Battle of Wyvernsword

I usually cite Baldur’s Gate 2 as my all-time favorite game. It’s a little hard to define exactly what that means. Was it the original story I played back in 2001? The heavily-modded versions I’ve played since then, which add their own variations to the original’s backbone? Am I giving it partial credit for the other games that followed in its wake, ushering in an era of character-centric narrative RPGs?

As with many experiences in life, it’s interesting to look back at it now across a span of MANY years and wonder how much of what I like is inherent in the thing itself; how much is due to my memories of the first time I played it (which is loosely but inextricably bound up with memories of college and young adulthood); and how much is due to the significance I’ve given it over the years (giving it credit for video-game romances, etc.). That’s part of why it’s such a gift to get to play something that’s of a piece with the original game, but still wholly original and surprising to me. I experienced that back when I played the Ascension mod for the first time, and experienced an even longer version of it over the last two weeks as I played Siege of Dragonspear.

 

SoD is a new expansion created by Beamdog, the company that created the EE versions of the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale games, which bridges the gap between the end of Baldur’s Gate and the start of Shadows of Amn. In their previous games, they have added new scenes and characters to the older games, weaving them into something new. In SoD, virtually everything is completely new: the entire main plot, all new maps, and major new NPCs.

What I was most surprised and gratified by, though, wasn’t the new: it was the old. Beamdog managed to hire back many of the original voice actors from the original games, playing their old characters in new situations. That means that, for the first time in 15 years, we have new dialogue from Minsc and Boo, Dynaheir (Jennifer Hale!), and many others who I will talk about in spoilerville down below. I never expected to get to spend more time with these characters, and felt surprisingly emotional at the extension of our journeys.

So, how is the game itself? As with every time before when I’ve returned to the Infinity Engine, it takes some time for me to re-acclimate to the old-school interface and design. Many of my biggest pet peeves are still around, and will forever be an inherent part of these games. Spending ages in inventory screens, shuffling around items, dodging encumbrance limits and trying to decide whether an item with THAC0+2 and +2 damage is better than one with THAC0+1 and +1D6 damage. Needing to guess in advance which spells will be useful for upcoming fights. Getting ambushed and wiped out, then reloading and buffing and floorstomping your opponents.

The latter especially stands out for SoD: for people who have replayed the originals so many times, we already know in advance what’s going to happen, and so don’t think much about the preparations we’re taking with our foreknowledge of the battles to come. SoD puts us back into the shoes we wore in 2000, and the same shoes that new players to those games need to wear. They can be frustrating shoes! AD&D 2nd edition is fairly notorious for its brittle difficulty, where mistakes get brutally punished and small setbacks snowball into large disasters. I’ll always love these games, but I have to concede that, if I hadn’t played them so long ago, I would almost certainly find them intolerable today.

Again, much of that trouble is inherent in the underlying mechanics and will never be able to be changed. However, Beamdog has done a fantastic job at updating the user interface and certain aspects of the ruleset, significantly improving quality of life. Here are some of my favorite upgrades; I think some of these may have been previously added to the EE versions, but at least some are brand-new for SoD (though my understanding is that they’re also being added to BGEE and BG2EE).

You can equip weapon sets! This is HUGE. That means a character can wield both a 2-handed sword, and a longsword plus a shield, and easily switch between the two in combat. Previously, you would need to unequip your shield to pick up a two-hander and vice versa, which in practice was such a pain that characters would exclusively stay in a single style even if they had the proficiency points available to switch it up.

Spells are still remembered even when you lose their slot! This almost drove me to quit back when I played BG2: if you suffer level drain, then are restored, you need to remember all of the spells you had memorized and manually add them back in, only to have them wiped back out again after the next vampire attack. Now, you still lose the slot, but not your spell selections; once you get your Lesser Restoration, you’ll immediately be back in business.

When you drag items around, party portraits highlight to indicate who can use the item. If they show up in yellow, it’s better than their current equipment; if it’s lit up, they can equip it but it’s equal to or worse than their current loadout; if it’s dim, they can’t equip it.

Active actions are shown on the party portraits. I think this might have been added before, but it was extremely useful in the bigger and more complex battles of SoD. You can see at a glance what ammunition people are using, whether they’re about to chug a potion, which spell they’re preparing; more importantly, you can see when they’ve finished doing what they’ve done and are ready for their next orders.

Several game mode options have been decoupled from difficulty settings. I prefer playing on Core Rules, but will totally abuse save and reload to get the HP I want on level-up. Now, “Max HP on Level Up” is a separate setting that you can toggle in Options, independently of the overall difficulty settings. Hooray! (Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent toggle for “Spell scribing always succeeds”, which is the one remaining case where I still abuse save/reload.)

The NPC AI scripts are much improved. They aren’t as detailed as the Tactics slots in Origins and Dragon Age 2, but are much better than the stock “Archer”, “Defender”, etc. options. You can now toggle individual abilities on and off depending on the character’s needs. For most of my companions, I leave selected “Attack nearest enemy”; this is nice since, once an enemy dies, party members will automatically select a new target without me needing to select them. However, I’ve disabled this for my cleric, since she sometimes needs to keep Turn Undead active. The nicest thing might be the way that Detect Traps automatically turns on as soon as my thief exits combat.

Changes in combat stats are now surfaced early on when comparing equipment. Instead of putting on the new item, than flipping over to the Character Record to see what happened, you can now easily see the delta in your THAC0, damage per hit, etc. right on the inventory screen.

I’m sure there are a lot more that I’m overlooking. These are all great updates, and make the game more usable and enjoyable than ever before. Ever since the old Ease of Use mod first allowed arrows to stack up to 80 per slot, players have been looking for ways to make the game more playable without affecting its underlying difficulty, and the latest EE updates feel like a culmination to those enhancements.

Let’s see… before I get into semi-spoilery plot stuff, here are a few mechanical notes that may be of interest to players, especially munchkins. No spoilers here, but you still may want to skip if you want to be completely surprised.

You can either create a new character in SoD, or import a save from BG1EE. If you create a new character, you’ll start off at a decent XP level and receive an initial party based on your alignment. If you import, you’ll get your PC and everyone who was in your party in your save.

In my case, I imported my post-game save from the end of BG1; in that game, two of my party members died in the final battle. They imported correctly, but since they had dropped all of their gear when they died, they arrived without any equipment. It wasn’t a huge deal, since I was able to re-equip them in the tutorial dungeon; but if I had to do it over again, I probably would have just imported the save BEFORE the final battle and kept their gear. As far as I can tell, the game doesn’t import any plot flags (other than maybe the BG1EE NPC quests), so there isn’t any particular significance to selecting the post-game save.

After the tutorial dungeon is complete, your party will leave you. Some of the party members can rejoin later, in which case they will keep all of their equipment and have the same items when they come back. Everything in their inventory gets dumped into a common storage chest, which is accessible throughout the rest of the game, so you don’t need to worry about handing everything to your PC prior to exiting the dungeon. However, I think that equipment which people are WEARING will go with them; so if there are any enchanted items that you especially want, you should strip them off before ending the intro. (You get plenty of advance notice before this happens.)

And, final mechanical note to super-munchkins: you lose all of your gold after the tutorial dungeon, so feel free to stock up on any healing or stuff you want.

Okay! Let’s get into the story!

MINI SPOILERS

The overall game design also feels like a bridge between BG1 and BG2. You tend to progress linearly through chapters, gaining access to new areas and losing access to older ones, just like in BG2. However, individual map exploration feels a lot more like in BG1. There are large areas of wilderness to explore, lots of random quests scattered around, plenty of stuff to find and plenty of stuff to miss. There’s a meta-plot driving you forwards, but I spent a majority of my time on (fun) side-quests.

They do a good job at making your character feel powerful and significant; honestly much better than the big reset button at the start of Shadows of Amn. Crowds gather to cheer you as you leave the city, powerful nobles courteously ask your opinion, military leaders look to you for direction. There’s still good narrative justification for you heading into the wilderness with your party - you hold no official rank, you’re just an incredibly powerful individual who people want on their side.

I’d mentioned before that they bring back many of the original voice actors for the NPCs. There aren’t as many available party members as for BG1, but I think the overall selection is better: less redundancy (seven thieves?!), while still offering choice for each major party role and much more content for each individual. People become available throughout the game, with narratively-distinct reasons for joining. My final party was:

Raenir: My Cavalier PC. She specializes in two-handed swords. She’s Lawful Good, but as I’ll address below, she gained some additional nuances and layers throughout the story.

Corwin: Human archer, and a new NPC. She’s a member of, uh, either the city guard or the Flaming Fist, I forget which. Her bare stats are mediocre, but with the proper equipment she’s an absolute beast on the field.

M’Khiin: Goblin shaman, a new NPC and new class for SoD. Shamans are to druids what sorcerers are to mages: they don’t need to memorize individual spells. She has a fantastic personality, with a mixture of resignation and stubbornness and taciturnity that I absolutely love.

Viconia: Drow priestess, fortunately much closer to her BG2 persona than her minimal BG1 presentation. In BG2 she can become a decent frontline fighter; in SoD she’s still squishy enough that I kept her on the back line, but she’s still very useful and has a compelling story.

