Fight! Fight! Fight!

Just a short update today (Well, I hope...) on how Baldur's Gate 3 is going. It remains both the only thing I'm playing and the thing I'm playing more than anything I've played for a long time but that isn't necessarily a recommendation. Also, why did I keep using "thing" there instead of "game"? I mean, it's not like if I wasn't playing BG3 I'd be playing the zither...

Steam now has me at 121 hours played. I have become a little more lax about leaving the game running when I'm AFK but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't account for more than a couple of hours altogether, so around a hundred and twenty hours seems fair. 

How Long To Beat has just the main story at a weirdly specific seventy-two and a half hours and "Main + Extra" at a hundred and fifteen, so I'm already past that. They have "Completionist" at a hundred and seventy-eight hours, which is still a long way off but my run so far is very, very far from being complete. Every time I change Acts a whole slew of quests get marked as "Completed", by which I think the game means "Unfinishable" and I have by no means found all the possible quests or even all the explorable areas.

What this tells me is that I'm playing the game wrong. Well, I knew that!

It is, in fact, increasingly obvious to me that Act 3 is a totally different game from Acts 1 and 2, not because of anything the developers have done but because the sheer attrition of having already played the equivalent of two, full-length RPGs even by the time I got there means I am no longer treating the experience even as something from the same genre, let alone as a continuation of the same game.

In Act I, I was pretty much invested in the characters and the storyline. I tried to roleplay most choices and avoid fudging the results as much as possible without actually having to restart the entire game. In Act II, I began to feel a lot more like I was playing a video game, where getting the best result was more important than staying true to the character I was playing, but I was still quite strongly involved in the storyline and the plot and I still wanted to keep things moving in a direction that felt honorable or appropriate.

Act III not only doesn't feel like the same game any more, it often doesn't even feel like a game at all. It feels more like a toy. It's full of big, set-piece battles that I find myself doing over and over to see if I can get a better result. And then I don't always even use the save from the good one when I get it! It's more like Kerbal Space Program than an RPG now, where you just keep fiddling with the controls so you can watch stuff blow up. 

The plot is still there, of course, but it's been a while now since I really cared about it. For a start, it's insanely complicated and I can't remember who is supposed to be doing what to or for whom anymore. It's like one of those Batman stories where someone blows a hole in the wall of Arkham Asylum and the entire Rogues Gallery comes boiling out, every one of them with a plot and agenda of their own. 

As far as I can remember, there are three Champions of Bad Gods, one of whom I killed at the end of Act II, plus at least two Devils, a Mindflayer going by the name of The Emperor, a Vampire Lord and a Hag. Then there are at least two Cults with countless members doing murders, a Thieves Guild and a Necromancer cluttering up the storyline and all of the above interact with each other in various ways.

It's ridiculous overkill and it's had the very negative effect of making it almost impossible for me to take any of it remotely seriously. The whole thing has devolved into a series of largely meaningless fights. I wander around the city looking for them and when I find one, it usually takes me all day. 

For a while I was still attempting to play the game properly, by which I mean coherently and in the manner of a table-top campaign, but that all came to an end after I spent literally a whole day - at least eight hours of gameplay - fighting through the very challenging series of encounters in the sub-plot where the PC tries to break into an Archdevil's storage vault in Hell to steal back the contract they foolishly signed.

It was a good day's play. I enjoyed it a lot. My party won a whole series of fights they really should have lost. I came up with some clever tactics and we had some lucky rolls and it all felt pretty good. Only, after every titanic clash, there was always another and there was never any real opportunity to rest and recover. In the end it just got to be too much.

When the final conflict between my team and the Archdevil himself started I knew there was no chance whatsoever we would win, even after Floradelle, who has a frankly insane Persuasion bonus, convinced one of the Devil's lieutenants to switch sides. We did indeed duly lose and the Game Over card came up and at that point it was plain no amount of retries would make the slightest difference.

I thought about it afterwards. In a way you could say it was a whole day wasted because I did end up going back to a save from before we even went to the Hells in the first place. On the other hand, as I said, it was a thoroughly enjoyable, exciting experience as a sequence of tactical battles in its own right. 

I came to the conclusion that it had been worth the time but only once. No way was I going to try it again, so that timeline was effectively null. It also brought down the final curtain on any lingering ideas I might have had about this being a roleplaying game. From then on it's all been about whether the fights are fun and pretty much nothing else. 

If they are, I keep doing them until I either get the result I want or I've had enough. I did the Hag fight about a dozen times yesterday, saving at every decision point in combat and reloading if I didn't like the way it went. 

As well as all the false starts and aborted attempts, I completed the entire thing three times with different outcomes. I killed the Hag but Vanra, who I was trying to rescue, died. That's actually very easy to do. The Hag barely got a spell off. Then I knocked the Hag out and cut Vanra out of her belly, which was harder but still not too difficult. Vanra ran off to safety and I thought I was done but unfortunately the Hag came back to life because I hadn't destroyed all her mushrooms and kept doing it even after I killed her a second time. 

After a reload, I spent ages trying to destroy all the mushrooms first, so the Hag would stay down, then knock her out and cut Vanra loose, and finally kill her while she was unconscious. I spent about four or five hours trying to do it but I could either get all the mushrooms or the Hag down but never both in the same run.

So I gave up. I'd saved after I freed Vanra so I reloaded and just had all my characters run away as soon as the Hag stood up. I got them all out into the city so instant-travel worked again and took them straight to Camp. As far as I'm concerned that's the Hag finished with for good. I hope never to see her again. 

Whether that will be how things turn out, I can't predict, even though I'm now using walkthroughs and guides all the time. I read several versions of how the Vanra quest can turn out but none of them cover my specific way of dealing with the situation so I have no idea if the Hag will come after us or not. I suspect that hasn't been scripted and she'll just hang about in her cellar until the heat death of the universe but I could be wrong. 

The issue isn't whether Larien has foreseen that particular tactical trick and accounted for it. It's that I really don't care. Further back in the game, I would have been concerned about leaving a threat like Auntie Ethel out there to make someone else's life a misery. To roleplay the character I'd created, I'd have felt obligated to Do Something About It.

Now I don't. It's not a real story any more, just a bunch of fights strung together. The whole thing has effectively collapsed under its own weight. Gravity has done it for gravitas.

None of which makes it a bad game. I'm still playing it. I'm still having fun. It's just that now it's the kind of fun you have when you line up all your toy soldiers and make them fight, not fun like watching a movie or reading a book.

