor, +2 Warfare and +1 Telekinesis, or one that gives +35 Magic Armor, +1 Warfare, +1 Scoundrel and +1 Bartering?). I'd take a break for a week or so, then dive back in again. By now, though, things are clicking: I'm getting invested in the story, in my companions, and have at least a rudimentary system in place for managing the metric tons of crap the game shovels into my pockets.

I think I'm still pretty early in the game; I just reached level 13, and it looks like I've uncovered maybe a bit less than half the map for Act 2. Since I've been playing for so long, though, I wanted to capture some in-progress thoughts, focusing on the things I think this game does very well in comparison to other RPGs I've enjoyed.

One big, obvious thing is the steep power curve. Basically, everything doubles in difficulty every 2 levels: all things being equal, the enemies you face at level 10 are twice as hard as the enemies you face at level 8, and four times as hard as the enemies at level 6; the enemies I face at level 14 will be 4 times as hard as at level 10, etc. Likewise, Level 10 equipment is roughly twice as strong as Level 8 equipment. This has a bunch of secondary implications for gameplay:

• There are no scaling enemies. If something is too hard, you can come back later and crush them.
• Virtually the entire game is "soft gated" by enemy difficulty, and not "hard gated" by artificial barriers. You theoretically can go pretty much anywhere, but the risk of being far under-level is extremely high.
• But conversely, if you do tough it out through a single encounter against much higher-level opponents, you will be richly rewarded: the gear you find could easily be twice as strong as what you'd find for on-level combat.
• You need to continually upgrade your equipment to stay viable. This can be very frustrating at lower levels, as you'll need to replace cool unique items with great abilities because their raw stats are so poor. By this point in the game, though, the levels have slowed down enough that there's a good cadence.
• On a related note, money is very useful. Loot is random, but you probably won't get enough to maximize your slots. Springing for Epic/Legendary/Whatever equipment lets you choose great abilities, and will usually remain viable for longer than Uncommon/Rare looted equipment will.
• The curve isn't just steep: it's very finely tuned. You need to do pretty much everything in an available zone, and will barely get enough experience to be on-level for the following zone. There's no grindable XP, and so far the encounters have remained nicely challenging.

To expand on that final point a little more: one of the coolest things about the DOS series is its encounter design. There are no trash fights: each combat is extremely finely tuned, with a unique setting and enemies and abilities and mechanics. In other RPGs, I dread grinding through combat so I can get to the good story bits. In DOS2, the fights are hands-down my favorite part of the game.

The world design is insanely good, especially when it comes to secrets. There are so many ways to get from Point A to Point B, and it's always worth keeping your eyes open and a high-Wits character in the party so you can find buried treasure, traps, and other unexpected items along the way.

I like the party specialization system. There are no fixed classes, so you can build your party around any concept you like; at the same time, there are limited skill and attribute points available, so you're incentivized to assign specialties.

Speaking of, here's my current party loadout. (I name some characters here, but there's no plot info, hence no spoiler tags.)

My PC is Lohse. She is a dual-wielding-dagger backstabber. She mostly uses Scoundrel abilities, with a few Necromancer skills to occasionally summon corpses for damage and more bodies on the field. She's almost all oriented towards Finesse, with splashes in Memory and a little Constitution and Wits. (Since she usually backstabs for guaranteed crits, Wits' increased critical chance isn't that useful.) As party leader (but not Leader), she focuses on Persuasion, and stacks some Bartering points as well. She has Pet Pal and some other good talents. For combat, she has a lot of Warfare, Scoundrel, and Dual Wielding.

I think Sebille is canonically supposed to be a dual-wielding dagger rogue, but since that slot is filled I respecced her into an Archer. She's also high in Finesse, and is the main Wits character in my party, currently in the low 20s to spot secrets. She's mostly focused on Huntsman skills, with some Polymorph and one or two Scoundrel. She builds on her Elven advantages to be the Loremaster for the party. She has Huntsman, Warfare, and Ranged combat skills. There are more useful Talents for her than anyone else, including ones to expand her range, recover special arrows, inflict deadly status effects, and so on.

Beast is my tank, wielding a single-handed weapon and a massive shield. I don't think he's ever died, other than falling into lava or deathfog. He focuses on Warfare skills, with some Aerothurge as well; initially I took some damage skills there, but now he just has utility ones like Teleportation and Nether Swap. He has a lot of useful-but-not-crucial talents, like Lucky Charm, Leadership and Retribution, but lately I've been focusing on pushing up his damage. His Constitution is probably higher than it needs to be, so now I'm focusing on his Strength.