Safana: Human thief. Not really my favorite, but one of the few thieves available in the expansion. She’s a decent archer and has good thief skills, but otherwise isn’t too remarkable.

Neera: Human wild mage. The last addition to my party, she was added in BG1 as a new NPC and has her story extended here. Not as strong as a PC-designed arcane caster would be, but still extremely useful to have around. I already liked her in BG1, and I think she’s even better here, with terrific dialogue and voice acting.

Other people I had in my party at various times include:

Minsc! Human “ranger” who plays like a berserker. One of the most beloved NPCs of all time, and a true joy to have back.

Dynaheir: Human Invoker, voiced by the terrific Jennifer Hale. A solid all-around spellcaster; I kept her around until picking up Neera later in the game.

Jaheira: Half-elven fighter/druid. The longest-serving companion in the BG franchise, she has a notoriously prickly personality and a complex, fully-developed personal arc. She’s extremely useful and I would have loved to keep her if I had one more slot, but I eventually and reluctantly dropped her so I could fit in the new NPCs.

And some others who I ran across but never traveled with:

Khalid: Half-elven fighter. As usual, a nervous but very decent man, who in SoD gets thrust into a new position of responsibility.

Rasaad: Human monk. Another new NPC from BG1EE. I enjoyed his quest in the earlier game, but, well, no room this time around, especially for a squishy melee fighter.

Dorn: Half-orc blackguard. The final new NPC from BG1EE. I actually wanted to get rid of him, but missed the earlier dialogue choice to tell him to get lost, and so he hung out at camp and glowered.

Edwin: Human conjurer. One day I’ll play an evil party! Maybe!

Baeloth: Drow Sorcerer. Apparently he’s a returning character, although I don’t remember meeting him in BG1.

Glint Gardnersonson: Gnome thief/cleric. Interesting multiclass! I actually really liked the little I heard from him, and will likely pick him up if and when I replay the game.

Voghlin: Human skald. When we first met, he was like “Hey, you saucy wench!” and I was like NOPE! Apparently he’s actually a good character, but I wasn’t inclined to give him a chance.

There are a bunch more cameos and such from older NPCs. Imoen doesn’t journey with you after the opening dungeon, but is a major part of the story, as is Skie. Tiax gets a great, if much shorter (heh), cameo. And there’s one particular returning voice actor who just FLOORED me. I'll avoid spoiling it, even though it's revealed early on.

The new voice actors are really good. My favorite is definitely M’Khiin, followed closely by Caelar Argent. I wasn’t initially a fan of Corwin’s voice, but it really grew on me and I ended up loving it. Weirdly, the weakest voice of the entire cast belongs to the final boss, even though he/it is supposed to be the most powerful of all the characters. I suspect that they had intended to put a filter on it but neglected to do so.

Overall build strategy for party composition and loadouts will be very intuitive for anyone who has played the other games. Missile weapons are still very useful, as they were in BG1; as you may have noted, my final party consisted of a single melee fighter and a whopping five ranged fighters; it isn’t ideal, but worked perfectly fine for most fights. Turn Undead comes in very handy on a couple of maps. Having a thief is very handy. Traps tend to be clustered in logical places, so if you find yourself thinking “There might be traps here”, you’re probably right and should focus on scouting. That said, many traps can be stepped around, so you could probably survive with a Detect Traps spell and occasional tanking.

There are quite a few battles against large numbers of enemies with low HP, so having AOE options comes in very useful; I still had some Wands of Fire left over from BG1, and picked up a couple more throughout this game, and used them fairly liberally as the situation demanded. You finally get the Raise Dead spell at the new XP levels available in SoD; before that, don’t forget (as I did) that you can get Scrolls of Resurrection for pretty cheap; there’s no Rod of Resurrection, sadly, so you should probably have at least two divine casters available for post-battle raising. Must-buys for me included the Bag of Holding and lots of +2 ammo and fire arrows. Pretty much everything else can be found through drops. I thought the money curve was handled really well. I only bothered looting and selling magical equipment (including precious stones but excluding un-enchanted weapons and armor); I kept a close eye on my money for the first couple of chapters, but felt free to spend recklessly nearer the end, and finished the game with well over 100,000 pieces of gold.

There’s a lot of nice equipment that you can pick up. Here are a handful of highlights; this is just based off of what I had equipped on my party near the end, I remember selling a lot of other great stuff that we couldn’t use.

• The Sword of Ruin: +2 THAC0, adds 50% or 100% to your crit chance, deals an extra 1D6 on a crit.
• Sundermaul. +3 Warhammer, 15% chance of inflicting -1 AC on the target... but wielder has a 2% risk of triggering a quake centered on themself.
• Daeros’s Full Plate: Ridiculously low AC, plus an extra 40% fire resistance and bonuses to Breath saving throws. 
• Ring of Wizardry: Doubles the number of first-level arcane spells you can memorize. This stacks with Evermemory, with a multiplicative effect! You now have more Identify and Magic Missile spells than you’ll ever need!
• Cloak of Minor Arcana: +1 to caster level for mages.
• There are a lot of pieces that give boosts to stats (like +1 to WIS, +1 to CON, etc.). Other than strength belts and one or two dex items, I don’t remember seeing many other attribute-boosting items before.
• There are quite a few items that can be worn by many classes, but have additional bonuses for a specific kit. For example, Stalker Gauntlets give a boost to everyone, but also increase a Stalker's backstab multiplier.
• Many items that are unique to particular characters; especially M’Khiin (which makes sense, given goblin physiology), but Corwin also has several.
• Multiple summoning items: no longer just monsters, but also ankhegs and stone golems and more! I often forgot I had these, and they turned the tide whenever I deployed them.

Let’s talk about plot now!

MEGA SPOILERS

I’ve been playing as a Lawful Good paladin. For the most part, this had made things very simple from a role-playing perspective: never lie, never cut deals with evil forces, always do good, and always uphold the law when it does not interfere with the above. This bypasses the moral judgment I usually struggle with when playing my more typical Neutral Good alignment, which can sometimes make things a little boring.

In Siege of Dragonspear, though, I found myself periodically questioning myself in-character, even from the Lawful Good angle, which made things much more interesting. One early example: the crusaders (your putative enemies) have seized control of a bridge that you need to cross, and have laid siege to an adjacent fort that has some of your sympathetic forces trapped inside (led by Khalid). The defenders are outnumbered, but now that you have arrived with the Flaming Fist, you have a chance at breaking the siege.

After I finally gained access to the fort, I talked to everyone, and was surprised to see multiple lines of dialogue that dealt with the possibility of surrender. I was reassured that surrender would not be a disaster: they could destroy the supplies before exiting, which would deprive Caelar’s forces of their primary goal. I made sure to disavow any chance of surrender: I was a holy warrior, fearless in the face of adversity, and would defeat the enemies no matter what.

But… as the time for a decision grew nearer, I found myself second-guessing my course. Yes, I could fight off Caelar’s forces, but what would be the gain? This was not our main objective; we only needed to secure crossing, and then would immediately proceed to Dragonspear. Caelar’s army was my enemy, but the more I learned about them, the more convinced I became that they weren’t “evil”. They were misguided, and had caused a great deal of harm, but were ultimately fighting in the service of what they believed to be the greater good.

And, furthermore, what would the cost be? I was confident in my own ability to survive, thanks to my mastery of the meta-spells of Save and Reload. But the defenders were another story. If I negotiated a surrender, they would all join the coalition army and be of use in the final battle. If we fought, then many of them would die, and for what? My pride, I realized. There was no strategic reason for this battle, and no moral reason, so its only purpose would be to prove my own power. Not the best reason in the best of circumstances, and definitely not the best reason for a child of Bhaal, the God of Murder.

So, I was astonished to find myself doing the thing I was so certain I would not, and negotiating a surrender of Bridgefort. Much like the British soldiers in Last of the Mohicans, we marched off, holding our weapons and carrying our colors with pride. It was a supremely satisfying moment.

The next point where I questioned my actions came during the titular Siege of Dragonspear. The plot requires you to plant some explosives underneath the castle walls (the wonderfully-named Barrel of BWOOSH!). There’s an optional additional objective: to poison the defenders’ supplies. I instantly turned down that mission, and didn’t really second-guess it. But, once I reached the castle, I started to wonder just how far I should go.

As a Paladin, I made it a point to say “Hi, I’m Raenir!” whenever I met someone, even if they were a Crusader. Most of the peons aren’t too aware of larger issues, and won’t turn hostile. Later on, I saved some crusaders who were afflicted by a fungal infection, and in return I received a crest that identified me as a crusader myself.

This, then, posed a quandary. By presenting the crest, I could gain peaceful access to the castle basement. This would allow me to carry out virtuous missions (freeing a captured ogre, rescuing hostages, etc.), without causing additional loss of life. However, it would mean mis-representing who I was. What’s a Lawful Good paladin to do?