Going back to how long it's taking me, obviously re-doing a lot of the fights multiple times is adding to the count but even without that it does seem to me that I must be taking a lot longer than expected to get through this thing. I'm not aware of taking it slowly but I do open just about every crate and that takes a while. I also find it very hard to follow the maps so I am frequently lost. I wish you could click on the map and just go there, like you could in the first two Baldur's Gates. I bet there's a mod for that but it's a bit late to go looking for one now.

It's almost certain I won't finish BG3. The fights are starting to become too difficult for me; too much going on and too many extremely tough opponents in quick succession. I can only assume the game will build up to a climactic battle at the end and I cannot imagine that fight being one I could win. 

I vaguely remember the first two games having a similar difficulty arc. By the end of BG1, which I did finish, I had a tactic that consisted almost entirely of summoning huge numbers of Monsters using the Monster Summoning line of spells and just swarming the bosses. Those spells don't seem to exist in BG3 so that's no longer an option, sadly. I can't remember how, or even if, I finished BG2. 

I could turn the difficulty down, of course. I'm playing on whatever the Default is but there's a Story Mode below that. And again I imagine there are mods that would make things easier. 

But I don't care enough to do any of that. Mike of The Works of Egan has a long post up about not finishing games and I have to say I think it's a healthy way to look at it. If it stops being fun, stop doing it. I probably wouldn't be so blase about giving up on a movie or a novel but the time investment involved there is literally orders of magnitude less, or it is with this game. 

I am also quite looking forward to stopping just so I can play something else. There's an annoyingly addictive element to the tactical combat that losing interest in the reason the fights are happening doesn't seem to quell. I imagine I'll eventually hit the point where even the fights aren't fun any more but annoyingly I don't seem to be quite there yet. 

Whether this will be the last time I write about Baldur's Gate 3 is another question. I imagine I'll at least want to give some kind of summing-up when I finally log out for the last time. Or maybe this post will be my final word on the subject.

I guess we'll find out. 

When They Talk About The Meta, I Don't Think This Is What They Mean...

I'm finding it increasingly awkward to come up with ideas for game-related posts when I'm really playing just the one game. Yes, still that one, Played Time now just nudging into three figures according to Steam and still very obviously nowhere even close the end. 

One odd thing I notice as a blogger is that if this was a new MMORPG I was playing, it would feel completely legitimate, not to say expected, for me to post a dozen or more times in excruciating detail about the gameplay. I've done it countless times with any number of MMOs, the great majority of which I've ended up playing for considerably less than a hundred hours and I've rarely thought to ask myself if anyone really cares, let alone whether it's a reasonable use of my time.

With single-player games, though, it feels like the way to go is maybe one or two posts at the start, just to announce what game it is I'm playing and what sort of a first impression it's giving, then nothing more until I've finished and it's time for a full review. It's an approach that works well for most of the single-player games I actually finish, nearly all of which are likely to be point&click adventures or narrative-driven games of some kind and which, crucially, are unlikely to take more than ten or fifteen hours, tops.

Survival games and the currently vogueish action-rpgs like Wuthering Waves, even if they're not multiplayer or I'm not playing them as such, slew much more to the MMORPG end of the spectrum. They frequently feel like MMOs even when they aren't, which makes it very easy to write about them as though they were.

Really, ridiculously big single-player RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3, though, (And I'm not sure there are all that many others...) don't fit into any box. It would be very easy for me to do whole posts on what the characters look like, on the dress-up options (Not least that there are some.) on inventory management, on the combat, the stats, the skill trees... all the standard topics I'd fall into talking about out of habit if I was obsessed by a new MMORPG.

Only, doing the same for Baldur's Gate 3 feels at best self-indulgent but mostly just pointless. Who even cares? The game's two years old and developers, Larian, have made it extremely plain they're done with it, want no more to do with it, won't be making any more content for it and are more than happy to move on from it. Sometimes I get the impression they wish they'd never gotten involved with it in the first place. 

With an MMORPG or any live service game that's still getting updates, commenting on how the game looks and plays feels like a conversation. With an RPG that's final and complete, talking about it feels more like hearing an old recording playing in an empty room.

But what's the alternative?  Hah! I'm so glad you asked! I can tell you that!

 

Since BG3 is still literally the only game I'm playing, as far as gaming goes I could post about:

• Games I'm Not Playing But Might If/When I Ever Get To The End Of This Bloody Monster
• Games I Used To Play Long, Long Ago
• Games I'm Looking Forward To Playing If/When Someone Gets Off Their Backside And Finishes Them
• Things Going On In Gaming In General

Or I could post about non-gaming topics. I always do plenty of that. Except, just now, I'm really only playing this one game, reading the usual random selection of books and slowly working my forward through the Dr. Who Archive on the BBC iPlayer. I'm not listening to enough new music to put a solid playlist together or watching enough new TV shows for a full post about anything. (I did watch the second episode of Haunted Hotel last night. That was good...)

Does anyone really care what I think now about the Dr. Who seasons I last watched when I was in my teens, though? That's how far I've got so far. There's really a shit-ton of Dr. Who, isn't there? I never really appreciated the sheer voloume of the franchise before. 

I do have things to say about the show but again it seems like the world has probably had to put up with more than enough old men droning on about the things they thought were so great when they were young already, especially if the only conclusions they come to is that those things were pretty great after all.

Most of this is happening because I have so much annoying, difficult real-life stuff going on at the moment, not helped in the slightest by Mrs Bhagpuss and I both suffering form a nasty and persistent cold-like bug that makes getting any of it done a real challenge. It means all I really want to do with my free time is as little as possible. 

BG3 is a drug, basically, and so is old, familiar television and, for that matter, the kind of books I've been reading lately. (I might argue all reading is a drug-like experience but that would require me to put a coherent argument together which, as must be obvious from this post, is not something I'm up to doing just at the moment.)

It's not that there aren't things to talk about. Actual, gaming -related topics I may or may not find the will to discuss this week include:

• The Official Launch of Project:Gorgon
• Daybreak Games' decision to abandon Roadmaps
• The Return of Jack Emmert to Cryptic
• The Unexpected Signs of Life in Rift

I'm listing those out in the hopes it might induce me to write something about them later. I don't suppose it will but you have to try, don't you?

I could also just stop posting for a while but as you can see I'd rather bang out a few hundred words of waffle and blether rather than let the post count fall to danger levels. I can get one of these done in an hour, provided I don't attempt to say anything of import.

