Here I sit so patiently, waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice

It's been pretty quiet on the gaming front since wrapping up Baldur's Gate 3, back to my regulars for the most part with a dash of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide when I fancy a bit of monster-biffing.

I've taken the opportunity to do a bit more reading. Fancying something in the vein of Joe Abercrombie I found Alex Marshall's Crimson Empire trilogy, starting with A Crown of Cold Silver. With expectations set appropriately (that the moment there's a glimmer of hope for any character it's sure to be dashed in short order) they were most enjoyable. I preferred the more human elements of the series, I found the supernatural horror that creeps in a bit uncomfortable, probably the point, but recommended for anyone whose ideal book involves every chapter soundly disproving D:Ream's 1993 assertion that Things Can Only Get Better.

After those I thought I'd head back to the cosier territory of the Cold War. I'd assembled all 19 of Anthony Price's David Audley series in a haphazard manner from jumble sales and second hand shops, with the gaps filled in by the internet later. It must be a good ten years since I last read them, long enough for the finer details to be hazy, though the broad outlines usually come back to me. The series isn't strictly chronological so it wasn't a major issue not to have read them in order the first time around but it's nice for the cast to develop as the series progresses. I'm just over halfway through and very much looking forward to the rest.

Gate won't close, railings froze

When asked why people should try Baldur's Gate 3, Neil "Astarion" Newbon said something like it was the closest you could get to playing pencil and paper Dungeons and Dragons on a computer. Of course we've had plenty of computerised D&D going back to the Gold Box games of the late 80s that I cut my teeth on: Curse of the Azure Bonds in the four glorious colours of CGA, isn't it? Wasn't it? Four 5.25" disks, swapping them around every time you entered combat for goalposts... BG3 really accentuates its tabletop origins, putting the D20 front and centre (literally, for some skill checks). I don't know if there's a carefully calibrated level of distancing, if anyone's tried a CRPG where you start in a first-person view walking up to a table, sitting down, and filling out a paper sheet of stats before the screen dissolves into graphical character creation. Maybe they did but Brecht said "guys, tone down the alienation a bit" in play testing. Anyway, BG3 has a nice balance, the narrator/DM complementing the visuals to set the scene and stat/skill checks being flagged up in conversations or popping up on screen as they happen. Those dice checks can be a little frustrating; oddly I mind it less if there's an obvious impact on the game, like failing a charisma check meaning you can't talk your way out of a fight, that seems fair enough and you can always reload the game if you're absolutely desperate to follow that path. It's the little things like missing out on a bit of extra information from a failed knowledge check that don't seem to add much. At least in a pencil and paper campaign a set of hilariously bad rolls can lead to some fun roleplaying opportunities if the DM and players are on board ("Team Oblivious don't recognise the markings on the stone. In fact they're pretty hazy about the concept of 'markings' at all, and while Geoff is reasonably certain he's seen a stone before the rest of you aren't convinced...") That's a pretty minor quibble, though.

Combat is (as far as I've read) a good representation of the 5th edition rules, I haven't kept up with things since 3rd edition and it took a little while to get used to bonus actions, class and item abilities and the like. As well as being rusty on the ruleset I'd grown accustomed to games easing you in with an hour or two of ineffectual minions barely able to dent your health bar ("Oh I'm sorry, I'd just gone to make coffee, I didn't realise you were attacking me. Would it help if I said 'ow!' a bit?") An early encounter quickly reminded me how squishy low-level D&D characters are; spotting a couple of thuggish types I casually ambled over and half my party were down within a couple of turns, previously unseen archers in elevated positions proving most unsporting. 

Being purely turn based, rather than real time with pause like the first two Baldur's Gate games, combat can be a time-consuming affair which presumably accounts for the lack of ineffectual minions. The game doesn't constantly throw 'trash mobs' at you, few encounters are trivial, though things got considerably easier as I got the hang of positioning and movement (the leap action: not just for jumpy puzzles) and environmental interactions (like water/lightning or grease/fire). Increased familiarity with the rules also allowed for a bit of character tweaking after accepting recommended choices for a while, though I didn't go full munchkin (I should've probably added a few levels of Fighter to my Rogue for optimal dual-crossbow plinking).