I ended up turning into a scrupulous lawyer. I avoided lying outright, while also allowing others to make erroneous assumptions about my identity. This allowed me further access to carry out my work. I’m somewhat happy with this, while still feeling conflicted; it felt a bit like “the ends justify the means,” which is not the most Lawful Good policy, and also felt dangerously similar to Caelar’s rhetoric. I got as far as I could without bloodshed, then reloaded to the point just before and headed back to camp. (In addition to my moral qualms, I also had practical considerations: the whole purpose of this venture was to secretly plant a bomb, and if the Crusaders discovered that the Hero of Baldur’s Gate had popped up in their basement, surely they would have searched my route of entrance and discovered the explosive?)

This stuff was good for roleplaying; I’m looking forward to playing again as a Chaotic (or at least Neutral) alignment, since it seems like there are a lot of opportunities for espionage and manipulation and backstabbing and such. There are some trees where you’re allowed to cut deals with enemies, only to turn around and trick them. That stuff is really fun, and will make for a nice change of pace on my next replay.

Roleplaying decisions are good on their own, and I was happy to see that it seems to have some ultimate impact on the end of the game. One of the very last scenes sees you put on trial for a crime, and in your defense you can cite instances of your moral character. It felt great to be able to say “Hey, I didn’t poison that stuff, even when YOUR commander asked me to! Poison is a murderer’s tool, and I’m no murderer!”

I’m a little unclear on exactly what impact the trial has, but looking back at it, I suspect that it affects the circumstances of your departure from Baldur’s Gate. As it was, the Grand Dukes banished me from the city, but I was allowed to leave with my own equipment; I imagine that, if you “fail” the trial, you instead escape from prison (perhaps with the assistance of the same sympathetic guard, perhaps with Imoen).

And, as a sidebar, it was a little funny/weird/odd to see that transition into Shadows of Amn, since both Minsc and Khalid had died in this game. So we were just a foursome heading out, but I’m pretty sure that this will not carry over to the start of BG2. Anyways, that’s definitely not a new problem, just interesting to see it again.

The plot of the game as a whole was really enjoyable. I found myself frequently thinking of Mask of the Betrayer, one of my favorite RPGs; there are many similarities between Kaelyn the Dove and Caelar Argent, and Caelar’s crusade to rescue the unjust dead of the Dragonspear Wars reminded me of Kaelyn’s crusade against the Wall of the Faithless. The final assault on Avernus kind of reminded me of the climax to Hordes of the Underdark, the final expansion to the original Neverwinter Nights.

Some of the specific plot developments didn't make a lot of sense to me. I particularly had trouble understanding the tactical situation at Dragonspear. Caelar's forces are under "siege" by, apparently, 450 soldiers, until your additional 100 soldiers swell the ranks to 550. When negotiations fail, SHE attacks YOUR camp. You beat her back, and then assault the castle. I mean... I guess it may make a slight amount of sense if her main goal is to capture you, but since you're going to attack her anyways, why on earth would she not just wait for your assault? And if she really just wants to capture you, why not send some spies/assassins to do the work instead of foot soldiers? This would all make more sense if you had chosen to poison her supplies, since that would put more time pressure on her plans, but as it stood in my game it seemed like a rare illogical development.

My biggest disappointment in the game was the romance, or more specifically, my lack of one. I’d deliberately avoided researching available options, which ended up thwarting my ability to pursue one… I didn’t recruit Corwin until Chapter 9, and temporarily kicked her out of my party while shuffling members, which may have broken the kickoff. Alternately, it MIGHT have been because I imported a character who had used the “Neera Expansion” mod to romance Neera in BG:EE; that romance didn’t continue either, so I’m guessing that it re-checks your eligibility instead of just relying on the romance flag.

As is usually the case, I ended up fiddling around in CLUAConsole and save game editors to try and get things back on track, but this time around did not have luck, mostly because the expansion is so new and there isn’t much info out there yet about how the new romances work. I’ll probably come back to this in a couple of months to reload my old saves and cheat my way back into one. My tentative plan is to look for an updated Neera mod so Raenir can continue that romance. Beamdog has indicated that, if SoD does really well, they may make updates to BG2EE to continue some of the new companions’ storylines as well; if they bring Corwin forward, I’ll probably start a fresh character at the start of SoD and then do a Corwin romance through SoD, SoA and ToB.

All right, there’s a ton more to say but I’ll do it in my album as usual. In the meantime, some summing-up:

THE GOOD

Significant UI/UX improvements. It’s still the same fundamental game, just with a lot of unnecessary annoyances removed.

Fantastic voice acting across the board.

New stories with beloved old characters.

Strong tactical challenges.

Varied combat, including major fights alongside allied factions and against enemy armies.

Gorgeous maps.

Decent money curve.

Terrific music! (Composed by Sam Hulick, the same guy who created the Mass Effect score! This is seriously some of the best fantasty music I’ve heard.)

Player choice. There are the expected “good or evil” choices we’re used to in this series, and also some good nuanced options for reaching your goals.

New goodies. The Shaman class is a great addition (one I’d be tempted to pick for a new PC thanks to the ease of casting), and the new items are useful without feeling ridiculously overpowered.

Sense of humor. It feels like Baldur’s Gate always has: against the macabre and dark backdrop, there’s a lot of silliness and terrific quips. Neera’s banter in particular stands out, as does CHARNAME’s dialogue options.

NPCs. Again, it feels like Baldur’s Gate. It’s not as nuanced as, say, Dragon Age, but these are still interesting people with unique backgrounds and unique perspectives on the world, who can be fun to love or to hate.

THE MEDIOCRE

Some bugs. I only ran into one that really affected me, where Khalid died during the magical attack on the fort. Apparently that’s already been fixed in a new patch, and I was able to CLUAConsole my way back on track without too much trouble.

Graphics. The new environments look gorgeous, and animations are still attractive, but the character sprites look increasingly dated.

THE BAD

Inherited game quirks. We still need to live with encumbrances, spell memorization, and other things that felt fine back in 2000 but seem archaic now.

Pathfinding is still awful. Get used to watching the party member with Boots of Speed eternally bumping into the person in front of them.

Difficulty. This is probably my own fault for playing on Core Rules without reading any guides, but there are massive difficulty spikes at a few points. I’ll be able to prepare for them in the future, but it annoys me when games require foreknowledge. (Again, this is more of an inherent issue with BG that I’m freshly reminded of.)

END SPOILERS

This was a lot of fun! I wasn’t necessarily expecting to pick this up so soon; my standard MO for new RPGs is to wait a few months for the initial round of patches to come out and the most essential mods to be created before picking it up. Given the ridiculous harassment that this game has received, though, I wanted to show my support for people carrying the torch, and am glad I did. For all my frustrations about the romance, I’m really glad that I went into this cold with no expectations of the plot or characters. I haven’t experienced a “new” Baldur’s Gate in 15 years, and I’ll treasure the memories of this new journey.

As is my wont, I have assembled an album of only the finest screenshots from my playthrough of this game. It is approximately 180 photos long. A majority of those photos were selected due to the text in the dialogue, which is small to begin with and rendered unreadable when viewed on the web: for this I apologize. The vast majority of photos are annotated with my pedantic, rambling thoughts about the game. So, uh… enjoy!

Trespasser

Geez, how did it take me so long to start writing about Trespasser? I finished it less than a week after it came out, but Life interrupted and I never got around to writing it up. Until now!

I’ll open with the lede: This is the one truly essential DLC for Dragon Age: Inquisition. I’ve played and enjoyed all three story-based expansions, and each has something to offer, but Trespasser is the best of the lot. It tells a compelling story that directly ties in with the main plot of Inquisition, and, more importantly, provides a deeply satisfying conclusion to the Inquisitor’s personal story.

(That said - if you haven't picked up Inquisition already, you should definitely grab the Game of the Year edition, which includes all of the DLC. Worth it!)

BioWare has clearly learned from their success with Mass Effect: Citadel. Trespasser isn’t exactly a Dragon Age Citadel, but it captures the main beats that fans responded to so strongly in that exceptional DLC: spending time and having fun with the characters who you’ve grown to know and love over the dozens of hours you’ve spent playing the game. There’s a lot of humor, a lot of pathos, and, if you play your cards right, more than a little romance along the way.

MEGA SPOILERS

The overarching plot is dramatic, but the actual gameplay feels a little tedious at first. Go into the eluvian, fight some enemies, come back out, advance the story, go back into the eluvian, fight some more enemies, rinse and repeat. It helps a lot that the Crossroads is such a beautiful and fascinating place. I’ve never understood people who complain about the Fade; those bizarre and dreamlike environments have always been my favorites, and it was great to see more non-Euclidean geometry and symbol-laden tableaus on display.

One thing I had to keep reminding myself was that I, the player, had different knowledge than Aztar, the character, did. From seeing the cut-scene at the end of Inquisition and the trailer for Trespasser, I knew that Solas was Fen’Harel and would come back. However, Aztar did not know this. I’ll admit to occasionally muttering, “When are we getting to the fireworks factory?!” while mucking around with Qunari agents, wondering when Solas would finally show up. And I’d think that Aztar was acting pretty dense in not recognizing that Solas was behind stuff, before reminding myself that I personally had had no clue until seeing that post-credits teaser.