This is the exact time AI would come in very handy, isn't it? I could just feed those bullet points into Gemini or ChatGPT and have the glorified predictive text apps knock out the first draft. Then I could edit that to make it look less plasticky and who would be any the wiser? 

Did I do that already? Aha! Wouldn't you like to know?

Alright, I didn't. The AIs just aren't that good yet. It'd be even more work than writing one of the damn posts myself. 

I will throw in a couple of AI illustrations though because I have fecking hundreds of them stored up and I might as well use them for something. I have them because I do the daily challenge at NightCafe every day, so as not to break my streak, which is over a hundred days now, and I've gotten so blase about it I just click on whatever they suggest and let the AI play with itself.

Now, that is a post I do want to write: what the hell do the people behind NightCafe think they're playing at? How does it benefit them to give away orders of magnitude more credits for free than I find it possible to imagine anyone ever needing? Aren't they supposed to making money selling them? And why are all the prompts virtually identical? Robots, airships, decaying jungle ruins, explorers...

And now, since I seem to have wandered entirely off-topic, not that it was ever all that clear just what topic I was on, I think I'll call this post done.

Hope you enjoyed it. I enjoyed writing it but then I love free-styling. It's always fascinating, finding out what I'm going to say next.

My Prime Picks For April

I wasn't going to post anything today, for reasons of extreme laziness and lack of motivation, but I just claimed two of this month's Prime giveaways so I thought I'd mention them for mentioning's sake. I'm not going through the whole lot because a) I doubt anyone cares and b) it's not a very exciting slate but I will just call out a handful of titles that might well be of some interest to someone reading this.

For starters, there's something called Minecraft Legends, which appears to be an RTS set in the Minecraft universe. Is there a Minecraft universe? And if there is, do people refer to it as the MCU? Because that could be confusing.

Anyway, the game is available on Prime separately for PC and XBox, which is weird. I didn't know Prime gave away console titles or if I did know, I'd forgotten. I did think about claiming it but seeing I've never even played Minecraft, it seemed like perhaps that should come first. And I have no plans to play Minecraft.

Three other titles came under consideration. There's one called PaleoPines, which has the tags RPG, Simulator and Indie attached to it. It also has a lengthy description, something that's all too often absent from games in the Prime offers. 

Reading that, it seems to be an Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley clone with added dinosaurs. Graphically, it looks as if it's aimed at fairly young children although that may just be the art style, not the gameplay. 

I really don't like farming games, I'm not a big dinosaur fan and I have Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp for all my imaginary socializing needs so although this looks like something I conceivably might play, I'm passing.

I was initially a little more interested in Let's Build A Zoo. As a concept it sounded like it might be a pleasant diversion, especially with the sci-fi element of gene-splicing thrown in: 

"Try your hand at DNA splicing, and stitch together over 300,000 different types of animals, ranging from the majestic Giraffephant to the peaceful PandOwl."

Then I looked at the screenshots. It's done in that top-down, pixel-art style I can't stand. Hard pass on that, then.

Finally, I thought about Deus Ex: Invisible War. It's an RPG/Shooter set in the DeusEx world. I'm discovering somewhat late in life that I quite like shooters and I already know I like RPGs so that seemed promising. As with Minecraft Legends, though, I've never played DeusEx. It seems a bit premature, not to say presumptuous, to start with a spin-off. 

Come to think of it, I might own DeusEx from a previous Prime giveaway. Maybe I should play that instead.

So, what did I take?

I took Gamedec and Mutazione, neither of which I'd heard of but both of which sounded right in my wheelhouse. (Where does that expression come from?  What is a "wheelhouse" and why would  something that was in it feel comfortable?)

Gamedec is "a single-player cyberpunk isometric RPG" Better yet "You are a game detective, who solves crimes inside virtual worlds." Now that's an intriguing set-up, although I'm not sure it's an original one. 

Best of all "The game continually adapts to your decisions and never judges." I do so hate a judgy game, don't you?

That one may well get played at some point. I have a good record with cyberpunk adventure games - I've played a few now and enjoyed most of them. Even finished some...

Mutazione is an indie point&click adventure and my record with those is even better. This one sounds quite intriguing: 

"A mutant soap opera where small-town gossip meets the supernatural. Mutazione is an adventure game where the juicy personal drama is just as important as the high-stakes adventure part of the story. Explore the Mutazione community as Kai as she cares for her ailing grandfather. Discover magical gardens, new friends, and old secrets. They can survive an apocalyptic meteor strike, but can they survive their small-town drama?"

I do like a bit of small-town drama. The graphics are stylized but charming and it's rated Pegi7 so I was a bit surprised by how eerie and disturbing the trailer made it look. Not that those are necessarily bad things in the context of an adventure game. It has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam so I'm optimistic.

Anyway, those are my picks for April. 

Do I Not Like This?

I spend quite a lot of time here banging on about how I mostly look for relaxation from my games. I often say I don't want much in the way of challenge. I try to avoid content that could realistically be called "difficult". If I have to do it so I can get to other content beyond the difficulty gate then I will but I'll do it grudgingly and with bad grace.

One thing I've never been known to do willingly and without complaint is to retry the same fight again and again in the hope of learning the mechanics. Perfecting my technique and making incremental progress until eventually I win. Unfortunately, since around the middle of the twenty-aughts, that kind of content gating has been a constant in MMOPRG design so, much though I might dislike it, I've had to do more of it than any rational, reasonable person would consider sane.

It's very odd, then, that over the past two weeks I've spent something close to fifteen or twenty hours repeating the exact same set-piece battle with every sign of enjoyment. I haven't counted my attempts but I've made at least one try most days for about a fortnight. Some days I've tried twice. I think day I tried three times.

Each fight lasted at least half an hour. One particularly gruesome farrago dragged on for more than ninety minutes. Most times I restarted again from the exact point where I began, without making any changes to my team or my build. Occasionally, I made major revisions to talents or gear. 

Sometimes thing went better. Sometimes they went worse. If I was lucky, I learned something. Mostly I didn't.

I did some googling, looking for advice or suggestions. No-one seemed to be having the same problems as me. No-one really seemed to be having any problems at all. The main suggestions were to do pretty much what I'd done the very first time I tried the fight. I'd thought it seemed like the obvious way to handle it and it seemed I was right.

The gist of the scenario is this: 

• There's a bridge. 
• At one end is your team.
• At the other end is a gate with a lever.
• Between your team and the lever are more than a dozen enemies.
• If you don't close the gate by pulling the lever, after a few rounds more enemies begin to come onto the bridge.
• The additional enemy forces arrive, two at a time, every two or three turns.
• They never stop coming so long as the gate remains open.