Finally, Fane is my jack-of-all-trades spellcaster. He uses Pyrokinetic, Geomancer and Hydrosophist, and I'm starting to squeeze in some Summoner as well. He's almost 50:50 between Intelligence and Memory, so his attacks aren't as powerful as they could be but he has a ton of useful buffs and utility spells available. He uses his bony finger to accomplish Thievery tasks with aplomb. Fane and Sebille are both Stinky, helping them avoid some of their foes' personal attentions in combat; he also has many skills that make his status effects more deadly.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the setup. The one big problem is that Fane doesn't have any teleportation skills, so I'm mulling maybe having him take over Aero from Beast and giving Beast... I dunno, maybe Hydro or something. Sebille can run out of abilities sometimes, but her basic attack is crazy good already, plus she has special arrows to spare; in any case, I just got her Skin Graft, which should help her with those cooldowns in the future.

Sebille usually goes first in combat, and, especially with her Flesh Sacrifice and Adrenaline skills, she can often take out an enemy before they get a chance to even move. When I can I try to take out the first enemy in the rotation order, which lets me use two characters back-to-back; if they seem too strong, I'll focus on someone further down the chain so a later party member can take them down before their move. I'm very Physical Damage-heavy in my party, but she will use elemental arrows if facing enemies with weak Magic Armor.

Beast usually dives into the fray and tries to use his CC skills. Even if Sebille didn't kill an enemy, it's very likely that she stripped their Physical Armor, in which case Beast can lay them out flat for the turn. The Taunting skill in this game is garbage so I almost never use that, but I do try to position Beast so he's a more tempting target than my squishier members.

Lohse is another single-target damage-dealer. She can inflict some nasty status effects (Bleeding, Ruptured Tendons, Atrophy), but I've come to realize that she usually kills an enemy in a single turn anyways so there isn't much point. When she has an extra action point left over, she'll CC a low-magic enemy with her Chloroform, or buff the rest of the party with Encourage. She and Beast are the only non-Stinky party members, so she does tend to get banged up in tougher fights; in the long run, I'd like to focus on increasing her Dodge to make her more survivable, and/or give her options to duck into Stealth.

Fane has by far the most abilities on the team, but it's often hard to find stuff for him to do. This is mostly because the rest of my party is so focused on Physical damage, so a lot of the stuff Fane could do would be pointless. That said, he is great in AOE scenarios, especially when enemies have weak Physical Armor and environmental vulnerabilities. In practice, he often ends up buffing deadlier teammates with Haste and Clear Minded, and replenishes Physical and Magical Armor as needed. I'm hoping to build out his Summons some more, which may let him indirectly contribute to this Physical Damage Party I've got going.

Hm, as long as I'm writing this post, let's chat about some

MINI SPOILERS

I've escaped Spellhold Fort Joy, and have finished almost all of the Driftwood-area quests, including the long arc to confront Mordus the undead dwarf Sourceror. Perhaps amusingly, I totally failed to find the Blackroot in the basement, so I didn't get my Spirit Vision / Source Vampirism abilities until Level 12. It is kind of cool that the game lets you do so much without it: again, it's a game of soft gates, not hard ones. But what's a little frustrating is that there are a few puzzles that are impossible to solve without Spirit Vision, and the game doesn't make that clear, so I'd still be trying to solve those if I hadn't gone online to search the wiki and found out that I didn't have the ability I needed.

I've earned the "Hero" tag, so I guess I'm mostly doing a "Good Guy" playthrough. I still don't have a totally solid bead yet on my interpretation of Lohse; there are good roleplaying hooks in the dialogue options, especially in the Hall of Echoes when conversing with your demon, but I'm not sure yet whether she's afraid or vengeful or flippant or what. Among my companions, Fane is slightly annoying but bearable (not nearly as offputting as the aristocratic Red Prince was); Beast seems a bit boring in spite of his revolutionary storyline; Sebille has been the most interesting of the four so far, but I think I've gotten less of her story than anyone else's.

After some early promising flirtation dialogue, and a romantic assignation in a Driftwood inn that proves to be a bad idea, I haven't really seen any romance options in the game. I'm very curious to see if there are any more substantial arcs related to that in the future; so far the game doesn't seem to go as in-depth on companion and NPC relationships as BioWare does, but there's enough there that it wouldn't be surprising to see something more pop up.

And let's see, for biggish decisions so far, I've:

• Convinced Gareth to spare that one dude, and just found out it was a Very Bad Idea.
• Made peace with Lohar, the dwarven crime boss. I'm ambivalent about that, but he seems to be a far lesser evil than the Magisters or Justinia.
• Solved the Magister murders, helped the suspect escape, confronted the murderer myself and claimed the reward (reloading after an earlier game where the disbarred elven magister pre-empted my announcement).
• Defeated Mordus and let him escape; I'm ambivalent about this, too. So far the dialogue in the game doesn't seem to distinguish between you killing him or just defeating him, so I'm hoping there aren't long-term consequences.
• I'm currently working for Ryker, but have gotten more and more hints that he's a Bad Dude, so I reserve the right to cancel my contract with extreme prejudice. 

END SPOILERS

So, yeah, I feel like I've got a nice bit of momentum going in the game now. There isn't much else on the horizon for me game-wise until 2020, when the next big batch of games begin to drop, so I'm hoping I can continue to hold this huge game inside my head and enjoy the rest of my journey.