Speaking of which: I hadn’t thought about it before, but that’s actually a pretty significant difference in the narrative structure between Origins and Inquisition. Origins is set up a bit more like a movie or something, with periodic cut-aways and cut-scenes. In order to advance the story, you’ll sometimes see Loghain and Anora or someone discussing strategy or plotting their next move. There’s no in-game explanation for why your character would know any of this stuff; it’s just that you, the player, presumably need to know it in order to be able to follow the story.

In contrast, Inquisition (and I think DA2 as well) are much more disciplined. You only have access to the knowledge that your character has. You directly witness most events in the game; when you learn other things, it’s usually because someone else is relaying information to you. In the rare event that you see a cut-scene, it’s because your character is watching that cut-scene (as in Calpernia’s crystal; you’re actually watching your character watching the scene), or it’s something your character is remembering (as in regaining your memories of the Divine’s assassination).

All that to say, the Solas/Flemeth cut-scene is unique and surprising formally as well as lore-wise. After having experienced it, it’s hard to wind back down to the more conventional storytelling of the rest of the game.

Anyhoo… the Qunari stuff felt like it went on for too long, but ultimately ended up being really interesting. The series has been foreshadowing an upcoming with with the Qunari since early in Origins, and Trespasser pushes that conflict to the brink. For me, one of the most shocking moments was when Iron Bull betrayed me and attacked. It was both totally unexpected and made total sense, which is the best kind of twist. And I can’t say I didn’t “deserve” it: after all, I was the one who had pushed Bull to renew his devotion to the Qun. The way it went down was fantastic, though. When he raises arms against you, he says something like “Nothing personal… bas”. It’s a one-syllable line reading that totally blew my mind. All this time, when Bull was saying “boss”, I took it as a mixture of affection and loyalty. But he was hiding in plain sight all along, secretly sneering at me while professing his allegiance.

It got even better in the post-game, at least with my particular world state configuration. The Qunari leadership denied any involvement with the Viddasala’s actions. They got bogged down in an escalating war against Tevinter and, amazingly, reached out to the Divine to help negotiate a truce. All along, I’d viewed the Qunari as a dangerous but powerful ally, and it was really cool to see that continuing past the end of the game: they had tested me, but I had proven my strength, and so they continued to be a valuable asset for a slightly diminished Inquisition.

Speaking of which, I was pretty happy with how the Inquisition proper wound down. All along, Aztar has been 100% focused on building and leading a powerful organization that would reshape Thedas in accordance with her values. I had imagined it being an extra-national entity that would continue to operate under its own banner and was initially peeved that this was not an option. As I thought about it more, though, being nominally under the control of the Divine was actually a pretty great outcome. Aztar has never been in this for fame or personal fortune: she craves the actual power, not being perceived as powerful. Being formally tied to the Chantry actually HELPS her goal, not limits it: back when it was a rogue group, it could be dismissed as illegitimate, but if the Murderpope officially gives you her blessing to operate, then, wow, you shove pretty much all of your enemies into the shadow. I would be less stoked if it was another Divine, but Leliana and I are simpatico on basically all issues. I’m perfectly happy to have her be the public face of the Chantry while I make things happen.

And, while I’m thinking of Leliana, I was also pleased with seeing what seems like the end of the story of the Hero of Ferelden. I had kind of expected that to be something which would be resolved in Dragon Age 4: Kiriyon was last seen searching for a cure to the Calling, and that, combined with Hawke’s journey to Weisshaupt, seemed to be setting up a Gray Warden plotline for the next game. But, given the dizzyingly wide range of possible outcomes for the Hero and the Champion, BioWare wouldn’t be able to design whole games around their statuses. It makes me really happy to think of Kiriyon and Leliana living and loving together in the Grand Cathedral: reunited after so many games apart, they can finally find happiness together, and set an active example for the rest of Thedas to follow as it ponders Leliana’s doctrinal reforms. Plus, it gives me an opening to head-canon Kiriyon undoing the damage caused by Aztar and un-hardening Leliana. Eventually. After all of her enemies are brutally destroyed.

END SPOILERS

I skipped over a bunch of stuff, but fear not! As usual, I have taken a staggering quantity of screenshots, added overly verbose captions, and assembled them into an album for your viewing pleasure.

Trespasser ends Inquisition on a great note. So far, there hasn’t been any confirmation on whether Electronic Arts will approve a fourth Dragon Age game. I have to imagine that it will happen; from what I can tell, Inquisition sold very well, and the investment they put into the new engine work should make sequels a much more palatable financial option. There’s obviously lots of groundwork laid for the next game and it would be disappointing to see if end; but if this is somehow the last Dragon Age game we get, it will be nice to have at least experienced satisfying ends for the characters we’ve played as and with.

Down Down to Goblin-Town

Shadowrun Hong Kong comes out on Thursday, which gives me a little spare time to explore other gaming options. I decided this would be the perfect chance to check out The Descent: it's an expansion DLC for Inquisition, so I figured I could enjoy a relatively short experience that built on a franchise I already enjoyed.

It ended up being a lot of fun. Maybe even shorter than I expected, but nicely focused: there's a central compelling threat to resolve, gorgeous new areas to travel through, and some good meaty combat.

MINI SPOILERS

The environment may have been the highlight for me. I'm one of the few people who enjoyed the Deep Roads back in Origins, and this version is even better: huge vistas, towering use of vertical space, terrific dwarven artifacts. Ever since the Vinmark Chasm, BioWare has achieved mastery of crafting underground caverns that feel airy: you can accept the light and the occasional trees while still feeling like you're buried deep below the earth.

The expansion also adds a new miniature version of the War Table specifically for the Deep Roads, and there are quite a few operations to undertake. Which was great, if for no other reason than finally giving me some way to spend the vast quantity of useless Power I had accumulated. What's especially cool, though, is seeing the handiwork of the Inquisition alongside that of the ancient dwarves. You'll walk down a crumbling stone tunnel, standing in the shadow of an enormous paragon statue that could never be built today; and also see a walkway made of freshly-hewn boards bridging the chasm, forming a latticed scaffolding up the statue. The old and the new are completely different with their own visual styles, and each makes sense, carrying out its unique purpose.

I thought a lot about the Jaws of Hakkon while playing the Descent and the various ways in which one is better than the other. A lot of people complained about the shard quests in Hakkon, which were a part of the base game that many people didn't enjoy. The Descent doesn't have nearly as much exploration as Hakkon, and much less area as a whole to explore. There aren't any shards as such, but there are ancient gears to collect, which serve a similar purpose. But for the most part there's just a single path to follow, with an occasional branch or loop, and you can easily get everything you need by following along without spending a lot of time exploring. This could be good or bad depending on your perspective, but personally I'm a fan of tighter, more curated experiences.

Well, I am when it comes to exploration, at least. Unfortunately, the plot runs on rails in much the same way that the map does. I wasn't expecting any big branching choices like In Hushed Whispers or Champions of the Just, but I was hoping for at least a few smaller meaningful choices to make like there were in Hakkon: how to handle certain situations, whether to show mercy or sternness, etc. Instead, you're basically just along for the ride. Your reactions are essentially limited to "Tell me more!" and "Please tell me more!" I'm pretty sure I won't replay this DLC on any of my other Inquisitors, since it would basically just be a repeat of this game.

That even extends to the choice of companions. One of my favorite aspects of Hakkon - heck, possibly my favorite overall - was all of the new companion banter they added. In The Descent, I brought along Team YOLO - Sera, Bull, and Dorian - hoping to hear some more of that lovely sassy banter. Nope. Dorian had a few brief quippy asides, but nothing significant. Bull and Sera each got one line at the very beginning, and didn't give a single peep throughout the rest of the game. I dunno... maybe I should have brought other folks along, it would make sense for Varric to be a bit more impressed at what we found. But given the total lack of participation from Sera and Bull, I'm not optimistic that anyone gets much to do, certainly nothing like the companion quests we got in Mark of the Assassin.

One nice thing about the dialogue, though, was that it acknowledged my inquisitor's dwarf heritage. Aztar grew up on the surface and isn't super-familiar with dwarf culture, but she was able to recognize some of the dwarf runes encountered, which was a small but very appreciated touch. I know that some players were bummed when their Elf inquisitors at the Temple of Mythal were like "Dur what's a Mythal?", and it seems like the studio is being a bit more studious in how it presents ancient lore to different backgrounds.

MEGA SPOILERS

Speaking of lore - we get some really nice lore bombs in here. We learn about the Titans, and the nature of lyrium, and witness a dwarf casting magic. That could have huge implications for future games, even for gameplay - who knows, maybe in DA4 it will be canonically legal to roll a dwarf mage.

Before starting the Descent, I'd assumed that it would cover some of the plots foreshadowed by Inquisition: Kal-Sharok, the Warden's attempts to cure the Calling, the corruption of lyrium by the blight. None of these are directly addressed, but the more I think about it, that does make sense. It would be a bummer to lock crucial plot developments behind $15 DLCs, so DA4 would be a much better place to resolve those. I increasingly feel like the ideal purpose of DLC is not to tie up old plot lines, but to lay the groundwork for new ones. In retrospect, Legacy was a kind of perfect DLC: it was a fun and interesting story in its own right, while also laying the groundwork for Inquisition. I think that's probably what's at play in The Descent, more so than in Hakkon.