I mean, it's not hard to figure out, is it? Get the bloody gate shut ASAP. The plan is simple enough. it's the execution that's the problem.

That's how I spent most of my game time these last couple of weeks. Trying to cross that bridge and close that gate. 

At first I couldn't even get to the damn lever without everyone dying. After a while I could get someone there but they'd die before they could pull it. If I managed to get the gate shut it was never before I already had more enemies on the bridge than I could handle. 

Concentrating on getting one person all the way across the bridge with enough health left to pull the lever frequently left most of the rest of the team dead or close to it. Trying to get several people across so as to have redundancy on the pull attempt went even worse. 

After too many failed runs using the obvious tactic I flipped the plan and tried moving forward as a team, clearing the bridge of enemies as we went. That didn't work either.

Although I always felt my errors were the main reason I was failing, a part of the problem was out of my control. Combat in the game involves a significant amount of dice-rolling so luck is always a factor. It also employs a system of Critical Hits and Failures, meaning a particularly bad roll can be catastrophic.

There were things I could do to mitigate some of the impact of a bad set of rolls. There are talents that prevent crits, for a start, and others that negate specific types of damage. All the usual push and pull of RPGs down the years. 

But the thing about random factors is they're random. It's all very well giving one character immunity from critical hits but who's to say they'll be the one to get the bad roll? And you can't make everyone crit-proof. Or fire-proof. Or poison-proof... 

Then there are the really super-annoying design decisions you would never have made in a million years. For example, if you have a Thief, who can go into stealth so no-one can see him, why would you have him come out of stealth automatically, just to take advantage of an Attack of Opportunity? Wouldn't you code it so he stays in stealth unless he's either spotted or chooses to attack?

That one dumb mechanic screwed me over on several runs to the point that I had to stop using the Thief as my sneaker altogether. I had the Elf do it instead. She was lighter on her toes, anyway. 

I also had the Barbarian do his flying leap to get past people. I even had the Ogre throw the Dwarf halfway across the bridge. It's a party trick they do. None of it really worked.

But I kept trying. I didn't even get mad when I failed, again and again. Ok, I didn't get mad much. 

Mostly what I got was interested. It didn't feel so much like I was being forced to repeat the same annoying, over-tuned fight again and again. It felt more like I was putting together a puzzle. Maybe if I put this piece here... or move that one there...

It probably goes without saying at this point that the game I was playing was not an MMORPG. Fights of this kind in MMORPGs are rarely - if ever - fun. Also, most MMORPGs I've played haven't been turn-based, although of course there are a few.

The game in question was one I've mentioned before: The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. I'm only playing it because it came free with Amazon Prime Gaming. There is absolutely no chance I'd have paid money for it.

And it's not even that great an example of its kind. I'd say it's pretty good but it sure as heck isn't Baldur's Gate or even Divinity: Original Sin. It doesn't have that much of a plot and the dialog is cheesy. The whole game doesn't amount to a lot more than a string of set-piece fights strung together with a bunch of lame jokes. 

What all this tells me is that I'm not very good at knowing what I like. Although, I already knew that. I didn't need to have it pointed out to me. Again.

I have a tendency to believe I actually like things when in fact they're just things I think I ought to like. Conversely, I imagine I don't like things when all the evidence suggests I do. It doesn't happen all the time - just often enough that it catches me out, once in a while.

I think it might happen more with games than anything else, too. I expect it's because I know less about games than most other things I like. Or don't like. Whichever.

Now that I've noticed, I'm hoping maybe this time I'll learn something from the experience. That's why I've written it down. In the hope that might make it stick.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and find out what comes after the bridge. I think I've earned it.

It's Magic!

A couple of apparently unrelated posts I read recently, one by Tipa, the other by Redbeard, along with a flurry of first impressions posts on Palia and Baldur's Gate 3, started me thinking about some of the core concepts of the wider RPG genre. Specifically, I found myself pondering the relative merits of games as opposed to virtual worlds, of settings in which magic is taken for granted and of the often unrealistic expectations of the people who choose to spend their time - and sometimes their lives - there.

Any of these topics could sustain a series of posts but for now I'm just going to fire off a few observations that came to mind as I was reading. If I ever get around to writing about any of this in more depth, at least I'll have some notes I can refer to.

The aspect that interests me the most - and the one I think I've seen given the least attention over the years - is the way almost every RPG, online or off, massively multiple or single player, takes place in a milieu where magic - or science so advanced it may as well be magic - is accepted as the norm. It's so absolutely commonplace in just about every game that we almost never think about the implications.

Redbeard's post makes some astute criticisms of the way NPCs in fantasy games tend to spend all their time gussied up in their Sunday best. I'm not sure it's true to say the farmers are all out there tilling the fields in ball gowns and silk stockings - certainly in some games I've played the farmers are a dowdy lot - but it's definitely the case that around towns and cities you do tend to see an awful lot of very over-dressed citizens supposedly going about their normal, working day.

What his post got me wondering wasn't so much why they'd be doing that as why they wouldn't. These people all live with magic as a part of their daily lives. They may not all be practitioners, although many games are remarkably silent on the degree to which magic is available to the general population, but they certainly see it being practiced in front of them every day.

Most fantasy rpgs include some form of illusion magic, meaning you can't be certain anyone or anything is what it appears to be. Magic-users can transform themselves into just about anything. They can change race, gender, ethnicity, size or species. They can make themselves appear to be inanimate objects or ethereal phenomena. 

You don't always have to be a skilled illusionist to pull off these effects, either. Frequently it's possible to buy potions or magical items that create the illusion on request. Those items are often on open sale in shops in the town squares and side-streets. They're not always even very expensive.

If you posit a society where most people have access to the means of looking just how they fancy, wouldn't most of them choose to look their best? Why would you walk around looking dowdy and down-at-heel, when with a click of the fingers you could look like Lady Gaga on Oscar night?

Even if you choose to believe all those flounces and frills are firmly founded, you know they're still  likely to be something very much other than they appear. Even that much-discussed issue, the disparity between what male and female adventurers wear for protection, recognises a real-world social dilemma, not an in-game credibility gap. 

Don't try and tell me that's not practical adventuring gear!

