the cesspool of fantasy art

So, I was less productive than I hoped. Who saw that coming? Yes. Well. It was my holiday, dammit.

I let myself get thoroughly distracted by the joyous superficiality of Kingdoms of Amalur. Given the repeated disappointments of Bioware’s latest offerings, it was oddly liberating to just be able to run around whacking shit heedlessly with an enormous two-hander. It’s just good, old fashioned, healthy fun, y’know. Fuck story. Fuck consequences. GIVE ME A BIG SWORD AND SOME TROLLS TO SMOOSH.

Although actually the story isn’t all that sucky. I mean, it’s not high literature but then it’s a video game, I neither want nor expect high literature. It’s moderately entertaining, not dreadfully written and has faeries in it. And there was one questline called The House of Ballads which was actively pretty awesome, I shall admit grudgingly. So, the basic idea is that the fae are changeless and alien, blah blah blah, and they re-tell their myths literally – which is what The House of Ballads does.

But that was an unexpected cherry on an already delightful cake (I need to somehow drag my metaphors out of the kitchen). Basically I’m in it for the killing, which is unabashed, unashamedly, straight-forwardly fun. Yes fun. There should be more of that in games, I feel.

Amalur takes a lot of its design principles from MMOs which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – being able to respec, for example, why isn’t that in RPGs just as standard? I’ve been tweaking my build as I go, which has really deepened the experience and despite the fact I’m sure I’m playing in what can only be called a non-optimal way, the game hasn’t particularly punished me for it. I call my build ‘bad motherfucker’ and is based upon the single, simple notion that blocking is for pussies. I don’t even own a shield, although Amalur would actually let use it even with my ziehander. And I get the biggest sword I can find and I hit things until they die. Basically, I have a lot of abilities that make me even more of a bad motherfucker when I kill things, or take damage, so actually it’s working out pretty well.

Unfortunately I think long sessions sitting around watching cutscenes and thinking deeply about personal morality have depleted my gaming stamina because I think I pulled a muscle while having fun. My right arm is really sore today. It’s like a wanking injury, but more embarrassing. Hum.

But, even so, I still did a fair bit, mainly administrative, polishing old stuff and fixing shit. As previously documented, I made meringues which was fucking awful but not nearly as fucking awful as it could have been, and I pushed a certain long-suffering person through a full a play through of the content as it currently stands. And we only encountered, like, two gamebreaking bugs! Whoop! And he didn’t think it sucked, or was stupid (except in the places when it’s self-evidently and supposed to be stupid) so that was encouraging.

Not a complete waste of my time in every conceivable way then!

I’ve also discovered the best thing in the world. No really. The best thing in the world. I mean it.

It’s Tchos’ HD UI panels and dialogue compilation & expansion. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to mod the quite frankly horrendous UI before now. I mean, I don’t need it to be shiny, but this little piece of genius simply makes playing the game on a modern, high resolution, widescreen monitor bearable. It enlarges all the panels, and all the fonts, and gets rid of all the squinting, scrolling and generally being mildly annoyed I was doing before.

I am so very very happy. So very very happy.

It’s still a bit rough round the edges, but frankly it makes such a difference that it barely matters.

The downside is that I realised I wanted to optimise my mod (on the assumption it ever gets finished) for use with it, which in practice boils down to portraits. Fucking portraits. The bane of my life. I can almost see why they went for those massively uninspiring 3D renders of your character, since it makes everything lot more straightforward, but they’re so soul-crushingly insipid I long since resolved to use custom portraits instead. I think I’m probably insanely fussy and I’d like some sense of artistic consistency between the characters so finding something suitable has been a nightmare. Thankfully I have only have a scant handful of recruitable companions.