And finally, a random note: I almost burst out laughing when I was attacked by machine-gun-wielding dwarves for the first time. It was a total flashback to playing Might & Magic VI and seeing sci-fi weaponry buried deep within my fantasy RPG. "What! Is! Happening! Here!"

END SPOILERS

The combat in Descent is really nice. The very final boss fight was a little underwhelming for me, but a lot of the boss fights leading up to it were very fun, with some unique mechanics that kept me from just sticking to a standard boring tank-and-spank approach.

You also feel like you're rewarded pretty well for your work. In this case, that mostly takes the form of items and money. I think I got enough XP to level up everyone once; I earned a small amount of Power, but not enough for another perk. But pretty much everyone got some new gear. There are several great pieces: a shield with a chance to cast Walking Fortress, heal-on-kill rings and staves, cooldown amulets, high-level unique helmets, etc. There are also a lot of Tier 4 schematics; I haven't crafted any yet, but was happy to see that they also added a shop that sells Tier 4 materials (dragon bone, webbing, etc.)

Soooooo, should you buy The Descent? If you love Dragon Age and have the money, sure. If you're at all cost-conscious, you might want to hold off. There's great stuff in there, but no answers to immediately pressing questions. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there, but there's much less content than in Jaws of Hakkon, and the content that is there has much less replay value.

While playing the game and writing this post, I found myself frequently thinking of an awesome recent talk by Anthony Burch titled Plot is Dumb, Character is Cool: Writing for DLC. He mostly uses the Borderlands franchise as an example, but I found myself constantly thinking of Dragon Age while watching it, and thought of that video a lot while playing The Descent. I had a great time with this expansion, but would have enjoyed it even more if it had let me spend more meaningful time with the people from Inquisition who I already loved.

Oh! Almost forgot - here's the requisite album of screenshots, filled with spoilers for your pleasure.

Jaws Clamped Shut

Dragon Age: Inquisition is holding up as one of my favorite games, of ever. Its first expansion, Jaws of Hakkon, provided a great excuse to dive back into the world. There is still plenty that I haven’t done in the main game yet - the Hissing Wastes remain largely unexplored, along with most of the Emerald Graves and some other locations - but the prospect of additional storylines prompted me to pony up for the DLC.

BioWare has gotten really great at putting together DLC recently; in particular, the expansions for Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 did a fantastic job at responding to specific criticisms that players had about the main games, and in many respects surpassed them. I believe this is mostly due to BioWare’s surprising humility in listening to and responding to their fans, as they seem to be very in tune with the cultural pulse around what aspects people enjoy, dislike, and want more of.

JoH doesn’t provide as dramatic a sense of improvement, but I think that’s mostly because Inquisition is such a great game to begin with. It’s more about giving us stuff that we already like than fixing anything fundamentally broken in the game. (Though the latter is arguably accomplished thanks to the Black Emporium, a free update distributed separately from the DLC, which finally lets players fix visual blemishes in their characters.) We get to banter more with Scout Harding and learn about her history, elevating this fan-favorite character from a minor source of exposition to a supporting sidekick. There’s also a lot of new banter between companions: not even tied in to the new story, just further developments in their funny, fraught relationships. And, on the flip side, BioWare has omitted some of the aspects of the game that people didn’t particularly enjoy; most noticeably, there are no new requisition orders from your camps.

For better and worse, JoH feels like a big new area in Inquisition rather than a sequel to Inquisition. You have the same freedom of exploration, gorgeous new vistas to see, cultures to learn about, side-quests that range from the rote to the fascinating. I’ve been impressed by the work BioWare went to in making this content available at various points during the game: much like the Dragon Age 2 DLC, you can play it at nearly any point, including after the end of the game, and the dialogue within it will be updated to reflect your current status. I happily played it in my post-end-game Aztar Cadash save, and was satisfied with the occasional recognition of the massive feats I had already accomplished. At the same time, the plot in JoH feels sufficiently weighty to be worth my Inquisitor’s time.

MEGA SPOILERS for Jaws of Hakkon

There’s a bunch of great lore in the game. A lot has to do with the Avvar, who have been present since Origins but, thanks in part to the discarded Human Commoner origin story, haven’t really been explored to the same extent as many other ethnic groups. As is so often the case in Dragon Age, we see that they aren’t a single monolithic entity, but a dispersed and varied culture with conflicting leaders, perspectives, and agendas. On the whole, they have a strong Nordic feel about them, reminiscent of the Wildlings in Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire, as well as the Nords of Skyrim.

It doesn’t directly play into the plot much, but one thematic plot thread that I particularly enjoyed had to do with the Avvar’s reaction to the “modern” world. You spend some time in Stone-Bear Hold, a mostly-peaceful settlement. Their leader, Sun-Hair, is really quite progressive: she wishes to trade more with the “lowlanders”, and has little use for the more violent tendencies of the Jaws of Hakkon. One of my favorite parts was when you find some notes where she was practicing a letter to the Orlesians inviting them to trade: there’s a wonderful mix of pride in her culture, frustration at the limits of her literacy, embarrassment at how she will be perceived, hopefulness for the ways this exchange could improve the lives of her people. I was strongly reminded of the perennial dilemma faced by indigenous people confronted with an outside culture, as they try to strike a balance between holding on to the traditions which have sustained them for generations and the advantages offered by joining the global monoculture.

The deep lore in the game, though, has to do with the history of the Inquisition. We’ve learned a lot about this over the course of the main game: how it was originally a separate faction, devoted to stamping out the threat of mage abominations, and relatively late in joining the Chantry to present a unified force against the Blight. We get some impressive lore bombs here, of which the biggest might be that the old Inquisition was led by an elf, who was also a personal friend of Emperor Drakon. We already know that, around the time of the Exalted March on the Dales, the Chantry hierarchy purged most references to elves from the canon, removing persons such as Andraste’s disciple Shar’tan. That same effort was successful in wiping the record of elven involvement from the founding narrative of the Orlesian Chantry.

Anyways. As usual, Dragon Age does a fantastic job at evoking real-world scenarios; it’s hard to hear this story and not think of events like the establishment of the biblical canon. There isn’t a one-to-one correlation, and the game isn’t meant to be an allegory or anything, but it certainly adds to the game’s great strengths at feeling complex, messy, and real.

END SPOILERS

As has become rote, I took a whole bunch of screenshots of my time in the expansion and uploaded them into an album. Some of them are very pretty! Others are silly. Many contain spoilers.

On the whole, I'm really digging BioWare's approach to DLC. In contrast to the long run-up to Inquisition, with frequent tantalizing glimpses at the upcoming game, they've been very tight-lipped about further releases for Inquisition, not announcing JoH until right before it went on sale. Of course, this also means that the next expansion could drop at any time, and after this experience, I'm even more eager to pick up what comes next.

Fall In: New and Improved Vegas

So! Do you remember, months and months ago, when I was playing Fallout: New Vegas, and I really liked it? As soon as I finished the game, I wrote up a post, then immediately created a new character and dove right back in. I was kind of stunned to think of how much stuff I HADN’T done in my first game: even given how long I’d spent in there, there were huge swaths of the map that I had never set foot inside. I didn’t necessarily intend my second game to be a completionist playthrough, more of a chance to explore the “missing” aspects of my first game.

I played a lot… and then got sidetracked with the new Antumbra game, and put FNV (and everything else) aside for months. I recently came back and wrapped up the major DLC that I had interrupted. I figured that it would probably be a good idea to wrap up my thoughts on this now while they’re still only months-old and not years-old; I don’t THINK I have anything else major on the horizon between now and Inquisition, but there is a LOT of game left, and I’m no longer confident that I’ll wrap it all up in a timely fashion.

All right! As is often the case when re-playing RPGs, I start from the moment of character creation to try and create something different. My first character was a female Asian energy-weapons expert; this time around I had a grizzled Hispanic male firearms user. There’s still some decent overlap between the two, skills-wise: given how FNV is structured, it’s really important to have strong Science and Lockpicking from early on, and with my own playstyle I greatly value Speech as well.

Still, the difference between Energy Weapons and Guns was by itself enough to make the flow of gameplay feel quite different. With Energy Weapons, you feel a bit helpless at first due to the extreme shortage of weapons and ammo. However, once you are able to start accumulating ammo, you reach a point where it becomes self-sustaining, and so for most of the game I never had to worry about restocking my supply. In contrast, Guns has an INSANE variety in weapons, and much less commonality in ammunition. Energy Weapons pretty much just have Energy Cells and Microfusion Cells. Guns have .308, 5MM, 9MM, 22LR, .44, .357, and lots more. It isn’t evenly distributed, either. Sniper rifles (which are themselves quite rare) require .308 ammunition, which is only rarely available.