We all know the armor looks the way it does because the developers expect to market their game to adolescent boys and men with adolescent minds but for the purposes of the world in which the characters operate, the chain-mail bikini makes as much sense as anything. If you can walk the streets with a ten-foot, glowing sword in one hand, leading a saber-tooth tiger on a chain with the other, you can pretty much wear what you damn well please.

All in-game armor provides a level of protection out of all proportion to real-world logic, combined with an equally unrealistic flexibility. Adventurers wear plate armor that somehow fails to drag them to the bottom when they leap into a lake. At most it makes them a little less able to roll and kick like a ninja than their counterparts in leather or cloth - cloth that can turn a blade, if not always as well as steel, then still well enough. 

Every piece of armor is magical. We know that because there are numbers that quantify just how magical it is. Once you give your scrap of cloth a numerical value to indicate how much damage it can take and assign it a slot on a paper-doll representation of the physical form, it's allowed that whatever level of protection it provides applies across the whole of that sector, whether the armor visibly obscures the skin or not. It's magic and there's no arguing with it.

Appropriately dressed for a memorial service?

If that's true for adventurers then why would it not be true for nobles or citizens too? Clothing may not be armor but it provides protection from the elements and from everyday incident. Imagine if nothing you wore ever got torn or soiled and even if it did, that somewhere in every town you'd count on finding a smith of some kind who could magically restore every single item of clothing on your body and in your backpack back to new, for only a few coins. If you knew you could have all damage repaired in a moment for the price of a pub lunch, would you worry about the wear and tear to your best clothes when you went to work or would you strut around like Beau Brummel on a bank holiday while you counted out the carrots?

And since I mentioned backpacks, let me address Tipa's points about "how to get those 200-300 pounds of meat and fur back to your home" after you kill a deer or "why would anyone think they’d be able to single handedly clear out a dungeon full of treasure?" The answer's the same in both cases of course: it all goes in your backpack, along with your horse and quite possibly a couple of goblins and a pagoda or two. 

It's magic. Don't question it. You can't. You don't know how it works. No-one does. Least of all the developers.

Palia fashions are... strange.
Although not as strange as
what's happened to her feet...

Now, Tipa is saying things might be more interesting if the games used real-world physics and that may well be so. Games that make that choice do exist. If you take that route, though, you can't also have almost any of the magic that makes the rest of the game what it is. 

It's not just that once you open the door to things like instant travel, no encumbrance or flying mounts, you're into a brave new world of logistics. It's also that you can't easily separate out the magic you want from the magic you don't without creating just as many cultural infelicities as if you'd left it alone. 

Look at a real-world example: AI. Now the large language models are loose it's proving extremely difficult to contain them. Once a principle is demonstrated, applications follow. The culture is already changing as a result and if draconian restrictions aren't applied and enforced, something which will require a cultural change all of its own, then many things will become possible which used to not to be.

A world in which magic is demonstrably real will necessarily have radically different cultural mores and practices from one where it's not. If we're going to start questioning the internal logic of these societies, we should probably be asking why they look so similar to cultures with which we're familiar, not why they don't look similar enough.

This leads directly in to the more pressing question of whether the games are as entertaining as they could be, although even to get there we first have to get past the hurdle of whether they're meant to be just games or something more. The argument over whether the goal is to create the most enjoyable games or the most convincing virtual worlds has been raging since even before I started playing MMORPGs and that was almost a quarter of a century ago. I certainly don't propose to try and resolve it here.

What I am going to suggest is that the two concepts are considerably less compatible than many people have been trying to suggest for decades now. There's a solid, commercial reason why MMORPGs (And, perhaps to a lesser extent, RPGs.) have become more and more gamelike over the years; it's because that's what players are most likely to accept, to enjoy and pay for.

There absolutely is a market for games where, as Tipa describes, you need a wagon to get the carcass of the creature you've killed back home so you can butcher it. ArcheAge come to mind as a game I've played that incorporates such features. But even in those games, such activities tend to be optional. 

It's also not as easy as all that to set up such systems to be consistent with real-world values, even if you wanted to do it. Star Citizen is perhaps the "shining" example here. In attempting to create a gamespace in which everything really does behave in a way logically consistent with real-world physics, Cloud Imperium Games have... not made a game at all.

We all look completely fine.

If and when they do make a game that conforms to that blueprint, it's odds on that most of the game-playing world, having given it a go, will decide they already have one life to live and can't fit the requirements of another, just as nitpickingly tedious and demanding, inside of it. Every action in a game must be easier, faster and more fun than the real-world activity it mimics. Otherwise, why not just go do the real thing instead?

All of which brings me to unrealistic expectations. These days games are expected to be both rigorously realistic and absolutely convenient. If it takes a long time to get things done it's a grind and if it doesn't there's not enough content. If travel is instant it's an insult but if it's not it's a time-sink. If death means nothing but a brief interruption to gameplay it's trivializing the risk but if there's a corpse to be recovered it's an archaic throwback to the bad old days.

There's so much choice these days, no-one has time to put up with anything that's not perfect. But nothing's ever perfect. Or will be.

Least of all this post, which as I said is just a few jottings on some things that occurred to me while I was reading stuff other people wrote. One day someone might knit all this together and come up with the ideal game but it won't be in my lifetime and probably not in the lifetime of anyone reading this, either.

We're all just going to have to get used to some things in our games not being exactly how we'd like them to be, I guess. Which is probably the closest to reality the games are ever going to come.

Coming Attractions Include Overwork, Crippling Debt, Death And, Of Course, Animals Wearing Pants.

I'm not sure if it's them or me but I never seem to notice when there's some kind of event happening on Steam. For example, I've had the thing open every day this week but it was only this afternoon I spotted another of those demofests going on. Only just in time, too. It's been running for five days already. Two more to go.

They do seem to host a lot of these things. I think there was one last month called Indiefest or something like that. I totally missed that one. This time it's NextFest, "A celebration of upcoming games", which I think is supposed to imply these are games you might actually be able to play in full some time before the heat death of the universe. No mmorpgs, then.

There's an extremely good argument to be made that the last thing I need at the moment would be more games. I just posted about the pile-up of point & click adventures clogging up my hard drive and it goes pretty much without saying that New World is eating every other game's lunch around here right now.

Still, I'm not one to turn down a freebie, as has been made all too plain of late. And these are demos, not whole games. Demos are short. Usually.

So I took a few minutes to scan through Steam's traditional ugly, garish, confusing display. Seriously, who do they have doing design there? It looks like a parody of something a twelve-year old might have put together for a GeoCities page and not a very talented twelve-year old at that.