I know fantasy art is kind of the lowest of the low but I had honestly had no idea how low that could be. Take, for example, boobs. I have nothing against boobs. I love boobs. I honour boobs. But I don’t think they should be hanging out on a day to day basis. Adventuring is heavy work. And dangerous. I’m probably just coming across as a total prude now, and I’m sure there are some women who would choose and feel empowered by boobalicious armour (or lack of it), but this is my game, my world, and it breaks my suspension of disbelief. I want my female characters (ahem, female character, I only have one…*fails diversity training*) to look awesome, not … sexy. Or rather, I’m happy for her to be sexy, and I hope she is, but I don’t want her to be a unreasonable proportioned sexual object. For that matter, I don’t want her just … looking limp and blank, which seems to be default state for most depictions of women. The advantage of the smaller portraits was generous cropping which led to very focused images, so you couldn’t really tell what was going on. But the new larger portrait size is merciless for revealing female warriors who apparently have no idea how to wield a sword, even assuming they had physical strength to pick it up in the first place.

Dudes are quite bad also – but in a different sort of way. If portraits are to be believed the two acceptable personalities for men are: old and barbarian. Yep. It’s either hoary wisdom or extreme machismo, ball (of the crystal variety) gazing and staff (of the wooden variety) clutching versus scars and flexing. So depressing. Although, actually, if you look hard enough there is a seedy underbelly of bishi elfboys looking emo.

I had to go and take a bath in Women Fighters in Sensible Armour.

Look, I know criticising fantasy art is, well, it’s not even shooting fish in a barrel. It’s like shooting already dead fish in a barrel. But this is the sort of thing I’ve had to endure:

Okay, first of all, she’s in swamp. It’s wet and cold, and there could be leeches. And she’s actually wearing a chainmail bikini. For reals. And she’s in a d&d campaign. She could be eaten by a dire crocodile or have to fight a yuan-ti at any moment. Also what in God’s name is she doing with that sword? She looks like she’s doing to cut her own head off. Backwards. Also, I don’t know how to say this politely, but what’s with the “I am a pro-anal sex” pose?

Or there’s this one:

I don’t even know where to start. Swords are serious business. They are not for wanking. Also how is that strap of nothing covering her nipple? How? Also she’s sitting on a rock in what looks like to be some kind of river of molten lava, why on earth – under those circumstances – does she have her legs open?
See, to me, these don’t say sexy, but mainly they don’t say character. I couldn’t imagine writing, or playing anyone, male or female, and thinking to myself: “y’know, I think to really sum up the essence of this person, I would like to show them practically naked with their legs open in the middle of a lava flow.” It’s dull, it’s pathetic, it just says wankbait. Wankbait for an idiot.

Offensive for different reasons was this little gem:

What’s wrong with this, you ask? Well, nothing, except the quality is a bit shite. But it’s a headshot, there are no random boobs or legs, or displays of inadequate swordsmanship. However. The title of the piece. “Evil woman.” Um? Ah, yes, a non-white person! She must be evil!

But, yeah, this has all been a bit grim. Let me finish with something that genuinely (albeit accidentally) made me laugh:

Not so much the picture though that does make me wince a little. I mean, wow, it is so very blue indeed. But the rather aspirational title is: “male elven druid with panther.”

PANTHER?! Dude, that’s blatantly a kitten. All say gaaaaaaaaw!

consistency is the last refuge of the uniminagative

Tags

lack of follow through

My activities at the moment:

Yes. I’m making meringue.

Metaphorical meringue.

I feel good about it.

make meringue

Tags

analogies, angst, whinging

There’s a new entry on my to-do list that is depressing the crap out of me.

The entry is “make chapter 1 not suck balls” + row of sad smileys.

Once upon a time, in my dim and distant past, I attempted to make Delia Smith’s Chocolate Hazelnut Meringue Roulade. You’d have thought I’d have recognised from the get go that this thing was way out of my cooking league. I mean there are FOUR SEPERATE ITEMS in the title alone. And I’m a low level cook, I need to make simple things, with only one or two words in the title. This like: scrambled eggs, steak, onion pie, chocolate cake. But, anyway, high on cooking hubris I decided to make this thing and, actually, it came out okay and the bit where you spread your roulade layers on greaseproof paper and roll ’em up is super fun but you’ll get how hardcore this recipe is when I tell you there’s a throwaway line in the middle of the instructions that reads simply “fold the ground hazelnuts into the meringue.” Do WHAT with the WHAT?

