The very first thing I did after finishing Baldur’s Gate 3 was start playing Armored Core 6. The second thing I did was stop playing Armored Core 6 and start playing Sea of Stars. Armored Core was fun, but it was more intense that I was up for in the first full week of September since it had been just over twenty-four hours since I learned my grandmother was fading and I just did not have a grindy, punishing game in me. I’ve since learned that AC6 is a lot easier to play if you do it super aggresively, with a heavy emphasis on melee combat, so I think I’ll have a better time when I go back to it, but I needed something calming and Sea of Stars seemed like a better bet. Plus, since I bought it on my Switch, I’d be able to take it with me anywhere I needed to go. This turned out to be the right decision, though I suspect my sleep schedule would be in better shape if I was playing AC6 since I doubt I’d want to stay up super late playing that. Sea of Stars had been described online (mostly by people posting on forums and not at all by any advertisement coming from the game’s creators) as being similar to Chained Echoes and while I think the comparison was useful since it got my attention, I think it really does both games a disservice. Sea of Stars is wonderful and a joy to play in its own ways that have absolutely nothing to do with what makes Chained Echoes one of my top recent games.
Continue readingI Finally Finished Baldur’s Gate 3
It took over 130 hours, but I did it. I beat Baldur’s Gate 3. I finished every sidequest, explored every map, fought almost every enemy (there’s some parts near the end where fighting every enemy will get you killed because there’s no end to the number of enemies that will appear to fight you), and finally brought an end to my Dark Urge character’s story. Shadowheart and my character were in a committed, monogamous relationship, my character had denied their Dark Urge so hard it got yote from their body, and everyone lived. I want to append “happily ever after” to that last statement, but I’m pretty sure that Lae’zel is either going to get herself killed or attempt to conquer the Material Plane. Also, while Karlach lived, the jury is out on whether or not she gets to be happy (her ending cinematic was the only one that felt particularly fulfilling, I’ll admit, since all the others felt kind of just “over”). I fought hard to bring what seemed like the best end to the story I began on August third, exactly a month and a day later, and I’m pretty sure it all played out as well as I could have hoped. I mean. as well as I could have hoped given the circumstances. Everyone grew a little bit, no one became an evil megalomaniac, and we all saved the day.
Continue readingWe’re Finally Starting Heart: The City Beneath Next Session
We finally finished The Ground Itself. Our final ten showed up as our second draw and then, as we wrapped up the game, I moved us into talking about what our first session of Heart: The City Beneath would look like. I checked in with my players, asked about some thematic stuff, and then pushed us into talking about characters and how to tie all the excellent worldbuilding we’d done to the systems and nouns of Heart. While Heart was in our minds the whole time we played The Ground Itself, we were still using a bunch of the nouns that I’d come up with for the core worldbuilding proposal, not to mention the plethora of nouns we produced in our game, so we had to slowly work through the mechanics of Heart and lace the disparate elements together. It required some careful work, since we were also pushing through character creation at the same time, I had a hard out an hour before our session was typically done, and I had some other stuff going on that was distracting me, but we got through most of it. I’m sure there’s plenty more that will need to be done on the fly as we play, but that’s just part of the game. Can’t have it all built out beforehand or else we’re not leaving room for us to play the game!
Continue readingThere Are Too Many Mechanics In My Baldur’s Gate 3 Storytime
I finally passed one hundred hours in my save file of Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m really not sure how much time I’d have logged to the game if I could somehow account for the lost progress due to crashes or the hours lost to reverting back a couple or more save files because a choice without sufficient context was going to ruin my experience with the game. I don’t mind reverting in these cases, given how what sometimes feels like a flippant or jokey answer in a dialogue tree can wind up being taken very seriously and sometimes there’s a mismatch between what the game suggests will happen and what actually happens (which seems to be cranked up to eleven as a Dark Urge character). Overall though, as I’ve looked back at my one hundred recorded hours, I realized that a huge amount of that time was spent incredibly focused on the mechanical aspects of the game rather than the roleplaying and inter-character aspects of it. Sure, the ratio is probably much more balanced than most similar games I’ve played, but it feels odd at first blush to realized that it is closer to a standard video game RPG than to my experiences with the tabletop rolepalying game this CRPG was inspired by. As I’ve thought about it more, especially as I played last night, I noticed that, despite only doing one major fight last night, I spent about eighty percent of my play time focused entirely on mechanics. A couple percent of the remainder goes to puzzle solving and logistics and then the rest goes to watching dialogue play out and doing my best to roleplay my player character.
Continue readingThe Difference Between Mourning And Closure
Content warning for discussions of death, grief, and childhood trauma.