Then again, I am old. What do I know? Maybe there's some kind of revival going on I don't know about that makes 90s graphics cutting edge again. There usually is.

On the positive side, while it may look repulsive, as a search interface it does work. Mousing over the various thumbnails sets a gameplay clip going, which makes it very easy to spot the handful of titles that might be of interest. 

There really weren't many this time but then I didn't spend as long looking as I have done in the past, mostly because I was trying to stick not only to demos I was almost certain I would actually play but to demos of games I might actually buy. 

My conversion record so far on that is dismal. I put several titles on my wish list after the last couple of rounds of demos but even though some of them have since launched I have yet to buy any. I will, eventually, but I'm waiting for the right moment. The way things are going, it looks like being a long wait.

This time, in the end, I went for just four demos. These are they. Them. Whatever. Up above, with some weird Steam housekeeping thing stuck in the middle. 

They vary hugely in size from almost 3gb to a shade over 100mb. That's like the difference between a pygmy shrew and a giraffe, which is kind of ironic since the protagonist of the smallest of them is a giraffe.

 

Taking them in order of magnitude, first  we have Lord Winklebottom Investigates, "a 1920s murder mystery, point and click adventure featuring a dashing giraffe detective." Oh goody! Another point&click adventure! Just what I needed!

Giraffes are by no means my favorite animals but I do like anthropomorphism and I do like detective stories and I do like the two of them together. And I suppose a giraffe does make a change from the usual cats, dogs and rabbits that tend to get the lead roles in these things.

Whether it's as funny as its creators imagine or, indeed, funny in any way at all, remains to be seen. Experience suggests it's unlikely but we can hope. 

Next up, weighing in at just over 500mb comes Chinatown Detective Agency. Guess what genre that is. Go on. I bet you can't. Give up? 

It's a point & click adventure! Not only that, it's "cybernoir". I hope everyone had their Bhagpuss bingo cards ready. At least this one doesn't have any funny animals. Far from it. Instead, the game "features scenes of moderate violence, blood, the use of tobacco and alcohol, and mild sexual references". Sounds fun.

Reading through the lengthy description, I suspect this one is going to turn out to be more work than play: "Do real-world research and investigation to solve puzzles and uncover leads, and manage your time and money to solve cases from clients both well-intentioned and nefarious." That sounds not in the slightest bit awesome but this sounds worse: "In Chinatown Detective Agency, time is a precious resource. The daily grind of the working Joe is a one-way ticket to fatigue, and tasks have a funny way of taking longer as you tire. Time is money, and the clock is always ticking." You can take realism too far, you know.

 

Third up, based on how how much of my hard drive it's sitting on, comes The Good Life. Not a sim of the 1970s self-sufficiency sitcom featuring the late Richard Briars et al, unfortunately, although I wouldn't be in the least surprised to learn there had already been a video game spin-off of that middle-class classic.

No, this is... oh go, on, take another guess. I'll give you a clue this time - it's not a point & click adventure. No, it's another anthropomorphic murder mystery! Only this time somehow it's an RPG. I have no clue how that's supposed to work but I'm curious to find out.

The plot sounds intriguing, too: "Journalist Naomi Hayward is drowning in debt and is at the end of her rope. Having accepted a request from The Morning Bell newspaper to “uncover the mystery of a small English town”, Naomi finds herself far from her home in New York, in Rainy Woods. Upon beginning her investigation, Naomi – camera in hand – soon discovers an inexplicable phenomenon in which the townspeople transform into cats and dogs as night falls... Then, as just she’s looking into that particular mystery, a murder occurs.."

So much there to savor, isn't there? Apart from those unfortunate prepositions. And so oddly familiar, somehow...

 

Last and not least if only because it's the biggest of them all, clocking in at 2.8gb comes Endling. I can't really be glib or snarky about this one. It looks absolutely beautiful and has one of the most depressing set-ups I can imagine for a game about a cute fox: "As the last mother fox on Earth, your cubs need all your care to survive in a merciless world that slowly destroys itself. You have to help them, teach them and save them. And you should never forget that extinction is forever."

Geez. As Zippy the Pinhead would say, are we having fun yet?

Honestly, I thought twice and then once more before I downloaded this one. The screenshots and gameplay clips look delightful but even the feature list designed to sell the game feels harrowing. I'm not sure I'm ready to "get involved in emotionally taxing decisions", especially when one mistake could mean the death of a bunch of "tiny furballs" with "unique personalities and fears."

And remember, "Extinction is forever". I hope that doesn't mean there's no save game function but I have a horrible feeling it does.

Those were my choices, anyway. I'll have to live with them. Although only if I ever find the time to play them, I guess.

If and when I do I'll be sure to report back on what I find. If I'm not too traumatized to type, that is.

 

On The Level

There's been a lot of talk about levels of late. Blizzard began it with the suggestion that World of Warcraft has too many. Something ought to be done about it, they said.

Yes, but what? If anyone knew the answer to that, surely they'd have piped up long ago. How long have we had levels, now? I make it... hang on, let me think... oh, yes... forever!

Online gaming was an entirely new concept for me when I stepped onto the precarious platforms of Kelethin back in 1999 but I'd known what a "level" was since the early 1980s. Even then I was late to the party.

I first saw Dungeons and Dragons played at University, where the people playing it confirmed every prejudice about the practice I might have had, had I had any, which I didn't, because I'd barely even heard of it. Nothing about the game or its players convinced me to give it a second glance but circumstances will conspire. A year or two after I graduated I found myself spending almost every Sunday for five years, from midday to midnight, rolling weird-shaped dice and improvising, cast against type and loving it.

We started out playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It was the first edition ruleset, which we just called AD&D, because no-one imagined there'd ever be another. Of all the myriad arcane rules and systems in the many books, by far the most prominent were levels.

Levels ruled all. A lot about your character could change during the course of a regular play session but when the number next to your name on the character sheet incremented, everything changed. Well, so long as you weren't a Fighter.

Levels didn't merely make you more powerful by increasing your stats and giving you more hit points. They gave you entirely new abilities, put new spells in your spellbook, allowed you to do things you could never have done at all before you leveled up.

Perhaps yet more significantly, as your level changed, so did the world and that change was as marked as any real-world shift from childhood to maturity. Claw and fang scraps with kobolds the size of dogs faded into memory as concerns turned to giants, dragons and other-planar powers.

That's the part I didn't like. I loved levelling, sure, but I wasn't keen on where the level curve was taking me. It was all very well gaining new powers and skills but having to use them on demons and demi-gods stretched my personal envelope of disbelief to breaking point.