With cooking, as with erecting flatpacked furniture, there are two schools of thought. One school of thought suggests you should read the instructions carefully in advance so you know exactly what you’re doing at all times. And the other school of thought, um, doesn’t do any of that. You can probably guess which school I attend. So the whole “hey, make meringues right now bitch” aspect of the recipe came at me out of nowhere. I think recipe steps should be things like “add sugar to flour” or “dust steak with pepper.” Make meringues IS a recipe already.

And don’t get me wrong, meringues is pretty simple if you have fair warning, a food processor or an electric whisk.

What I had was a fork.

Forty minutes later I had made meringues and was prepared to fold in the hazelnuts.

But my spirit was totally broken.

And, unfortunately, “ make chapter 1 not suck balls” is the “make meringues” of this whole enterprise. The thing is, chapter 1 does what I want it to do, it’s straightforward and introductory, and it’s meant to be, but it’s also really clumsily executed. It’s riddled with bugs because I made a real hash of designing and scripting things with any sort of coherence and, maybe I’m just being a paranoid artiste (dons beret) but I think you can sort of feel that coming through the gameplay. The quest flow isn’t quite ‘right’ and everything is just a bit awkward and disjointed. It’s also really difficult to fix it because it’s all so embedded in, um, itself. You can’t unravel one mess without making about 600 other messes.

That’s the problem with long running projects. By the time you get to the end you hate the beginning.

For the moment, though, I’m just going to hide the problem in my to-do list and come back to it – hopefully.

If I ever get to the end.

huh

Tags

enthusiasm, hopeless self-justification, smug

Wow, well, I did that thing that all would-be module designers do: disappeared without a word for ages and ages and ages. And ages. But I aten’t dead, which is good.

Heh, did you see what I did there?

Okay, so this post is basically the same as my last post. Yes, I took a massive life break and now I’m back to modding again, and I’m sure that’ll be a cycle that continues indefinitely until I am actually dead. Any modules produced will be entirely matter of chance. To be honest, I’ve always accepted the fact that the chance of producing a module at the end of this process was basically negligible so I’m taking the ups and downs of wild enthusiasm, gruelling determined and reckless abandonment pretty much for granted. The internet is scattered with the fossils of discarded modding blogs, but that’s kind of okay. It’s all about the journey, maaaan, the journey.

Weirdly, picking up the pieces has been less painful this time round than last. I don’t know how or why, but I think some pieces clicked into place in my brain while I wasn’t thinking about any of this shit. Or else, I am now ignorant enough that I am no longer capable of comprehending the vastness of my ignorance. Regardless, it’s all feels slightly easier than I remember it being, although my compiler continues to spend most of its time in an unknown state. But that’s part of the fun, right?

I went back and played the damn thing from the beginning, which is actually the first time I’ve done so when I wasn’t also immersed in a particular aspect of the building. And, y’know, I wasn’t horrified. I was even tentatively pleased. Okay, I went through a brief phase of thinking I was awesome. The thing is, I have no objective standard for judging the thing, but it does what I wanted it to do, and there’s lots about it that I personally enjoy. I suppose the thing really surprised me was the lightness of the tone, which is slightly odd considering the uber-emo premise. But I guess without that lightness it would be bleak, and unbearable and tedious. So, yeah, I’m feeling pretty proud of myself, and not even like I wasted hours of my life.

I didn’t hit many game-breaking bugs either, though it’s riddled with minor issues, which is to be expected. But I fixed everything up and generally spring-cleaned. I mean, when I first started I just forced stuff to work without really having much clue what I was doing at all but I’ve learned and developed quite a bit and there going back to the beginning really showed me how much.

Halp

Wow, well, I did that thing that all would-be module designers do: disappeared without a word for ages and ages and ages. And ages. But I aten’t dead, which is good.
I basically pushed through some major life changes, and then went on holiday. New job, new flat, new you name it. It wasn’t entirely a pre-mid-life-crisis so much as a concatenation of circumstances.

