It's been a few years since the last time I plugged a Kickstarter campaign on this blog. And... it may not happen again.
One of the more surprising and encouraging trends of the last couple of years has been a resurgence in labor organizing in media companies. Numerous newsrooms have unionized, and those labor protections have proven to be the best (perhaps only?) defense against the pillage-and-burn corporate raiders who have decimated local new sources across the country. Billionaires will buy newspapers, sell off their assets, load them up with debt, lay off experienced senior reporters, back-fill their jobs with temps and freelancers, and eventually declare bankruptcy after they have extracted all value from these once-prestigious organizations. For all this country's problems, we do still have some good labor laws on the books, and having a unionized newsroom halts that process in its tracks, as new owners cannot capriciously fire their employees, making those media companies less enticing acquisitions in the first place and limiting the damage they can do even if purchased. A century ago we relied on the benevolence of plutocrats to fund "independent" news as a matter of prestige and influence; these days, a mistaken belief that all institutions must be solely oriented towards maximizing profits will degrade and destroy news, and it's up to the workers at the bottom rather than the owners at the top to stop that slide.
What I actually want to write about, though, is video games! There's been an increasing drumbeat for organizing within these companies too. Such a move is long overdue: major AAA publishers are notorious sweatshops, and we've been reading horror stories for decades about how employees at companies like Electronic Arts are expected to work hundred-hour weeks while being paid for forty, enduring crippling psychological stress and damage to their physical health and family relationships. The underlying problem of broadly classifying white-collar workers in an "exempt" category initially intended for managers is not unique to the video game industry, but that industry is particularly egregious in abusing the system and its employees. This does seem like a textbook example of necessary industrial organizing, as the market cannot solve it on its own: there's a surplus of people who want to work in the industry, leaving little financial incentive for companies to treat their workers right. None of these pushes for unionizing have actually been successful yet, but more and more attention is being paid to them at developer conferences, in politics, in the media and on social platforms, and I'm optimistic that some changes may happen in the coming years.
The latest labor story in the games world isn't about a game developer, though: it's about Kickstarter, which has played a vital role in indie-game and small-studio development over the past decade. A month ago Kickstarter fired employees who had organized a (not-yet-recognized) union in a pretty blatant act of retaliation. Like a lot of stuff in the news lately, the story started out bad, and became drastically worse when management doubled down on it, speaking out harshly on the firings and attempting to intimidate their remaining staff.
The world today is a lot more fraught than it was in 2016, but one silver lining is that folks are more politically aware and engaged these days. I can imagine a story like this just being ignored and fading away years ago, but in today's more activism-oriented environment, it has swiftly caught fire. There were widespread calls to boycott Kickstarter; interestingly, the union specifically requested people to not boycott, as they still hope to come to terms with management and keep Kickstarter healthy and more ethical in the future.
I know that I personally am finding it difficult to make pledges on Kickstarter when I know the company will take a cut of my pledge, and those profits will ultimately reward union-busters. But, the world is complicated! Those pledge cuts also fund the salaries of the brave workers who are still fighting for their union. Unlike some other organizations out there, I definitely don't want to see Kickstarter destroyed, I want to see them redeemed.
Creators are in an even trickier position. Kickstarter is by far the most popular go-to funding site; but everything is political, and by launching a new project on Kickstarter today, creators are making a statement that they're OK with the anti-labor practices there.
Fortunately, there are other choices out there! We've seen a variety of alternative crowd-funding platforms spring up in recent years, as well as alternative funding models, and some mid-sized organizations with established fanbases have started doing their crowd-funding in-house.
This is all stuff that I've been following with interest over the last month or so, but I'm specifically thinking of it now because of a very recent announcement. David Gaider is one of my all-time favorite people in the video game industry, right up there with Sid Meier, Warren Spector and Richard Garriott. He's written extensively for many of my all-time favorite games, including Baldur's Gate 2 and the Dragon Age franchise; and like my other heroes, he's also written and spoken extensively about his experiences creating games and his evolving philosophy about making them.
Anyways, he's jumped around a little in recent years: he left the Dragon Age team to become the lead writer on Anthem in its earliest stages, then left BioWare altogether to work on a yet-to-be-announced project at Beamdog (who have most famously created the Enhanced Editions of the classic BioWare Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter games). He's been working in Australia recently, and at PAX Australia he announced the first game from the new studio he founded.
Yep, that's right: a video-game musical! Chorus is checking every single one of my boxes: narrative focus, characters bursting into song at dramatic moments, and, yes, references to romance.