This has had several repercussions for how I play my game. With Energy Weapons, I would always have a single “best” weapon that I would hold on to. Granted, there’s the standard tradeoff between DAM and DPS, but I would usually be satisfied picking one all-around useful weapon. With Guns, though, there’s too great a risk of running out of ammunition, so I ended up carting around a bit of an arsenal; given that you’re holding multiple guns, it makes sense to specialize with them a bit more and switch between them based on the scenario you’re in. As of this writing, that includes a Sniper Rifle (using .308 ammmunition, modified with a suppressor and carbon stock, which is fantastic at taking down enemies at extreme distances in outdoor environments); a silenced SMG (22LR ammunition, useful when fighting at close quarters in indoor environments, handy in stealth); a Hunting Rifle (best at medium range; this used to be my go-to weapon, now it’s a handy fallback when I’m running out of ammo); and my latest acquisition, the K9000 (chews through .357 ammo like candy, good against powerful targets  or when facing groups).

I’m also striving to roleplay this character a bit differently. Again, one of the awesome things about FNV is the large number of big choices it gives your character. My first play-through was fairly aligned to law-and-order; my new character is still “good”, but I see him as more of a wild card, willing to mix it up and break the rules if he thinks a better outcome is possible.

One other thing I do when replaying an RPG is look for mods to install. FNV, like all games based on a Bethesda engine, has a staggering amount of mods available. It can be tricky to research the best ones to use: you can often find articles with titles like “The Ten Best Mods for Fallout: New Vegas,” but such articles are typically written very shortly after mods start appearing, and don’t include the newer ones that end up being superior to those rushed out early on. You can get slightly better results by going to a big aggregator like Nexus Mods and using their sorting options to find the most popular or most endorsed mods. I also find it very useful to check for recent activity on message boards, where you can get a better impression of exactly what the top mods offer: some are very ambitious and impressive but buggy, others might serve very narrow roles that some players need and others won’t care about. Of course, just reading up on mods will almost always give away details about the game, which is part of why I wait until after I beat a game to begin hunting.

I picked out a couple for this playthrough. Some were closer to patches than mods; one lets FNV use up to 4GB of RAM instead of the (I think) 2GB it is hard-coded to use. That should translate to shorter load times when moving repeatedly between the same scenes (as is often the case on the Strip). It didn’t make an enormous difference that I could see, but I think it probably sped it up a little.

I also tried to use an atmosphere mod that’s supposed to add a lot more environmental effects: different sorts of storms, clouds, meteorological events, etc. It sounded cool, but ended up crashing my game, so it had to go.

The most significant mod I added this time around was Willow, which adds a new NPC companion. This turned out to be a FANTASTIC mod, and one of the most professional-looking creations I’ve seen. Willow is very well designed, has a variety of outfits, terrific voice acting, and several personal quest lines that contribute to an overall relationship arc. Most impressively of all, she’s very well integrated into the existing game - in fact, I could almost argue that she’s integrated better than the official NPCs are! In core FNV, you can never have more than two humanoid followers at a time, and never really get to see them interact with one another (one of the critical ways in which this otherwise-amazing game falls short of the BioWare standard). Willow doesn’t count against that limit, though, and she will actually strike up conversations with people as she meets them. Even more amazing, though, is that the original NPCs speak back - they’ve somehow been able to find appropriate reactions from the original audio files, making a surprisingly seamless dialogue between official and fan-made creations. It’s pretty remarkable!

I had a lot of fun with the Willow plot, and let that drive a lot of my initial wanderings. My main goal was to focus on new stuff and ignore the old, and there was a ton of new stuff available to explore. Besides Willow, I also met up with Rose of Sharon Cassidy, bumping up the number of awesome female sidekicks in this game to a rockin’ three. Cass is very different from Veronica, and I don’t know if I could pick a favorite between the two… they’re unique in voice, outlook, background, attitude, combat style, and more. Each has a really engaging personal mission that leads to some very difficult decisions with lasting story-related and mechanical repercussions. In addition, I also did more with Arcade Gannon this time around: I’d recruited him previously, but never unlocked his personal quest, and I was looking forward to seeing his story. With that gang in place, I started wandering through West Side and all the other places I’d neglected during my first game.



And, frankly, that alone was already a pretty stunning part of the experience: realizing just how little of the game I'd even seen. I'd never once set foot in Westside or New Vegas Square, and huge sections of the Wasteland map were completely unexplored. I had a ton of fun checking those places out, and still haven't gotten to everything yet.

I got a better feeling for FNV's quest structure this time around, and I found myself appreciating it more and more. I'm used to a more "hub"-style structure for quests, which is most common in games like Skyrim. Those games tend to have you travel to a major friendly area, like a city; you'll wander around the city and talk to a bunch of people, perhaps picking up a dozen quests, which each require you to travel to another spot out in the countryside. You'll travel there, do what needs doing (rescue someone, find an artifact, slay a beastie), then travel back to the hub for your reward. This tends to lead to massive quest bloat, and often a fair amount of boredom: you feel like you're either picking over the same ground over and over again, or else skidding along the surface and never completing anything. Worse, I feel like I'm actually discouraged from exploring in games like Skyrim: if I stumble across a place too "early", I might break a quest or spoil something that's intended to happen later, or just need to revisit that place again after I get the proper quest.

In contrast, in Fallout New Vegas, it's almost always fun and worthwhile to explore stuff even when no particular quest is leading you there. Sometimes a location is just kind of cool for its own sake. Other times, it will spin up its own mini-quest when you enter, which will give you something to do but not prompt you to go traipsing all over creation. It harkens back in a really nice way to my all-time favorite games in the Ultima series, which created this fantastic sense that you were living in a really deep and complete world: the world doesn't revolve around you, but whenever you go digging in a particular spot, you'll find something there.

MINI SPOILERS

Willow’s story was pretty sweet (both in the sense of “awww” and “cool”). She’s definitely a much sunnier character than any of your other companions, without the sort of hard edges one acquires from a brutal life lived in the Wasteland. I kind of liked it, though… it’s nice to see a ray of sunshine after a period of gloom. She still comes across as capable, though… she teams up with you because you can help each other, not because she’s in need of rescuing.

Several of Willow’s quests seem a bit fetch-quest-y, but they’re written and delivered engagingly enough that I really didn’t mind. One quest asks you to collect 100 pencils. Pencils are typically just another type of trash that you come across, but once that was on my radar, it became really interesting to think about. I started to get more excited when my missions would take me into bombed-out office buildings rather than bombed-out factories, just because I knew I was likely to acquire more pencils. There’s no one single mother lode that can provide all the pencils you need, so it ends up being something that you continually pay attention to over the source of several missions. Along the way, Willow gives you feedback and encouragement, and then there’s a nice perk at the end once you finish the quest.

That’s probably the most extreme example; other quests have more to do with Willow’s past and such. Still, it is kind of fun to, say, have a “Let’s go shopping!” quest dropped in amongst all the angst and gloom. Over time, you’ll raise approval with Willow as a result of your various interactions (completing side-quests, making certain dialogue choices, etc.). Once you reach a certain point, you'll open up the opportunity to continue either a friendship or a romance arc with her. I went for the latter. Vanilla FNV doesn't really do romances. This seems to be partly due to the philosophical values of Chris Avellone and other Obsidian writers, but I think the limitations of the Elder Scrolls engine also plays into it. Granted, people do make fun of the romance scenes in Mass Effect and Dragon Age, but I think they're still on top of the industry when it comes to believable contact between two friendly humanoid bodies. In contrast, bodies in Elder Scrolls and modern Fallout are extremely stiff; and with the default first-person camera, there's usually no opportunity for physical interaction with the protagonist.

Given those big limitations, I was again impressed by how well the Willow mod was able to perform, thanks to an artful use of perspective, strategic fadeouts, and great sound design. (Warning: there is some nudity very late in the romance arc.) And, as with BioWare romances, the arc doesn't feel like a conquest or an easter egg: it's a decision you make that ends up altering the nature of your relationship. I'm a fan! Even after completing what seems to be the main content for Willow, I've happily continued to keep her in my party.

At least, up until I started the DLC. The expanded content is set up to not allow you to bring additional companions from the Wasteland; but, once again, Willow doesn't count, and she will happily tag along. I did a little of the first with her before figuring out that it was making the combat way too easy and reluctantly removed her. I suppose that's a good sign for attachment, if you miss someone after leaving them behind.

So! Thus far I've finished one DLC, "Old World Blues". One of my minor complaints with the DLC is that it's difficult to correlate the title of the DLC with the mission title in your Quest log with the name used within the game for its content. This certainly wasn't a problem for people who were buying each DLC as it came out, but for someone like me who boots up a new game and instantly is spammed with four ambiguously named new quests, it was a bit hard to navigate. And, since each has its own suggested minimum level requirement, I ended up relying on the wiki more than I would like just to kick this one off. In any case: for the record, "Old World Blues" starts with the quest named "Midnight Science Fiction Feature!" and takes place in The Big Empty, aka Big MT.

I was surprised (agreeably so!) by just how big and well-polished this content was. It apparently cost $10 upon release; given my expectations with DLC from similar games, I would think that this would cover a new series of missions and maybe a new companion and/or set of skills. It gives all that stuff, but a ton more beside. There's a really impressive set of opening and closing scenes, a bit like the slides you get after beating the main game, along with some fantastic narration that describes exactly what happened in Big MT and how it relates to events in the broader world. The narration and voice acting in general is really top-notch, including incredibly talent: I did a double take when I heard James Urbaniak, of The Venture Brothers and The Thrilling Adventure Hour. Initially I thought it was someone doing a really good Rusty Venture impression, but, nope, it was the man himself!