I’m finally in a position when I can concentrate on something extra again, although I’m suffering from a major reduction in spare time, and I do quite fancy getting back into the module …

… except I’ve forgotten EVERYTHING.

Well, I can still remember the general outline, and I have copious notes, but there’s no obvious way back in. And unpacking my own code is an exercise in horror and mortification. I’m basically looking at everything I did previously, and thinking “what the fuck did you do that for?”

I think it was LP Hartley who said all famously that the past is another country. Well my past self was a freaking alien life-form. No idea what was going through my head.

The other slightly peculiar thing is that I’m, err, not quite feelin it any more. It’s a sad truth of life in general that “happy” is not a good state for acts of creativity. At least not for me. I’ve always produced my published output under severe duress and/or distress. And at the time of embarking wildly and clueless on the module, I not only had the time to commit but life was just a little bit shitty round the edges, and so it was a welcome distraction. And embarrassing though it is to admit, it’s difficult to write anything without, intentionally or otherwise, stuffing bits of yourself in there. I say this was all due irony, and acknowledgement that personal angst is nothing short of hilarious, but a few months ago I was, indeed, feeling voice-less, bestial and generally monstrous.

However, at the moment, I am feeling stable and at least moderately human. So I’m genuinely not sure how to go on from here.

fuck beetles

Needless to say, progress has been zilch because I am absolutely knackered by life in general. I have about three-to-five Important Life Changing Events TM going on simultaneously which is killing me dead. I think things will get better after July; meanwhile everything else is sliding into a black hole of guilt and shame. It does mean, however, that whatever hilariously inadequate windows of free-time I get I have just about sufficient brain power and energy to play some NWN2 modules.

The depressing side-effect of having played something you had a massive reaction to is that everything that follows feels a bit inadequate. I am kind of looking at most modules through a kind of sad “oh but you’re not Live Forever” filter, which is bad for everyone.

I played through The Wizard’s Apprentice which … hmm … I didn’t enjoy as much as I could have / should have, and I feel quite bad about that since it seems quite popular on the Vault. It’s a debut module so you have to be a less of a total dickwad than usual, because it isn’t fair to start slamming it all over the place. I generally like class or alignment specific modules because I think self-imposed restrictions can be extremely liberating. I very much enjoyed The Maimed God’s Saga, for example, because you really got to feel like a Cleric of Tyr. I think it also helps with roleplaying options, since there’s so much more nuance possible in “what kind of x do you want to be” than the alternative which ends up running a gamut of generic. So in TMGS, for example, you can be a fluffy flirty cleric or a stern, justice-focused cleric, or a wise-cracking cleric or some combination, and the point is you feel slightly more like a person. Whereas if you try to map out every conceivable response for every conceivable personality type what you end up with:

I am a complete sap
I am trying way too hard to be funny
I am an arbitrary maniac

Sorry to keep banging on about Live Forever but even though the conversations are relatively linear there are a nice array of responses, most of which are things you might genuinely want to say to someone. And even the complete psycho answers are interesting enough to be tempting. Anyway, I am going somewhere with this tangent which is: one of the things I found quite frustrating with The Wizard’s Apprentice is that I never really felt like a wizard’s apprentice. I mean, yeah, obviously I WAS a wizard’s apprentice, and we lived in a tower, and he was called The Master, and he had weird experiments in the basement but it all seemed pretty shallow to me. I don’t have anything concrete to say really but I felt like lots of the quests I ended up doing were pretty generic, rather than explicitly wizardly. And there are several occasions on which you have to behave like an absolute moron – like allowing a couple of kobold guards to escort you into the middle of their camp where, of course, you get attacked. And surrounded in melee by a bunch of kobolds is a TERRIBLE position for a wizard. Also, I shouldn’t whinge, but the combat seems quite unforgiving. I mean, I’m no tactician so I’m not the best person to judge but I was getting slaughtered out there. I had a badger to tank for me, and a bit of cc (sleep and cloud of bewilderment) but getting things dead was seriously gruelling.