From following Gaider and Summerfall's Twitter in recent weeks, I'd overheard (over-read?) their angst about funding: they had been planning to run the campaign on Kickstarter, but felt they couldn't morally support it at this time, which I appreciate the heck out of. That wasn't an easy decision to make! They already had marketing plans all lined up, with specific dates in mind to make the announcement for maximum impact, and it must have been really stressful to scramble and find an alternative. Again, fortunately, there are alternatives out there, and Fig looks like a great fit. Unlike many other crowdfunding sites, this one was specifically designed for games, and was founded by veterans of the first wave of Kickstarted games like Double Fine and inXile.
That rising consciousness about ethical behavior in gaming has really exploded in the last week thanks to the catastrophic events at Blizzard's Hearthstone tournament. For those who haven't already heard: Wai Chung Ng (aka "blitzchung") is a professional Hearthstone player from Hong Kong who reached Grandmaster rank and won thousands of dollars at the recent championships tournament. In a post-game interview, he concluded by donning a gas mask (worn by protesters in Hong Kong) and saying "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our time!". Blizzard, who created Hearthstone and runs the official tournaments, immediately banned him, fired the people interviewing him, took back all of his prize money, and put out a statement excoriating him.
Well. People, uh, noticed!
There was an immediate outcry, which has only intensified as the week went on. Players throughout the gaming community have blasted Blizzard's actions and called for widespread boycotts of their games. In recent days, more and more professionals are voluntarily cutting off their ties with Blizzard in protest of the action. The incident has spread significantly beyond the community, though, probably because it occurred during a time when people were already paying attention to American companies censoring speech to appease the mainland Chinese government. In the week before the blitzchung incident, the NBA came under fire after it punished the general manager of the Houston Rockets for speaking in support of the Hong Kong protesters; the NBA reversed course, and those basketball games are now banned in China. A recent South Park episode similarly drew the ire of China, resulting in all mentions of the show being banned within the country.
All of this attention has led to a curiously bipartisan alignment pitting corporations against the American public and citizenry. Both the liberal Democratic Oregon senator Ron Wyden and the conservative Republican Florida senator Marco Rubio publicly criticized Blizzard's actions, rightfully asking why an American company is kowtowing to an autocratic regime and censoring the free speech of its customers. I'm shocked to be in agreement with Marco Rubio!
The most baffling thing to me has been Blizzard's silence on the matter. At first I assumed that they were scrambling to come up with a response to defuse the situation without angering China. I now think that they're waiting for it to blow over, but that seems like a mistake. Players are following through with their threats to cancel subscriptions to World of Warcraft, to uninstall Hearthstone, to fully delete their Blizzard and battle.net accounts. Other innovative strategies have emerged, such as EU customers to issue GDPR requests en masse.
I have a ton of respect for everyone who is taking these actions. It's incredibly hard to delete an account that represents many years and thousands of hours of investment in building a character, and in many cases turning away from the friends you've made on that service. Many Hearthstone players have spent hundreds of dollars or more in creating decks that will now be lost forever. There's a real sacrifice of money and time that players are making to express their protest, and I think that's every bit as impactful as an earlier generation's boycotts of businesses or marches in the street. I've been very heartened to learn that friends of mine have followed through on these promises, voting with their wallets in support of human rights. And I'm also extremely encouraged to see that current Blizzard employees are internally airing their own dissent, with organized walk-outs and direct action to express their dismay at their employer's cowardice and greed.
As for me, I find myself in the same position I so often find myself when, say, the New York Times does something idiotic: "I wish I had a subscription to cancel!" Blizzard is a bit of an oddity for me as it as a company that I have profoundly respected while never really buying any of their games. I've admired their "we'll ship it when it's ready" ethos, the opposite of Electronic Arts and other finance-driven companies that idolize release frequency over quality, their internal high bar for quality that leads them to outright cancel games that don't meet standards rather than release disappointments, and their social awareness and community responsiveness that led to Overwatch being a spectacularly diverse and inclusive game. But, my sole experience with playing Blizzard games consisted of the Shareware demo for Warcraft II, a couple of weeks playing a dwarven rogue in the original release of World of Warcraft (after being gifted the game by a coworker), and a few weeks and no money playing the initial release of Hearthstone. So, yeah, I've paid Blizzard a total of $0 over the 20 years I've played their games. I wish now that I had invested more in them back when they were a good company!
It'll be interesting to see where they go from here. It's very likely that Blizzard is just calculating that the 1+ billion potential customers in mainland China far outweigh their fanbase in the rest of the world, and they're willing to accept even widespread desertion to retain access to that market. But, they can't continue making games if their employees refuse to do it. Once again, workers ultimately have power over the means of production, and those internal debates we can't hear may be what ultimately determines what morals the company chooses to hold.