If a straight fight is proving tough there are usually other ways to approach things, sometimes obvious (load up on silencing spells and arrows when facing mages), sometimes a little borderline (carefully positioning your main character to avoid triggering a battle-starting conversation while another member of the party artfully places explosive barrels amongst a not-yet-hostile crowd). That's the beauty of a single player (or co-operative hosted) game, you can either adjust the difficulty setting or be as 'cheesy' as you feel comfortable with (more irregular verbs: I am tactically innovative, you are cheesy, they are a dirty exploiter). 

The interface can be a little finicky at times when trying to get a good view of a particular area or select a specific item, and the AI pathfinding can't be relied on for delicate manoeuvres. If I forget to un-group the party and start cautiously picking my way through some caves the other three get into a quick huddle: "Right, this is a very dangerous environment, we'll need to be on top of our game here. Karlach: you run back into that chamber over there, do a couple of laps of it, come back out, then straight back in again. Gale: trap duty. If it explodes, releases poison gas, or shoots an arrow you're shoving your face into it. Now off you go while I hurl myself off this precipice, almost kill myself with falling damage, and run through every single passageway as I make my way back to Tav pursued by 17 spiders, three umber hulks, and a particularly confused Darkspawn who tunnelled in from a nearby franchise. Go, go, go!"  Overall, though, it's all done very well and feels like a pencil and paper game without 'gamified' elements - no gathering 100 of a particular resource to upgrade a thing to allow me to refine 100 of a different resource into another thing. That can be fine when integrated well, I love making numbers go up as much as the next person, but can be counterproductive when trying to tell a story - looking at Bioware the path from Mass Effect 3 to Dragon Age: Inquisition to Mass Effect: Andromeda to Anthem wasn't exactly a glorious triumph (to the point I had to check Google as I couldn't remember Anthem's name). Fingers crossed for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Anyway, BG3 has a really sound foundation to tell its story. Or stories. There's a lot packed in.

The combination of the writing, direction, performance capture, and visuals are truly remarkable. The main quest is a good backbone, it pushes you on but gives plenty of space for the rest of the world, from little vignettes you might stumble across to your companions stories, probably the heart of the game and what really sets it apart. Of course there've been great companions in other RPGs but I can't think of a better set than the origin characters of BG3. Some are immediately likeable (I was hopelessly smitten with Karlach from the first meeting), others a little standoffish or actively hostile, but they all have layers and depths as you spend time with them. Hearing the developers and actors talk about the process has been fascinating, the main cast really seem to be passionate about the game (or are good enough actors to come across like they are). That's not a prerequisite for a fine performance, Alec Guinness in Star Wars perhaps being the exemplar, but you'd imagine it makes a difference, even if only subconsciously. A stream of the cast playing pencil and paper is lot of fun, also showing the strengths and weaknesses of computer vs tabletop. A good human DM can improvise and adapt, give context and flavour to dice rolls, and gently nudge players without removing their agency but, even if he do the police in different voices, can hardly rival 200+ human actors for the NPCs (unless they have (hello to) Jason Isaacs and JK Simmons on speed dial). Even the smallest encounters in BG3 can surprise you with NPC performances.

Six seems like a sensible number of primary companions, especially with a party limit of four. Games with 12+ companions like Mass Effect 2 and Midnight Suns (especially with DLC) felt over-stuffed; you didn't have to recruit everyone or spend time with them but when there were in-game benefits for doing so I always felt compelled. The option to fully respec every member of the BG3 party is fantastic and means you don't have to include or exclude anyone just for their role; I had the Rogue side of things covered so Astarion had to sit tight at camp ("a travesty, dahling!") until I was confident enough to respec him. After finding a bunch of robes and items boosting unarmed combat I turned him into a Monk, and blimey the lad couldn't half stun opponents. The attention to detail, each cast member recording themselves casting spells for all the classes, is most impressive. There are others you can recruit as you go through the game but I felt it gave enough space to follow everyone's story, or at least one version of that story, without excessive diversion or bogging down into a rut.

Act 3 did feel a little over-stuffed compared to the first two and perhaps could have done with a little more direction; one particular quest sounded like it was building up to a grand confrontation so I'd been carefully avoiding that and skirting my way around the city, but it turned out to be a more minor step that I'd skipped. Fair play to the writers, though, everything still worked in the order I did it, even if a couple of bits didn't quite make as much sense as they might have done. I can only imagine the flowcharts needed to keep track of all the possibilities, especially being able to play as your own character, any of the six Origins, or the Dark Urge. I might well go for another run in the future, once I've given it a little time to digest. All in all it's been quite the ride and I very much look forward to seeing what Larian might do next, and if someone else picks up the Baldur's Gate franchise hopefully they can do something equally interesting. Bravo!