And as for The Beetle Mound. Oh God no. That TORTURED me. Go in. Kill a beetle. Run out. Rest. Go in. Kill a beetle. Run out. Rest. Go in. Experience catastrophic spell failure. Get killed by beetle. Reload. Rinse. Repeat. Scream. I should probably have given up but by that stage it was personal. I was taking that Beetle Mound OUT.

The module is played for laughs – the humour is quite, although not always successfully, Pythonesque and that was entertaining but it also meant that characterization was similarly shallow. And there is a LOT of back and forthing, to the village, to the tower, to the village. Gah! I think an insta-teleport to the tower would have been very much appreciative. I mean, I’m a wizard’s apprentice not a courier.

To give its due, however, it ended rather successfully. The plot unfolds entirely as you would expect but there was a stand off involving me, the top of a tower, a wand of fireballs and a fuck tonne of orcs, which was very pleasing indeed. Not quite pleasing enough to compensate for what it had taken out of me to get there though.

the triple fried egg and chili chutney sandwich

Tags

live forever, wanking

No, this isn’t a recipe, it’s a random comedy reference.

I just finished playing through Live Forever, and oh my fucking God, it blew my tiny mind. I thought it was superb – actually, genuinely, superb. Not so very much of a game per se, being basically a series of set pieces, and enough dialogue to drown you. But, yeah, amazing stuff. Its main strengths are its storytelling, its characters and its dialogue – but it also has bucket loads of atmosphere, beautifully designed areas and some surprisingly challenging fights. I actually had a few (only mildly painful) WoW flashbacks when I was fighting some kind of Thaddius demon, and juggling electric charges between my party members. Thankfully, unlike your average raider, you can force your NPCs out of the bad shit yourself.

Despite this cavalcade of praise I am nevertheless somewhat ambivalent. Why is nothing ever simple – even pleasure. The thing is, I hate myself a little bit for liking this thing so goddamn much because, in many ways, it ought to have annoyed the fuck out of me. It’s pretentious, pseudo-philosophical, dependent on cheap narrative tricks, and so bloody metatexual it’s a wonder it hasn’t talked itself out of existence yet. Oh, yeah, and shot through with crazy Oasis references (I always preferred Blur). In short: it thinks its way cleverer than it actually is:

My God, is that a reference to the most famous line in Joyce’s most famous short story. Your erudition has slain me, sirrah.

In short: playing is akin to sitting next to a complete, but not entirely talentless, prick who takes a time out every ten minutes to shriek DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THARR in your ear:

But, damn it all to hell, it somehow works, and works beautifully. Even though it shouldn’t, which his why it’s a triple fried egg and chili chutney sandwich. I suppose the important thing is that I completely loved it. Loved it so much that I missed the latest episode of The Apprentice (another of my shameful weaknesses). Loved it so much that I actually want to play it again, even though I only just finished it. Loved it so much that it’s been tugging at my thoughts all day.

So, what’s it about? Well, that’s a good question. It consists of a variety of embedded narratives, all told by unreliable narrators (one of whom, incidentally, is you) – and it’s a story about stories, I suppose, which is to say it isn’t really about anything. There’s an ostensible plot about a gem that bestows immorality on the bearer but I think mainly what it’s saying is: “awwwhhhh.” Like Jesus:

Hmmm, this is turning into a random comedy reference post. Well. It’s a theme. Awwhhhhhh.

In terms of atmosphere, Live Forever is kind of like Beckett meets Pulp Fiction. You’ve got a bunch of lowlife scum having self-consciously philosophical discussions, punctuated by constant absurdities to remind them of their largely marginal place in the world they apparently inhabit. So, yeah Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Wankers.

In more concrete terms, here is why I loved this module:

It amused the hell out of me, basically, and showed just enough irony, just enough willingness to puncture its own gravitas, that I was able to bear the awwwwhhhhh. Also the characters were wonderful – Blood and Chief, especially. I loved them. Came perilously close to shedding a tear for them at the end.

