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.
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Why I Return To Frustrating Video Games
Since last week, I’ve been reflecting on why I continue to play video games that frustrate me. I was pretty tired when I wrote last week’s post, so it did not initially occur to me that one of the main elements of video games is to present challenges to overcome and while failing to overcome a challenge can be frustrating, video games are usually set up to give you additional opportunities to attempt challenges you’ve failed. As someone who plays video games with a desire for a challenge, a certain amount of frustration goes hand-in-hand with attempting a challenge that actually feels like a challenge. Still, when I think about the moments of frustration in a game that cause me to set it aside, most of the time it has nothing to do with the challenge the game presents and everything to do with my experience as someone attempting to enjoy themselves. Last week’s post included examples of games I’m playing and frustrations that caused me to put the game aside, so I’m going to expand on those for simplicity’s sake.
Continue readingMusings of a Valheim Architect.
My main Valheim-playing associate, the same person who hosts our server when it is running, and I built a nice castle on the side of a mountain. It sits right at the edge of where the “Meadows” biome meets the “Mountain” biome, so we had to do a lot of work to keep it properly heated and safe from the various nefarious beasties of the mountain tops. There are a few exposed areas, but all intentionally so. One is the top portion of half the structure, set up as a landing with decorative crenellations looking over the approach up the side of the mountain to the castle’s main door. Much of the view is obstructed by trees or the rising slope of the mountain behind us, but it is a comfortable place to stand and greet anyone who might approach.
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