The rest of the gaming group tended to agree. We got to around Level eight or nine then re-rolled to start a completely fresh campaign from Level one. When we got back to where we'd been, we dropped AD&D altogether and spent the next few years running through various RPG systems, always moving on when our characters threatened to become too godlike.

EverQuest in 1999 felt both familiar and strange. I'd played a few video RPGs in the eighties and nineties, several either based on D&D or using the genre tropes that megafranchise established. EQ had classes and races and stats and spells and magic items. And it had levels.

When I started, about seven or eight months after launch, it had fifty and lots of people had done them all. I came to a game that already knew all about endgame ennui. There was plenty of talk of "bored fifties".

To hear people waxing nostalgic about the golden days of "Classic" EverQuest, you might be fooled into thinking everyone was happy to live in that pre-lapsarian world. They weren't. The atmosphere I recall, both in game and on the forums, was an uncomfortable melange of hyperactive excitement coming from the ever-growing flood of new players like myself and an increasingly uncomfortable and cynical impatience that seemed to be settling over those who'd done their six months.

It must have been plain to the developers back then that something would have to change if the numbers were going to carry on heading in the right direction. The game was opening new servers regularly to meet the growing demand but how many of those players would stick around once they hit fifty?

The solution to the problem was already baked into the structure of the game, of course. More levels. Sony Online Entertainment set out on a course they and their successor, Daybreak Games, has followed unerringly ever since: expand the game, don't change it.

"Expansion", in this context, was a concept entirely new to me. I was familiar with Campaigns and Adventures but the idea that you might "expand" the entire game by adding more of what was already there around the edges seemed astonishing.

From the very start EverQuest expansions included a lifting of the level cap. The first, Ruins of Kunark, added ten, taking the total to sixty. That turned out to be a huge change. RoK was so vast  and those extra ten levels made such a difference to what was possible, it felt like a different game altogether.

From then onwards levels were doled out more sparingly. The next step up had to wait until 2002's Planes of Power, the game's fourth expansion and even then the cap rose by only five levels, to sixty-five, setting a pattern that has persisted ever since, with several expansions passing before another five levels are doled out.

The unnamed, twenty-sixth expansion this autumn will add the ritual five, bringing the grand total to 115. In terms of power, a Level 115 character will be to a Level 50 as a supernova is to a birthday candle. This brings problems.

As many MMORPG developers have discovered, even success can be problematic. By any measure, an online video game that can still maintain a population sufficiently large to justify the production of new, paid-for content twenty years on has to be taken for a success. But a success for whom?

Most long-running MMORPGs rely in very large part on continual growth, creating a sprawling confusion of continents and alt-planes, a palimpsest of contradictory systems and a plethora of arcane mechanics, all of which put up barriers to entry for potential new players. Those barriers can climb to impossible heights and the level cap represents the most insurmountable of all.

A new player may be willing to overlook the aging graphics. They can certainly learn the necessary systems and mechanics. Wikis and fan sites do a good job of cutting through the clutter, opening up the essentials to the light of knowledge.

All of that is manageable. Levels, as originally conceived, are not.

Even back at the turn of the millennium being Level 60 in EverQuest didn't make you seventeen per cent stronger than a Level 50. It added an order of magnitude  - at least. For that to make sense in gameplay terms, the lands those higher characters were exploring had to grow as well.

The mobs needed to be strong enough to put up a fight. The items they dropped needed to be powerful enough to provide a reward. The further the level cap receded, the more irrelevant the rest of the gameworld became.

A level 60 might not have been able to wander Lower Guk alone with impunity but a Level 65 most certainly could. By the time 2006's The Serpent's Spine expansion raised the cap to 75, Mrs Bhagpuss and I were able, gleefully, to duo through the Elemental Planes, leaving nothing standing where once, at cap, we'd cowered in corners with a full group, praying the puller wouldn't bring more than one.

I love that about levels. As a solo or duo player, an ever-increasing cap consistently expands horizons. When a new expansion arrives it's filled with places I can't see and mobs I can't kill. But all I need to do is wait.

In time a new expansion will appear and another and over time my number will float up. I'll pick away at what I can, take my xp where it comes and one day what was impossible will become possible, then easy, then trivial. It's the circle of life.

Or it used to be. Unfortunately, trivializing older content can be problematic in itself.

Veteran players often enjoy re-visiting old challenges and breezing through them without breaking a sweat, especially if there are still rewards there to grab. Some games facilitate that behavior or even make a feature of it, adding achievements and cosmetics that bypass level-based gameplay. It's an approach that works well with instanced dungeons, where over-levelled characters can monty haul at no risk without offending anyone. To the developers chagrin it's a solution that doesn't work at all in the open world.

Allowing high levels to operate freely with low in the same environment causes any number of issues. If there are targets of opportunity the high levels will monopolize them. If there's nothing of interest to the bubble of players sitting at cap in an aging game, that zone will be all but empty. Anything that relies on co-operation better have strong incentives for the capped players or it will fail.

In most older MMORPGs I've played, after a while there's been a call to re-purpose old content. It's not being used, say the players who aren't using it. Let's revamp the lot. Make all the mobs our level, give them the loot we want. So what if a few new players won't get to do what we did? When did you last see a "new" player, anyway?

Game designers are surprisingly resistant to such demands, luckily. There's the economic argument. Revamping content costs. Also someone created all this stuff and chances are they're still there, somewhere, caring about it. And, as Cataclysm showed us, players don't always take kindly to having their memories erased.

In latter years a compromise solution has appeared: level scaling. The world reflects the level of your character. Wherever you travel, in new content or old, the mobs will give you a tussle and the gear they drop will fit. It's a solution ArenaNet incorporated from the outset for Guild Wars 2 and which many other games, from Elder Scrolls Online to WoW itself, have adapted for retrofit.

And yet all those MMORPGs still have levels. GW2 has 80. ESO has 50. WoW has 120. And many games not only have levels but multiple level-like systems, carrying on way past the cap, with the direct intent of mimicing the same mechanics. Indeed, as I think about it, just about every MMORPG I can think of has levels, except for those few that replace them with "Skills", another, very similar discussion of its own.

Only yesterday I started playing Secret Worlds Legends again. SWL is the revamped version of  the excellent but under-performing MMORPG The Secret World, one of the very few games of its genre that chose not to use levels. When Funcom rebadged and remarketed the game in an attempt to appeal to a larger, more mainstream audience, one of the changes they made was to remedy that omission. I did three levels in SWL yesterday evening.