As I say, it’s not without problems. Mileage may vary depending on your stomach for awwwwhhh and sometimes the writing, well, it tries to fly a bit too high and comes crashing down:

Uh…say what? A cocktail of literary cacophony? Swing and a miss there chief.

Similarly:

Heartless blood? Err. No. Just no.

I do feel a little churlish for mentioning these, because I think part of the reason the writing crashes and burns on occasion is connected to the fact most of the time it’s soaring. I mean, for your average NWN module I’m not in a position to point out that a couple of the high falutin phrases don’t work out, because I’m too busy weeping over the writer’s inability to place a comma. I’d rather the peaks and troughs of ambition than smooth sailing to mediocrity. See, I can torture a metaphor with the best of them.

And the other thing that really pisses me off about Live Forever is the fact the writer is a complete wanker. Now, normally I’d hesitate before calling someone a complete wanker on the Internet … or anywhere really … but firstly who’s going to care and secondly he seems to be going to plenty of trouble on his own behalf to get cosy in the wanker-zone. Specifically, he writes:

Your enjoyment will vary depending on how smart you are.

What? No! Oh no! You didn’t just say that, did you? Seriously, stop waving your dick around, you’ll have someone’s eye out. I don’t even know how to begin addressing this, but how about: “tolerance of a certain sort of undergraduate level self-referential pretension” is not the same as “smart.” And let’s leave it at that. Actually, the other thing that bewilders me is that pretty much every commenter (except VanillaGorilla, go you) seems to have taken this statement at face value. Now, I can understand people who loved the module going away, smugly satisified with this evaluation of their intelligence as bestowed by Some Dude On The Internet, but people who didn’t like the module seem entirely willing to accept that they only didn’t enjoy it because they were too dumb to get it.

One commenter, Andgalf, gives a fairly balanced perspective, concluding that he personally didn’t like it, because the dialogue is extensive and, to him, not that interesting, and the module appears to be about nothing – all of which is not only fair but absolutely correct. The author replies “I’m very pleased you took the time to play it through despite your lack of comprehension. I totally understand where the confusion comes from. I myself realized when I was writing this module that the point of it is difficult to grasp if you’re an idiot” reiterating the same bullshit he does on the vault submission, whereupon Andgalf rolls over amiably and takes it: “You’re truly a gifted artist! I really mean it! And it’s fully possible that I’m a little too dumb to understand your module. ”

My ghast is profundly flabbered.

And all this makes it slightly galling to me that I rate Live Forever as highly as I do. But we judge the work, not the creator. And I guess it’s just as well re,ally.

save our apostrophe’s*

Tags

apostrophe abuse, Fallen House Celofraie, kitty!, prophet

*Yes, I know it’s in the wrong place. I thought it would be funny.

Progress has temporarily stalled, as I have been quite busy being busy and also quite busy playing modules. As I keep saying, it’s very important to me to keep playing other people’s work, or you can get over-invested in your own project and forget that being a consumers is just as vital as being a creator.

I revisited Baldecaran’s work over the weekend, specifically the Prophet series. I remember enjoying The Cave of Songs and Honour Among Thieves so it goes without saying that it’s pretty bloody good. It’s very story-heavy with limited roleplaying opportunities beyond whether you want to make your prophet a bit rude to people on occasions, but that’s okay because it’s not the focus of the thing. I’m about halfway through the first chapter, and enjoying myself, although I’ve actually got a bit demoralized because I made my way to the very bottom of a mine (about three levels plus dark temple at the bottom) to complete a quest and now I have to hike all the way back again.

I don’t know if it’s just that modern games have made me lazy but I really do hate this sort of back and forthing. Nothing blunts the pleasure of exploring quite like the knowledge you’re going to have run the whole way back again once you’re done. I was talking to a friend about this earlier and he said that, for him, it really does shatter the suspension of disbelief if there’s an expedient way out you just happened to miss on the way in. It’s an interesting question, really, how much the suspension of disbelief is tangled up with frustration – there is little quite as realistic has being annoyed, after all. But still, I think my personal suspension of disbelief is elastic enough to encompass a little well-earned convenience.