Edit: Heh, this post got results! This is why I shouldn't try and be topical on this blog, the news just moves Too Darn Fast these days. I'm still processing the latest update; apparently Blizzard has returned the seized prize money, and reduced the ban from one year to six months. My immediate reaction is to wonder why they couldn't have done this back on Tuesday. It's definitely encouraging to see that a people-driven protest movement can affect change in a multinational corporation. I also think there's still a ways to go.
Friday, October 11, 2019
Tuesday, October 08, 2019
Ayo!
I talk about my "gaming queue", but the reality is that it's often more like a stack. I'll start playing a game, then be interrupted when a must-play new release comes out. I'll play that for a while, then suddenly get the urge to play a short and fun game. I'll wrap up the fun game, then finish that new release, and finally continue with the original game... at least until the next one comes along. It's even more common with books, but happens plenty with games.
My current game might have had the longest interruption period relative to the duration of the game. My total play time of The Next BIG Thing clocked in at 10 hours, according to Steam; a not-inconsiderate chunk of that time was spent being flummoxed by unintuitive puzzles. I played about 7 of those hours in late June, took a break for a few months while playing 150 hours of Divinity Original Sin 2, then played the final 3 hours in a single night in September.
It was fun! It reminds me strongly of the classic LucasArts point-and-click adventure games. There are lots of puzzles, mostly organized around inventory items (acquiring, using, and occasionally combining). This is a very zany world with lots of silly characters, funny dialogue, extremely creative visuals. The overall experience is light and fun, though with a few frustrating puzzles. There's one particular music-based puzzle that's one of the least enjoyable things I've ever encountered in an adventure game, and I've put up with a LOT of BS puzzles over my decades in the genre.
I haven't played anything from this studio before, but the game received solid reviews, and the few details I immediately gleaned sounded very promising: a politically-themed comedy with a spunky female protagonist and lots of puzzles to solve!
MINI SPOILERS
The setting ended up being a bit different than I had expected. Based mostly on the cover art, I had thought it was focused on politics, but that's actually a very minor aspect of the game: it's set in an imaginary version of Hollywood where monsters are real, and are very popular actors. There are journalistic and political threads that come out of this, but the core storylines are very much based around the Hollywood studio system.
The developers are from Spain, and it does feel like you're seeing a European conception of America, which isn't necessarily wrong but has some odd emphases. It's a more-or-less-loving tribute to the Howard Hawks era, with a hefty dose of Citizen Kane sprinkled in.
And, y'know, random stuff too. This felt very much like a game where people had a bunch of different ideas and decided to cram them all into a single story. So there's a lengthy sideplot where you're infiltrating a replica Egyptian pyramid for dubious reasons. But there's also a wonderful stretch where you're exploring your own mind and dreamscape, which I absolutely loved: I'll gladly gobble up any game where my character can plumb the depths of their subconscious.
MEGA SPOILERS
There is one major thing that gives pause to my generally positive impression of the game. It's really weird and offputting that one of the two playable protagonists sexually harassed the other in the immediate backstory. This is purely played for laughs and never treated seriously. It's even grosser that the incident ends up being whitewashed as OK because the protagonists end up together. I know that things have moved quickly in recent years, but this was a dicey storyline in 2011, and is almost unimaginable in 2019. I think I get what they were going for - a bantering screwball romantic comedy - but ugh!
To be fair, though, something may have been lost (or gained!) in translation from the original script. Not to excuse the content or dismiss the effect it may have on people, but given the generally positive and fun tone of the rest of the game, I'd like to think this was an oversight of some sort.
The main plot was pretty fun and twisty without ever getting overly complex. Partly because of that aforementioned history of harassment, I vastly preferred playing as Liz instead of Dan. I didn't expect William A. Fitzrandolph (a perfect parody of William Randolph Hearts) to become the villain, but it made sense and flowed well. I did feel like the game spread itself a bit too thinly across multiple characters; people like the Immaterial Man are introduced and don't really do much. But, again, all of these characters are unique and creative, and I think a big part of the motivation of the game was to stir all these wacky elements together, which also helps with the "whodunnit" feel of the first half of the game.