While the voice acting is amazing, my biggest complaint with the mod is probably how densely presented it is. I mean, I hate to suggest that they cut out any content; but from the time you start the DLC until you start doing any actual gameplay, you're probably in for sixty minutes of non-stop dialogue. (Technically skippable, but "unfortunately" it's too good to skip.) The actual content is great, again: it's really funny, conveys a lot of information, and introduces the relationships between a whopping FIVE new characters. Sadly, though, this is yet another case where the shortcomings of the engine limit what they can do. A BioWare scene would almost certainly feature some action to go along with the exposition; here, we have five virtually identical character models, doing the same repetitive animations over and over again, not really doing justice to the incredible words coming out of their mouths.

Once you get into the actual gameplay, the pace picks up quite nicely. The idea behind this content is that you've been abducted by a secret research facility that was started before the Great War and ran off the rails sometime later. The original scientists running the facility have all lost their bodies and transplanted their brains into portable containers, Futurama-style. During the course of your abduction, they removed many crucial parts of your body, including your brain, spine, and heart. So, you are doing a series of quests in order to get them back, and along the way learn more about what happened to Big MT.

A ton of stuff was added to the game as a part of this. Some of them, like an expanded set of perks, were added to the main game and so have been available for both of my playthroughs. But, there are also unique perks that you earn during the course of the game. Your "Spineless" perk, for example, indicates that your original spine has been replaced with an artificial one, which actually increases your Strength and Damage Threshold. After you recover your spine at the end of the game, you can either choose to restore it (getting a new perk) or remain being Spineless. In addition to perks, you'll also gain new weapons; due to the advanced scientific nature of the setting, the majority of these are energy weapons, but I was able to get a sort of portable Gatling Gun called the K9000. Lots of weapons have their own unique mods, most notably the Sonic Emitter which has a ridiculous number of swappable settings.

Big MT is huge, too! It really feels like a major section of the wasteland, and I found myself approaching it in much the same way. I would have a destination in mind, and start heading in that direction. I would then discover new locations along the way, prompting me to stick my head in and explore. This in turn would often lead to additional new quests, each with their own rewards. It was awesome! And then it was a bit overwhelming, particularly when I returned after my months-long break, realized that I had forgotten the motivation behind most of the quests, and that there were several big areas of Big MT that I hadn't even visited. So, I resolved to wrap up the existing quests and bring it to a conclusion. You can freely travel back after you've finished the mission, so I still might head back there some day and see what I've missed.

That conclusion is pretty good, by the way. This is definitely a mission that is very heavily bookended by massive exposition on both ends. I'd gotten a pretty good hunch about the situation as I'd played through the game and paid attention to the environment, and that ended up being pretty accurate, although there were still a couple of neat surprises near the end. As is the case with almost everything else in Fallout, you can make some pretty massive choices that will drastically alter the status quo in Big MT. You are then treated to a series of slides (wonderfully narrated of course) that detail the outcomes from your quest. It felt like there were just about as many from here as from the main game, which is pretty crazy. A bunch of them are very goofy - one of the side-quests in the game involves dealing with a menagerie of talking appliances straight out of Pee-Wee's Playhouse - but the goofy ones are endearing, and several more have more drama or pathos. All in all, it felt very substantial and well-earned. To be a bit flippant about it, this is the amount of content and polish I would expect in a $20 expansion, not a $10 DLC.

END SPOILERS

So, that's it for now! I've prepared the customary album of screenshots, primarily covering my time with Willow and in Big MT. Ware spoilers.

I'd planned to continue ahead with the remaining three DLCs, buuuuut Sunless Sea just dropped today in early access (huzzah!!) so I'll be doing that for at least the immediate future. Still, the high bar set by Old World Blues makes me very optimistic for the remaining content, and I'm fairly certain I'll dive back into it sooner or later.

Buried Alive

And so, the BioShock journey comes to an end. Back when Burial at Sea was first announced, we all thought it would extend the story of BioShock Infinite, and perhaps provide a bridge to whatever game would be the next main entry in the franchise. Since then, of course, we've learned the shocking news that Irrational Games is shutting down (despite having released one of the most critically-admired games of last year, which appears to have also sold quite well), and this, the second part of the DLC, will be our last-ever journey through BioShock.

Fortunately, it's a very fine end. Like its predecessor, it combines some of the most memorable aspects of the worlds of Rapture and Columbia. It continues the impressive job of merging together their unique gameplay mechanics (sky-hooks in Rapture! Drinkable plasmids!), and actually manages to innovate somewhat in its play style, addressing what I've long considered one of the weak points of the franchise. As I've previously complained, I've often felt like the games have a half-baked implementation of a stealth system, with just enough enemy alertness and patrols to make me want to attempt a more pacifist approach, but not designed well enough to actually make it a viable strategy. Well, they've explicitly made a non-lethal playthrough possible this time, and even associated it with a new difficulty level: 1998 Mode. Somewhat similar to 1999 Mode, a "hardcore" mode with limited ammo and resources, 1998 Mode restricts you to only using stealth-based approaches: you can sneak around enemies, knock them out silently from behind, Possess them to join your side, put them to sleep from a distance with tranquilizer darts, or distract them with loud noises. The intro provides a good overview of the stealth mechanics, which, in addition to the typical field-of-vision sight avoidance now also incorporates an aural component. Moving faster makes your footsteps louder and more likely to draw enemies; stepping on broken glass or water will alert them to your presence, while wood or stone surfaces are quieter, and carpet is so quiet that you can safely run across it. Enemies have different alertness levels, which you can monitor from a discreet distance when deciding a course of action.

I'm not totally sure of the etymology behind 1998 Mode, but I strongly suspect that it's an homage to Thief: The Dark Project. This seminal game was released in 1998 by Looking Glass Studios, which was a forerunner to Irrational Games (Looking Glass also created System Shock, of which BioShock was the spiritual heir). Thief was a revolutionary game for its time, and arguably is still the only great stealth-based first-person franchise ever created. Thief had even more great mechanics, like great use of three-dimensional space (crossing a rope line suspended high above guards), manipulation of light (shooting out torches with water arrows!), and moving around unconscious bodies so they wouldn't be discovered by other patrolling guards. Thief is in the news again lately due to a lackluster reboot of the franchise. The timing is probably coincidental, but will probably make Burial at Sea look better in comparison.

The difficulty for 1998 was nicely challenging. There's one particular area, which I visited at two different points in the story, that was extremely difficult and took well over a dozen tries to complete; other than that, though, most of the game could be completed with a combination of patience, observation, and management of resources. (One random tip: at one point, it looked like I had lost the ability to pick up additional tranquilizer ammo. It turned out that my ammo was full, but since the crossbow holds two ammo types, I was seeing the other ammo type on display. On PC, you can press and hold "E" to bring up the weapon wheel, which lets you switch ammo types for the crossbow.)

One tangent/brag: you unlock a Steam achievement for beating the game in 1998 mode. I've become increasingly interested in achievements since their very clever use in Hate Plus, and after beating the game I looked at the statistics for Bioshock Infinite. I was a bit proud to see that I was one of the 0.1% of gamers who had unlocked this particular one. In comparison, a total of 2.2% had beaten this DLC at any difficulty. I was a little surprised that 1998 mode was so low, but even more surprised that overall victory was so high. This was on... Saturday afternoon, I think, which means that only four days had passed since the DLC was released. It's a bit astonishing to think that 1 out of every 50 gamers who had ever even started playing BioShock Infinite had downloaded this 6GB-or-so-large DLC, started it, and played to completion within a few days of its availability. Then again, I'm notorious for starting a game more than a decade after it is first released, so this quick adoption is probably more common than I realize.

But that also got me thinking about how valuable Steam could be for research and statistics into the patterns of game-playing. Sales data for digital distribution of games is notoriously difficult to get; neither publishers nor digital platforms like Steam tend to release sales figures, so the question of how well a particular PC title does is very opaque. (In contrast, since most console games are still sold through retailers on physical discs, sites like VGChartz usually have fairly-accurate numbers for sales on XBox, PlayStation and Nintendo consoles.) While overall numbers are mysterious, though, there's a lot you could learn from a game with a fair number of achievements. How many people play a game at all, enough to get an achievement from beating the very first level? How many play to completion? How popular is the DLC? Does latter DLC always decline in popularity, or is it primarily driven by reviews? In some games you might be able to figure out whether players gravitated towards "good" or "evil" playstyles, or favored a particular class type, or opted for non-lethal solutions. It would be really interesting to track this stuff across the industry as a whole, and also among individual franchises, to see whether certain types of players are drawn more to certain types of games.

Tangent over. Moving on:

Burial at Sea Part 2 is gorgeous. In particular, the opening scene might be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in any video game; this is taking the crown from the previous record-holder, the original BioShock Infinite. Scene design is incredible, the animations are gloriously sweet, the hue is super-saturated, and it's all tied together with the loveliest sound design this side of a 1990s Disney musical. The BioShock games, like System Shock before them, have long been renowned for their fantastic sound design, which just might be the best in the industry. Typically, their immense skill is directed towards making the creepiest, most unsettling moods imaginable, so it's wonderful to see that, when they really want to, they can be just as talented at invoking moods of euphoria and bliss.