I think it probably also depends on how you do it. I mean, yes, if there just so happens to be a backdoor leading directly from the main dungeon boss to the surface it feels a little bit TOO convenient, although if you were the main boss of a dungeon it would make sense that you wouldn’t always want to sit in an appropriately threatening room at the bottom of a mine. I mean, what if you needed the toilet or something? Regardless, I reckon you could introduce a bamf mechanic that felt reasonably plausible – I think my favourite is the handy NPC who is all like “Shall we go back, Player Character?” and you can be “Yes” or “I need to loot this joint first” but if you pick the first you get teleported to the entrance, but with the implication that you walked back with the NPC. So you get all the plausibility of a tedious backtrack without the frustration of having to do it yourself.

I also played Fallen House Celofraie, a Drow module. I wasn’t massively impressed with it, but I nevertheless played all the way to the end so I must have enjoyed it more than I was willing to admit at the time. It did have a relatively interesting story and the area design was suitably atmospheric. I supposed I also liked the fact you get to do underdarky things like battle Beholders and interact with hot Drow matrons in the mood (okay, not that). I do find the whole Drow thing absurd – I mean come on, a whole society of scantily clad, whip-wielding, promiscuous dominatrices. Is that not the most pathetic 14 year old male fantasy in the history of pathetic 14 year old male fantasies? It’s also, of course, horribly sexist but it’s also ridiculous enough to be funny. Perhaps. Anyway, I didn’t spend the majority of the module going “yes, Mistress” and the whole thing unfolded relatively maturely considering the setting. You’ve lost your memory (convenient!) at the start of play and discovering what the hell is going on, and who the hell you were, is what keeps things interesting so I won’t spoil it. There are a couple of fairly entertaining companions, as well – there’s a drow Bard who is really pretty embarrassed to be a bard and keeps insisting he’s mainly a warrior like everyone else, and a Duergar druid who made me chuckle (he can turn into an “epic badger”). Oh, and your “sister” who, on account of being a chick, has purple Final Fantasy bunches and no personality whatsoever. Blah.

The thing that really lets it down, however, is the writing. The conversation trees are pretty clunkily implemented and I guess I’d describe the style as “enthusiastic.” It’s not so much that the writing is terrible – it’s even moderately interesting on occasion – it’s just the awkward system and the poor grammar really let it down. Commas, for example, are generally accounted good but they are thin on the ground in the Underdark. And there is some serious apostrophe abuse going on in there. Someone should call the Royal Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Punctuation. I can’t decide how much I’ve overplayed the irritation factor of poor writing and poor grammar but I did feel like I wanted to playing with a red pen in my hand. And this isn’t just typo stuff – I’m the Prince of Typos, after all – it’s consistently bad.

Apostrophes were abused near this kitten

The wood and the trees

Tags

angst, baldurs gate, bioware, dilemmas, hopeless self-justification, the witcher, whinging

So The Witcher 2 happened to me in a big way. I’ve loved computer games – games in general, to be honest – since I was knee high to a slime, but as you get older it’s a passion that’s difficult to sustain. Not just because you’re a grown up who is meant to be into grown up things (and I am into some grown up things – I like Chopin, and I go to the theatre, and I read the occasional Booker prize winner and I drink pink champagne…okay, so I’m not very grown up at all) but also because I think your sense of wonder gets eroded with time. You get used to things. You learn about tropes. The edges of your imagination go a little soft. It takes more to engage you, plot developments that once might have blown your tiny mind seem blasé. I suppose in some ways it’s just increasing sophistication in your attitude to texts, and the world, and being able to get away with less in your daily life. After all, if I’m abstracted at school because I’d rather be playing Final Fantasy XII, that’s all very well but there’s really no room to do that in a job, not only because there’s the chance of disciplinary proceedings but also because people are depending on me. But I remember going through my day in a haze of bewildered delight after an evening playing Baldurs Gate. The world! The storytelling! The strangeness of it all. At university, I actually sacrificed a relationship to Morrowind and, at the time, it seemed a reasonable exchange.