Players complain about levels all the time. Levels cause any number of problems, only a very, very few of which I've mentioned in this lengthy post. Almost every mature game nowadays includes multiple ways to speed up or skip over the painful process of leveling: instant max levels, xp boosts, heirloom items. Scaling content attempts to render levels all but irrelevant. And yet, here they still are.

Blizzard, worried about the ever-growing number next to the name on your character sheet, wants to squish it. But no-one's talking about making it go away completely. Whatever problems levels may bring, it seems not having them is worse.

There's more to say about all this and more will be said. Levels aren't going anywhere and neither are the problems they bring. For now, though, I'm going to pass the conch. I'm sure it'll come back around again soon enough.

Just like my next level cap increase.

All Aboard For Funtime

Naithin posted yesterday about some coming games of interest. There was one I hadn't heard of before: Outward.

There's no particular reason I should have heard of Outward. It's not an MMORPG. It's not even an MMO. The Steam page describes it as "an open-world RPG" which can be played "alone or with your friends".

It's supposed to be a sandbox rpg with survival mechanics "featuring deep simulation and immersion". Naithlin says it "...puts you in the shoes of a nobody in an otherwise high-fantasy world. Your victories will be small in scale, but no less meaningful.... Getting a backpack is a milestone to remember." In many ways it's the game I would have wanted fifteen or twenty years ago. Not any more. 

This morning I read what may be Gevlon's final blog post. He says it is. In it he details how he feels gaming has changed over the decade or so since he began blogging. Very much for the worse, in his opinion.

"It’s time for me to accept that my hobby went the way of television: once an intelligent entertainment, now targeted to the lowest common denominator", he says. A somewhat nuanced judgment, particularly given the very widely-held belief that television is currently enjoying its greatest Golden Age of all time.

But of course he means free-to-air, broadcast television, which has indeed descended into a dark place from which it will most likely never return. Ironically, over almost exactly the same timeframe, TV has undergone a role-reversal with online gaming. Television is now a subscription medium; games are free. And easy.

"Players no longer need to be any good to progress. They just have to log in and open their wallets... They don’t have to learn anything to succeed, so learning became “tryhard”. They became the dominant culture in gaming. Being any good became “elitism”. “Gamers are dead” is the new slogan among developers"

Gevlon again. It's an oversimplification but not without substance. Expectations and standards have changed.

Have they changed for the worse, though? I'm not sure. And I don't propose to go round that track again, not right now.

What interests me more is how I've changed over the same period. From the time I first dicovered role-playing games, fairly late, in my early twenties, until perhaps ten years after I started playing EverQuest in 1999, my tastes in the genre were fairly consistent.

For the best part of thirty years I knew what I wanted in an RPG, be it on or offline, tabletop or on screen. I wanted a low level, low fantasy setting, where cantrips and potions represented the only magic most people would ever see and the sight of a goblin or two would send even the town guards running.

I was dead set against anything to do with dragons, gods or demons. I wanted my characters to be ordinary people, scratching a living by poking around in old ruins hoping to find a few tarnished trinkets to sell back in town.

Another thing I wanted was "realism". My characters should need to eat, drink and sleep. They'd need to dress appropriately for the weather and anyone crazy enough to try swimming in chainmail deserved a swift trip to the bottom of the river.

I never entirely got what I wanted, even in tabletop RPGs I GM'd myself. Everything always tends to drift upwards. Characters get more powerful. Players want to fight bigger, scarier things.

In MMORPGs, few of which even attempted to pay lip service to any kind of "realism", the invitable power creep of expansions and updates dragged the median level of play away from the gnoll tribe menacing my home village to battles with the gods, with my character as "the chosen one" or "The Commander".

The strange thing is, over time I got to like it. Or perhaps I stopped caring. I was paying far more attention to whether I was enjoying myself than whether I ought to be. It turns out that being powerful and winning all the time is fun.

And killing bigger monsters with flashier explosions is more exciting than killing small ones with a fizzle.I started out playing gritty, leather-clad woodsmen and women, reliant on hard-won practical skills and the ability to read a scent on the wind or a spoor on the ground. These days, in all games, I cleave towards classes with the most spectacular spells and, especially, the most devestating area attacks.

Instead of slipping unseen through the woods, living off the land, I like to leap into the middle of a crowded camp yelling a battlecry, calling down fire from the sky or spinning in circles like a steel-bladed whirlwind, until everything around me lies dead. Subtle I am not.

It's true that I do, even now, relish a slow start. I like the picking yourself up by your bootstraps aspect of starting out with nothing. But you can only stay low level for so long. And how many times can you scavenge for food with the meter running down before you say "sod this for a game of soldiers" and log off?

Which is why characters, even in games with survival mechanics, always outgrow their needs. Those things that seemed hard starting out become easier, then trivial, then cease to be things at all. If not, people get bored of the endless maintenance-work and drift away.

The developers of Outward are almost evangelistic about the joys of defeat. They make a play of the game's constant autosaving, meaning you have to live with your mistakes. All of them. There are even things called "dynamic defeat scenarios", which makes losing sound like something to be relished.

In the end, though, unless the aim is to attract an audience of masochists, players will have to feel they have "won". This is the hard-won discovery of games developers these past few years against which Gevlon rails.

The way he puts it, "Game companies realized that money comes from bad players too, so they started to nerf their games." Or perhaps, given more options than they'd previously been offered, players discovered they didn't care quite so much about being good at games as they thought they did.

Gevlon sees it as the old guard dying out. Players who cared about skill and effort finally deciding the games were no longer worthy of their time and trouble, moving on to other hobbies. There's certainly some of that.

I suspect, though, that many more players changed along with the games. As the games got easier, less demanding, they found there were compensations for the loss of status that came with being "good". Having things is what matters, not how you got them. And less work means more play.

Without a doubt, I was such a player. My goals changed, my tastes changed, my expectations changed. Here I am, entertain me.

The question is, could I change again? Could I find myself swept up in some new, harsh world of struggle, grubbing in the dirt for the wherewithal to buy myself a pair of worn boots and a belt pouch to carry my few coppers?

Of course I could. And no doubt will. And then the cycle will start over.

The cat's out of the bag, the genie out of the bottle. Uphill both ways in the snow was fine when we didn't have a clue where we were going. Today's players, no longer "gamers", know there are shorter, smoother paths to the sunlit uplands.