It was alive when you bought it

Well Elmo's made a right horlicks out of Twitter hasn't he? After turning one of the most recognisable brands on the globe into a meaningless letter, presumably the result of a bet that it wasn't possible to come up with a worse rebrand than Conquistador Instant Leprosy, and loosing every banned lunatic to vomit disinformation, he's started picking fights with entire countries.

His determined efforts to enshittify the place are finally bearing fruit as even diehard Twitterites are jacking it in, or at least greatly reducing their presence. I haven't abandoned it entirely, yet, more out of habit than anything else, though I'm checking in increasingly infrequently as there's less and less of interest. Where once it was a combination of blogroll, news feed, jokes and commentary it's now more of a post-apocalyptic wasteland where you might scavenge a moderately amusing gag before a gang of blue-ticked twats sweep through.

It's all about networks and connections, as they break down they're difficult to replicate elsewhere. It's rather like a big, busy guild in a popular MMO where you know there'll be a team on the go whenever you log in, but then new developers take the game in a different direction (maybe they try and introduce, say, a Game Experience that's New) that isn't terribly popular. Some people absolutely hate it and quit immediately, others stick around but aren't playing so much so the groups are trickier to find. There are other MMOs out there but nobody quite agrees what the best alternative is; some splinter groups form new guilds, but none quite get the traction of the original and it all fades away.

Mastodon had a bit of a head start as an alternative to Twitter, but doesn't quite seem to have picked up a critical mass; Bluesky has a nicely freewheeling nature but doesn't seem to have the appeal for organisations; Threads has the weight of Meta behind it and more corporate posting but a slightly odd vibe that hasn't really clicked yet. Oh well, at least that's more time to finish off Baldur's Gate 3.

Chalke History Festival 2024

This year was our tenth visit to the Chalke History Festival, we've been regulars since 2013 (except when stymied by automotive issues or Covid). The Festival goes from strength to strength with a slight rebrand this year (it was Chalke Valley, but that sounded a little yoghurt-y) and the merciful loss of the Daily Mail as title sponsor. The crowd is a good mixed bunch, it's heartening to see youngsters with brightly coloured hair alongside the brightly coloured trousers that might be a little more traditional.

The trouble we always have is cramming everything in - at any given moment there are likely five talks on at various stages and tents around the ground and a couple of living history performances/demonstrations, any one of which I'd quite happily sit and enjoy, so we decided to do two days this year, one focused on talks and the other to soak up everything else. Fortunately we rolled a critical success on the random British Weather Table avoiding torrential rain and dangerous heat in the bucolic Wiltshire setting, and have a splendid old time: swords were forged, pies baked, weapons, armour and uniforms demonstrated, artillery fired.

A live recording of Charlie Higson's Willy Willy Harry Stee podcast was particularly good, after enjoying a Best & Worst Monarchs discussion last year I'd worked through the whole monarchy with Charlie while walking the dog, I can highly recommend it if you're a bit hazy on chunks of British history.

With festivals being an expensive business they've also launched the Chalke History Hub, membership giving access to recorded talks and online events, which I might well sign up for to catch some of the talks we couldn't get to. Roll on 2025 and More History!

The festival ground

Foreign Field foot tourney

25 pounders? I hardly know 'ers!

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling.

The loveliest and the best

By jove, Baldur's Gate 3 is quite good isn't it? I suppose there were one or two clues, like the raft of awards from hither and yon including BAFTA wins warranting a mention on the News at Ten, but maybe the entirety of games media and the overwhelming majority of player reviews were mistaken?

Spoiler: they're not. So I'm too busy playing to write a proper post about it for the moment. Maybe in a month or three...

The bridge at midnight trembles

When Midnight Suns first released I caught a little of the buzz around it - a turn-based Marvel game with deck building from the XCOM 2 people. Sounded my sort of thing, PC Gamer liked it, I stuck it on the Steam wish list and recently picked it up with all its DLC in a sale. The turn-based card combat is just what I was expecting, but I wasn't anticipating quite how much time I'd spend organising a cake for a surprise party and customising Doctor Strange's swimwear...

Not having read a detailed review I didn't know there's a lot of downtime between missions in Midnight Suns during which you can explore the background of your own character (The Hunter, introduced for this game), chat with the cast of Marvel heroes you can recruit and befriend, and explore the mysterious Abbey that forms your home base (with its own pool, hence the importance of swimwear options). This is done in a third person explore-and-chat-'em-up where you can also gather ingredients for crafting and find chests of (mostly cosmetic) loot, some behind puzzles. This worked well to mix things up; do a bit of research, unlock new abilities, use those abilities to build decks for your team, head out on a mission, biff evil-doers on the nose, back home for tea, biscuits and movie night (or book club, or other team-building exercises).