But it’s been a while since I’ve felt that way. I know it’s complicated, and not wholly negative, coloured as it is by the rosy tint of nostalgia. But, damn, I think The Witcher 2 got me good. I twitch to play it when I should be doing other things. I find myself thinking about it at odd moments, mulling over the decisions I have made, the things I have seen and the people I have met. I wonder what is coming next. And I cannot begin to express how much I enjoy that. My expectations feel deliciously de-anchored. I sometimes think that there’s nothing Bioware could write that would surprise me – when I play their games, it’s like sleeping with your ex, comforting, pleasurable, but nothing you haven’t had before. Even flaws are deadened by familiarity. But The Witcher is full of mysteries, and from a deep slumber my sense of wonder shakes itself awake.

Anyway. Enough about the genius of others. Let’s talk about meeee! As I celebrated in my previous post, I have finished chapter 3. Or more accurately stumbled over the finish line. And now, continuing in the fine old tradition of depicting my emotional state via animals, I feel like this:

blah

Partially as a consequence of the above mental faceplant, the end of Chapter 3 has turned out to be a rallying and regrouping point. The main problem is that I realised, midway through Chapter 3, that my journal system wasn’t working for me. I kind of started this process in this sort of mood: “design document shmesign shmocument” and now I’m thinking “y’know, what would be really helpful around here would be a design document.” But the thing is, when I first started modding I didn’t know enough about what the hell I was doing to have anything to put in a design document. I knew I had a main quest, of course, playing out over various “missions” but it didn’t occur to me at the time to break that main quest down into manageable chunks. So suddenly I’m in chapter 3 and I’m up to journal entry number 281 (I don’t have 281 entries, honest) covering multiple mission outcomes and it occurs to me, in a flash of blinding insight, that I should really have individual journal headings for each mission, even if they comprise the same quest, because it would make tracking everything about a million and eighty times easier.

But the thing is, I use the journal a lot. I track a fuck tonne off the journal, and reference it a fuck tonne too. Fuck tonne, by the way, is technical language. And so I had to decide whether I should press on with my functional but inelegant approach, which would likely implode or explode or bog standardly fail to work properly, at some point in the future. Or re-do the whole bloody thing from half-way through the process. After much soul-searching and agonised howling, I went for the latter. It took me an evening of solid work, chasing down and changing every journal reference in every script and every conversation across two campaign modules. And I still left a shit tonne. That’s another technical term.

Thankfully I do have a friend to help me with bug-smooshing, otherwise I would actually have gone nuts by now. She’s somehow vaguely enthusiastic about the process, which I would in no way take for granted, but leaves me completely boggled, since for me bug-testing is the computer game design equivalent of references and bibliographies. Necessary but time-consuming, soul-destroying and bloody difficult to do for yourself, since you tend to read over your own mistakes. I think that’s genuinely one of those brain chemistry things: because you don’t believe you’ve made a mistake, your brain kindly helps out and so you see what you’re expecting to see (no mistake) rather than what is actually there (blatant mistake). Bug-testing also makes you feel lowkey bad about yourself because most of the crap that comes up is so unbelievably banal and obvious you can’t believe you didn’t notice it going go. Like connecting doors to the wrong waypoints. Or failing to actually give characters the conversations you’ve so devotedly written for them. Or mistyping the tag of something. Gah. Argh. Curses.

In good news, I think we’re reaching the end of this process. And, yeah, this is surface bug-testing. There’s still tonnes of polishing to be done but at least we’ve managed to swat about 75% of the “this will break the whole fucking game” style bugs. So now it’s time to get off my arse and do Chapter 4 I guess.

difficult (third) album

Tags

enthusiasm, smugitude

I just wanted to say, with immeasurable smugitude, that I finished Chapter 3.

It was fucking hard.

But I’m proud of it. And I feel good.