I wrote about some family-related stress a couple weeks back. I spent my therapy appointment between then and now working through my feelings on the matter and what I’d do in the future, which turns out to have been particularly prescient of me (and seems even more so when I add that my therapist was ready to cancel our usual every-other-Monday appointment for the week I wrote this since it was a federal holiday and I instead suggested we reschedule for a few days later that week, which turned out to be the day after I wrote this). My grandmother began to fade earlier this week and passed away today. I’m, of course, still processing this. All of the emotional preparation and complex feelings of relief and grief intermingled don’t make this any easier. Even my complex feelings about my family and how I have processed my feelings for them don’t really help since, ultimately, this moment is when it all goes from being abstract and self-enforced to being incredibly concrete and real. No matter how else I feel about her, my grandmother was a major part of my life for my entire childhood. She is in many of my oldest memories, even if they’ve taken on a more bitter than bittersweet cast as I’ve come to better appreciate the horrors of my childhood and the way my grandmother served as a source and focal point for much of the generational trauma in that side of my family.
Continue readingNo New Posts Today Or Tomorrow
My grandmother passed away on Wednesday and the funeral is today. As a result, there will be no post today or tomorrow. I should be back on something akin to my normal schedule by Monday, but we’ll see how it all goes, I guess.
Finally Playing A Pair Of Legend of Zelda Games In Sequence
In one of the latest updates to the perks provided by having a Nintendo Online subscription, the Legend of Zelda games Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons were added to the Game Boy Color section. As a child, I was obsessed with the dual nature of these games. They’d blown my mind by introducing the idea of transferring save data between them by putting in specially generated passcodes or by using a link cable when you started a new game. I was not quite ten when they came out and it had literlly never occurred to me that you might be able to bring something from one game into another one. While a soft continuity (some aspects of a game carrying forward into another in a way that subtly influences your experience) are still fairly common, I don’t know if I’ve played another game that is quite so drastically influenced by including data from another. Technically speaking, I’ve never played any game that is this drastically influenced because while I’ve played both games, I was never able to play them sequentially.
Continue readingBaldur’s Gate 3 Is Missing Something
I have continued to put a ridiculous number of hours into Baldur’s Gate 3. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game this intensely and consistently. I mean, I typically don’t play games that require a great deal of focus and personal investment on work nights, since I know they tend to make me ignore the passage of time, but I’ve not only started doing that, I’ve been doing it consistently enough to go from staying up until the wee hours of the morning to stopping at a reasonable time. Turns out two straight weeks of obscenely little sleep thanks to a combination of Baldur’s Gate 3 and stress will shake me out of my worst sleep habits. I’ve managed to stop playing between eleven and twelve at night for four nights in a row as of writing this, and only once squeaked in under that deadline solely due to the game crashing as I started “one more thing”ing myself into what might have wound up being the wee hours. Still! I’m counting this as a win, if only because I’m still enjoying myself and am now clear-headed during my work days (even if I’m still recovering from a severe sleep deficit and struggling to stay away right after I eat lunch). Baldur’s Gate 3 really has a lot going for it and I really don’t have much of anything negative to say about my play experience in the one hundred played hours I’ve accrued on my save file.
Continue readingI Feel So Relieved Already
Just one week later, not even seven full days getting my mole removed, and I’m already wondering what I was worried about. Sure, I’m still in the active wound-care stage of things, but I’m notably less self-conscious of the bandage stuck to my face than I ever was of my mole, and that’s even with the bandage feeling way more noticeable than the mole ever was. It just bothers me so much less. Honestly, the only gripe I’ve got about this whole process is how I have to shave every single day. I learned the hard way that more than a day’s worth of facial hair growth makes the bandages fall off much more quickly. Most of the other gripes I’ve had (such as how bad the wound looked) either faded away in the first few days or I’ve learned how to counter them. For instance, I might still be unable to bite into large things (like an apple), but I’ve gone back to drinking as usual and gotten the hang of eating various more easily bitten foods without making a mess or accidentally putting pressure on my wound. It has all become fairly routine at this point and while I’m definitely eager to get to the point where I don’t have something stuck to my face twenty-four hours a day, I’m honestly just happy to not have the mole anymore.
Continue readingTaking a Birthday Break To Rest Up
This is the weekend after my birthday and, complex feelings about the day itself aside, I am absolutely going to use that as an excuse to rest. We’ve got a holiday in the US (Labor Day, which feels more and more important with every passing year) and I’m just taking some time off. I’m just going to have a quiet, guilt-free day of relaxation and video games on Monday, since I’ve got Baldur’s Gate 3 to finish and then Armored Core 6 or Sea of Stars to play. Plus all the other games I’ve started and left unfinished because something else came along (I’m looking at you, Cassette Beasts). And a new playthrough of Chained Echoes, inspired by the blog post that went up yesterday. I’ve got a lot of fun games to play, books to read, puzzles to do, and I’m just gonna set everything aside for now so I can just enjoy my three-day-weekend. It’ll be a couple months before I get another work holiday and it’s not like I’ve got much vacation time left after how much I was out in the first half of the year, so I’m doing what I can to maximize my relaxation right now.
There will be another Chapter of Infrared Isolation next week (I was almost finished writing the chapter when I wrote this post, so it should be done and edited and I’ll even be partway through the next chapter by the time this post goes up) and my normal blog posts will resume on the 5th of September. Have a great weekend!