END SPOILERS
Playing this game reminded me that the adventure game genre never really died. Like a lot of people who grew up on the genre, I tend to think of the 90s as being the bright heyday of these games, then it dying and disappearing by the early 2000s, and only recently being revived on Kickstarter. But really it was only Sierra and LucasArts that went away, and both of them abandoned adventure gamers, not the other way around. Even before the retro indie wave started, the torch of classic point-and-click games has been carried by mid-sized European studios. I think those games are just as good as the classic ones; the big difference is that adventure games used to be the most expensive AAA games of their day, while today they command a fraction of the budgets of today's AAA games, but on their own they're just as long and involved and fun as the classic games. Which is exciting! My horizons are broader now than when I was a child, but it's a genre that remains close to my heart, and I need to remember that there are lots of people still making new games out there.
My current game might have had the longest interruption period relative to the duration of the game. My total play time of The Next BIG Thing clocked in at 10 hours, according to Steam; a not-inconsiderate chunk of that time was spent being flummoxed by unintuitive puzzles. I played about 7 of those hours in late June, took a break for a few months while playing 150 hours of Divinity Original Sin 2, then played the final 3 hours in a single night in September.
It was fun! It reminds me strongly of the classic LucasArts point-and-click adventure games. There are lots of puzzles, mostly organized around inventory items (acquiring, using, and occasionally combining). This is a very zany world with lots of silly characters, funny dialogue, extremely creative visuals. The overall experience is light and fun, though with a few frustrating puzzles. There's one particular music-based puzzle that's one of the least enjoyable things I've ever encountered in an adventure game, and I've put up with a LOT of BS puzzles over my decades in the genre.
I haven't played anything from this studio before, but the game received solid reviews, and the few details I immediately gleaned sounded very promising: a politically-themed comedy with a spunky female protagonist and lots of puzzles to solve!
MINI SPOILERS
The setting ended up being a bit different than I had expected. Based mostly on the cover art, I had thought it was focused on politics, but that's actually a very minor aspect of the game: it's set in an imaginary version of Hollywood where monsters are real, and are very popular actors. There are journalistic and political threads that come out of this, but the core storylines are very much based around the Hollywood studio system.
The developers are from Spain, and it does feel like you're seeing a European conception of America, which isn't necessarily wrong but has some odd emphases. It's a more-or-less-loving tribute to the Howard Hawks era, with a hefty dose of Citizen Kane sprinkled in.
And, y'know, random stuff too. This felt very much like a game where people had a bunch of different ideas and decided to cram them all into a single story. So there's a lengthy sideplot where you're infiltrating a replica Egyptian pyramid for dubious reasons. But there's also a wonderful stretch where you're exploring your own mind and dreamscape, which I absolutely loved: I'll gladly gobble up any game where my character can plumb the depths of their subconscious.
MEGA SPOILERS
There is one major thing that gives pause to my generally positive impression of the game. It's really weird and offputting that one of the two playable protagonists sexually harassed the other in the immediate backstory. This is purely played for laughs and never treated seriously. It's even grosser that the incident ends up being whitewashed as OK because the protagonists end up together. I know that things have moved quickly in recent years, but this was a dicey storyline in 2011, and is almost unimaginable in 2019. I think I get what they were going for - a bantering screwball romantic comedy - but ugh!
To be fair, though, something may have been lost (or gained!) in translation from the original script. Not to excuse the content or dismiss the effect it may have on people, but given the generally positive and fun tone of the rest of the game, I'd like to think this was an oversight of some sort.
The main plot was pretty fun and twisty without ever getting overly complex. Partly because of that aforementioned history of harassment, I vastly preferred playing as Liz instead of Dan. I didn't expect William A. Fitzrandolph (a perfect parody of William Randolph Hearts) to become the villain, but it made sense and flowed well. I did feel like the game spread itself a bit too thinly across multiple characters; people like the Immaterial Man are introduced and don't really do much. But, again, all of these characters are unique and creative, and I think a big part of the motivation of the game was to stir all these wacky elements together, which also helps with the "whodunnit" feel of the first half of the game.
END SPOILERS
Playing this game reminded me that the adventure game genre never really died. Like a lot of people who grew up on the genre, I tend to think of the 90s as being the bright heyday of these games, then it dying and disappearing by the early 2000s, and only recently being revived on Kickstarter. But really it was only Sierra and LucasArts that went away, and both of them abandoned adventure gamers, not the other way around. Even before the retro indie wave started, the torch of classic point-and-click games has been carried by mid-sized European studios. I think those games are just as good as the classic ones; the big difference is that adventure games used to be the most expensive AAA games of their day, while today they command a fraction of the budgets of today's AAA games, but on their own they're just as long and involved and fun as the classic games. Which is exciting! My horizons are broader now than when I was a child, but it's a genre that remains close to my heart, and I need to remember that there are lots of people still making new games out there.
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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!
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!
Wednesday, September 04, 2019
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.
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.
Thursday, August 29, 2019
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)