MINI SPOILERS

In small doses, that is. Like every other entry in BioShock Infinite, this game starts with a beautiful worlds to explore, then rapidly shifts into an extended fight for your very survival. For me, the shift was easier to stomach this time, in large part due to the non-lethal tools at my disposal. The big difference, though, might have been the shift in character. In the expansion, you play as Elizabeth, the young girl who was Booker's sidekick in the previous two entries.

This is a fun shift. It reminded me in a few ways of some of my favorite parts in The Last of Us when you play as Ellie, who is Elizabeth to Joel's Booker. It's not quite as drastic a shift in playstyle - Ellie had fundamentally different characteristics and abilities, while Elizabeth still relies on many of the same weapons and plasmids as Booker - but there are still some neat additions, notably being able to crawl into ventilation shafts, just like Elizabeth was able to do in the earlier entries. Playing as a girl is interesting; the biggest impact I noticed was that I tended to cringe a lot more when coming under fire, and I was quicker to reload a checkpoint once it became clear that things would end poorly, unlike my earlier Booker games when I would usually play through to the end regardless. I still feel a weird sense of responsibility for Elizabeth, just like I did when she was a companion, even though now I'm the one looking after her well-being, instead of Booker.

Like Burial at Sea Part 1, this game takes place in Rapture. In this entry, though, we learn much more about the link between Rapture and Columbia. This helps resolve some of the long-unexplained mysteries of both franchises, and also acts as a really nice kind of retcon to explain why gameplay was so similar between the two entries. For example, we learn that Dr. Suchong and Jeremiah Fink were able to establish a connection through a Lutece Device, and so were able to collaborate on the development of vigors and plasmids. The Adam from Rapture was delivered to Columbia to create Vigors. There's even some neat minor stuff you can come across in notes and audio logs about the difference between injectables and drinkables: Fink is more consumer-oriented, and knows that it will be easier to sell a drinkable than a needle, even though it will take 50 times as much Adam to deliver the same results. Fontaine, though, is much more supply-driven, and aware of the benefits in hoarding Adam, and demands manufacturing injectables alone, stating that he'll take care of selling them to the public.

Okay... a lot went down at the end of Part 1, and more big revelations come in Part 2. Here we go!

MEGA SPOILERS

The big shock at the end of Part 1 was Elizabeth killing Booker. At the time, I'd thought that this was an alternate-universe Elizabeth, acting in vengeance for the death of her sister / alternate-self. In Part 2, though, I'm more inclined to think that it was the "original" Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite. The missing-pinky thing seems to be a somewhat-unique identifier for her, and she has memories of Songbird and other elements that probably aren't all that widely distributed amongst all alternate Elizabeths.

In her internal monologue, it was fascinating to note that she refers to killing "Comstock" and not killing "Booker." To me, these are still two separate entities: sure, if you go far back enough in time they came from the same person, but having "lived" as Booker and "killed" Comstock, I mentally categorize them as distinct persons. It was eye-opening to realize that Elizabeth doesn't see such a distinction: Comstock is Comstock, whether or not he was baptized at Wounded Knee. It does raise a lot of questions about guilty and culpability. Again, having played as Booker previously, I'm automatically sympathetic for him: he made a terrible mistake, but was haunted by it, and wanted to do what he could to make it right by saving others like his daughter. But, from Elizabeth's perspective, he's a monster who murdered a little child (from both directions!) and should be punished for it.

Or should he? Much of Part 2 is cloaked in deliberate confusion. Elizabeth has lost much of her memories; she had previously "seen through all the doors" and knew what lay in store in all alternate universes, but now she has collapsed into a single quantum; she knows that in the past she saw all outcomes, and started along this path, but now that she is set on it she does not know where it will lead. An early, unsettling moment has you confronting your own corpse, and the accompanying dizziness reveals that you have crossed over into a universe not your own.

To be explicit: Burial at Sea Part 2 is the missing link that shows how and why the BioShock games are connected. In addition to minor things like the development of vigors/plasmids, this game shows how Atlas returned in triumph to Rapture and started the war that would destroy it. It doesn't just show it: you, yourself, do it. That felt super-weird, knowing that every action I took was creating the nightmare that I played through several years ago.

There's an optional side-quest in the game that lets you discover fairly early on that Frank Fontaine and Atlas are the same person. Like a lot of plot elements in Part 2, this leads to a hyper-awareness that can feel disorienting. You know that you're going to be betrayed, but need to proceed regardless.  These thoughts are often worked out in a strange external monlogue between yourself and "Booker" - which, as he helpfully points out, isn't really Booker at all, but merely a hallucination you've created to have someone to talk with. "Booker" reassures you, but as he points out, he can't tell you anything that you don't already know. (In one example of narrative inconsistency, it's established early on that you're talking to nothing on your radio, and Atlas jumps on the line, somewhat irritated, asking why you're speaking to yourself. Later, though, you openly discuss Atlas's identity and plans with "Booker," when presumably Atlas can hear every word you say.)

The ultimate resolution is... touching, and very bittersweet, but also confused me a bit. As far as I can tell, omniscient-Elizabeth had looked through all universes, and found a single version of Booker that could be saved. I think she implies that this is Jack, the protagonist of the original BioShock game, but I haven't been able to work out how that makes sense. Jack was Andrew Ryan's son, and the original BioShock took place in 1960. I don't see any way that this could be the same man who fought in the Battle of Wounded Knee... I suppose that some inter-dimensional trickery might be able to explain it, but a major plot point of the first game was how Jack was Ryan's illegitimate child, so without the genetic match the mechanics of the first game don't make much sense. Anyways... it's very possible that there was some explanation in the DLC that I was too dense to see, or that I misunderstood what Elizabeth was trying to do. Which, the more I think of it, just seems deeply strange. She seems happy to be deliberately orchestrating the events that will give Fontaine the activation phrase "Would You Kindly", and dooming the entire city of Rapture to destruction, and for what? To bring Jack down below the sea, so he can have a chance to die? Hm, unless... I suppose it makes more sense if her ultimate goal was to rescue the Little Sisters. If that's the case, then the destruction of Rapture wouldn't have intrinsically been a bad thing; at the very worst, it would ensure that no future little sisters were created, and at best, the existing ones could be rescued as well. Though, with her pre-existing ability to open tears, it seems like there must have been a much better way to accomplish that goal without an extremely roundabout mission. Then again, the whole thing is absolutely a retcon, so I'm probably making a mistake to question it at all.

Anyways!

While I don't claim to understand exactly how Booker fits into all this, it didn't make the ending any less touching. Scenes of sacrifice are always powerful, and fairly rare in video games, and literally every single game in BioShock Infinite has ended with the protagonist getting killed. Each death serves a purpose, though, and while Elizabeth's death is the saddest and least shocking, it's also the most uplifting. Elizabeth kills Booker in the earlier games, but here she has deliberately designed and played out her own downfall, in the service of a greater good. That's pretty heavy stuff, and an appropriately melancholic note on which to end a franchise built on the themes of corruption and decay.

END SPOILERS

So! I'd mentioned earlier that you might want to wait until both parts are out to try Burial at Sea; now that they're here, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. Assuming you already enjoyed Infinite, you'll find more to enjoy - terrific environments, fantastic voice-acting, and improved combat. People who have played through from the very first BioShock will get the most out of this, as it is a fitting tribute and capstone to the entire series. (For the curious, I went ahead and made another album for this one, though I haven't captioned anything yet. That may come in the future.)

Like a lot of people mourning the passing of Irrational, I'm very curious to see what the future brings. Ken Levine, the main creative force behind Irrational, announced its closure and also that he wants to transition to telling smaller-scale, more narratively driven games. That does sound pretty awesome, since I'm all about narrative in games. It is a bit sad, though, to think that we might have seen the end of one of the best visual design teams ever assembled. Don't get me wrong, the storytelling in the BioShock games is very good and much more memorable than most games out there. However, I think the one particular area in which they most excelled was creating distinct, creative, imaginative, wholly original settings. There's nothing like Rapture or Columbia, and if Irrational hadn't created them, I don't think anyone else would have. It's all the rage now to talk about how AAA titles are too derivative and cautious, churning out cookie-cutter sequels that improve graphics while sticking with stale modes of gameplay; the same line of arguing goes that the independent creators are doing all the innovating these days. There's some truth to that argument, but I think that the BioShock games have been some of the best examples to date of what AAA games are capable of doing that indie games are not. A small free or $5 game can have a really compelling story, as good or better than a $60 AAA title; but the $60 AAA title has the resources to construct a lush, vibrant, fully-realized, visually compelling realistic world. Too many franchises these days blow that budget on making the next hyper-realistic simulation of a war-torn WWII battlefield, or a sleek dystopic future, or a modern American city. BioShock broke the mold, inspiring players with its wholly original visions of worlds we hadn't even imagined before. I'm optimistic that Ken Levine will continue to create great games, but I'm pessimistic that the game industry will find a replacement for their breathtaking visual originality. If a franchise this popular and this well-liked couldn't survive, then who can?