There's a large cast of heroes to recruit and befriend. I'm reasonably familiar with Marvel characters, partly from the comics (though I've fallen out of reading them for a while), partly the Cinematic Universe (a decent chunk of the Midnight Suns crew have their own film series), and partly other games (my main point of reference for less well known characters like Nico Minoru (excellent for strengthening special tiles in Marvel Puzzle Quest) and Magik (a staple for adding turn 7 to a Marvel Snap match)).  At first I wasn't quite sure about the game versions of the big names - obviously there've been any number of variations across different media with different writers, artists and performers but some stand out as iconic like Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man and Huge Action's Wolverine. The voice cast of Midnight Suns are all strong, though, so after getting used to them it didn't feel like a bunch of knock-offs. There's a good range of customisation, a variety of outfits for all the heroes and more in-depth options for The Hunter.

Things were progressing quite nicely as I learned the various systems, but then everything started to bog down somewhat. The game is centred around the magical and supernatural elements of Marvel - plenty of spells, demons, gods and such. For some reason that's never worked well for me; in Dragon Age or D&D, perfectly fine, but not so much with superheroes. It's ridiculous, I know; a radioactive spider bite resulting in superhuman powers? Sure! A flying suit of nigh-impervious armour with an improbable arsenal of weapons? Absolutely! A bloke doing magic in present day New York? Hmm, not sure about that... Technological superheroes might as well be the poster child for sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, but for some reason I have double standards for how things are hand-waved away.

The supernatural aspects drive the whole plot along, a good old battle between good/light/order and evil/dark/chaos, unfortunately that never particularly grabbed me. The lead character of The Hunter is a fairly blank tablet allowing for some player agency, but lacking a strong identity; I never got terribly invested in their relationship with the game's antagonist.

Each of the characters who can accompany you on missions has a Friend-o-meter that can be increased by selecting conversation options they approve of, giving the right gifts, and taking part in suitable activities. It's not so different to something like Mass Effect, but with twelve of them in the base game plus four more from DLC that's a lot of present-based admin. If you reach Level 5 Friend-osity you unlock a new costume and power so I'd been trying to do that with everyone, but just ran out of steam towards the end. I'm not sure the Marvel IP does the game any favours here; delving deeply into the background of Captain America or Spider-man hardly breaks new ground, and the previously unknown Hunter becoming the Super Best Friend of the entire Marvel universe didn't ring terribly true.  

Without that investment in the story or characters everything ossified maybe halfway through my play-through, every day following an almost identical pattern of research, training, mission, chat; I had ability decks I was pretty happy with, sufficiently fabulous costumes, the between-mission segments were more of a chore than something to look forward to. It didn't help that the combat and non-combat aspects are so clearly delineated and feel rather disconnected. In hindsight it may have been the DLC that tipped things over the edge. I played through all of it as soon as it was available, and enjoyed those interconnected stories a bit more than the main plot. Without that diversion, and the additional admin that the extra characters brought, I don't think I would have been stuck in quite such a rut towards the end of the main story.

Thankfully even when the narrative aspects dragged, the actual missions kept interest up. The turn-based combat with decks of cards for powers works really well. PC Gamer have an interesting piece about the way the XCOM model wouldn't have worked for superheroes - they shouldn't need to take cover, shouldn't miss their attacks, and shouldn't have limited movement. The use of cards flips things from XCOM, where you have a consistent set of actions that may or may not succeed, to a random selection from a set of (mostly) guaranteed actions. Both approaches have their merits, I'd probably tend towards the latter - I prefer backgammon (roll two dice and decide how to move your pieces with the results) to Blood Bowl (decide to do something then roll a dice to see if it succeeds). Characters have interesting selections of powers with varying degrees of damage, tanking and support options, I enjoyed pretty much whatever combination I, or the game, selected. Positioning, environmental effects and knockback make for interesting puzzles in how to use your powers in the right order for maximum evil-biffing.

It's a pity the non-combat aspects of the game didn't really work for me; with a more interesting original (or at least different) IP it might've worked as a full RPG, or with that side of things stripped right back to focus on the tactical missions. Still, worth a look if it sounds like it might be your thing, especially with the deep discounts its been getting. Maybe don't worry about the DLC, though. Unless you really want to deliberate over Eddie Brock's swimming trunks.

Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page

I've got a fairly stable collection of regular games. Not quite so stable that they haven't changed since I was last posting to Blogger in 2008 - that would be a bit much. Mind you, Hellgate: London was one of the last things I posted about before moving over to KiaSA, and I just saw news that its creator has announced a new Hellgate title is in the works. It seems the original has been tweaked and re-released a few times, I was almost tempted to grab the current version from Steam, but a tenner seems a little steep for what would likely be a brief nostalgia hit rather than a serious diversion.

War Thunder is a bit more recent and has received considerably more updates, thundering along in a warlike fashion into its eleventh year. This year's April not-exactly-Fool's event was an apocalyptic resource gathering and crafting affair, Mad Thunder, bringing elements of Crossout into the game. Lightly armoured vehicles with automatic weapons made life nasty, brutish, and short so the mode was fun and frustrating in fairly equal measure - one round with a couple of good kills and a large haul of crafting materials was almost inevitably followed by another of immediate death to unseen opponents with nothing to show for  it. I crafted a couple of new vehicles and might have dabbled further, but as it was only around for a month it didn't seem worth devoting too much time to. Otherwise I try and get a few battles in each week flitting between modes and nations - British ships, Swedish tanks, French aircraft.

Speaking of fun and frustrating, Marvel Snap also fits that bill. I tend to find a deck I like and stick with it - between the randomness of the hand you draw, your opponent's deck, and the locations that appear there's plenty of variety. It's not ideal to get too set in your ways, though, and the game seems to have an uncanny ability to send me on a terrible losing streak, either with a shift in the meta or just a run of bad luck, to the point that I'm on the verge of quitting. I'll grudgingly sort out something new (usually dusting off a previous deck and slotting in a couple of the hot new card gets them competitive again), and frequently get on a hot streak and shoot up the ranks. There's probably some psychological element, like the other queue always moving faster, but it's kept me playing. The small decks and quick matches are a real plus point; it's entirely supplanted KARDS for my card gaming as I found the meta there shifting towards lengthy matches of attrition, with decks of 40 cards from a choice of around 800 needing rather more effort to build and test. 

Around other games I still tend to have Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms idling along in the background. I wasn't sure about its longevity, but three years on it turns out that Making Numbers Go Up still works for me. There are (very) long term goals of hitting some Really Big Numbers (Complete 200 variants! Collect 1000 feats! Acquire 1.00e14 influence!), with regular releases of new characters providing more immediate content while working towards them. Also regularly releasing new characters is Marvel Puzzle Quest - you might've thought they'd be running out with 300+ already in the game, but between some pretty deep cuts ("Hit-Monkey possesses the normal attributes of an Earth Japanese macaque, which includes superhuman agility and reflexes") and multiple versions of better known characters (good old multiverse!) the well runs deep. It's still my mobile game of choice, alongside 2048 Ultimate as a sort of fidget-swiper par excellence during calls and similar (up to 8,388,608 in one square so far!)

Destiny 2 had been a regular for a good while but fell out of rotation a few years back; it recently got an update, Into The Light, with a new Onslaught activity pitting players against waves of mobs. It generated some positive buzz so I got it patched up to have a nose around, and enjoyed a bit of blasting. I'm not sure I'm motivated enough to start on the heavy admin - working out a build, finding weapons with particular perks, touring the Tower for bounties and the rest, but it scratched an itch and might be something I head back to.

Aside from the regulars a light dabble in Fortnite didn't last too long - Festival Mode didn't grab me like Guitar Hero 3 had back in 2008. Saints Row 4 was more diverting, but got a little same-y after a while, so when a decent bundle of Mechwarrior 5 and its DLC turned up in a sale I picked that up to clamber back into a 'Mech cockpit for the first time since Mechwarrior Online back in 2013; I'd loved the rest of the Mechwarrior series but could never get into MWO. For some reason I hadn't got around to MW5 before, but that allowed for plenty of improvements and additional content. It was most enjoyable to work through the main campaign, building up a collection of increasingly heavy 'mechs. I carried on for a while after completing the story, but with a couple of reliable lances of assault 'mechs things got a little humdrum, so I had a look around for something else. Midnight Suns was another game I'd had my eye on for a while that popped up on sale with its DLC, so I grabbed that and it's proving... interesting. More on that next time when I'll hopefully have finished it.