When I logged into Battle.net today, I saw this graphic:
From Battle.net, although a slightly different color tone than found on the front page.
I typically don't see this particular version of Xal'atath --I think this is from a cutscene or a trailer for the expansion-- because this is more photo realistic than the "usual" version:
It's that "I'm the smartest person in the room" look that gets you. From Wowhead.
The look she has in the first graphic reminds me a bit of Minthara from Baldur's Gate 3:
Well, except for the white hair and the non-glowing eyes. And the carvings. And that Minthara is obviously pissed off. From IGN and Larian Studios.
That middle graphic looks more obviously diabolical to me, while the other two being more understated actually scare me a helluva lot more.
I've never heard Xal's voice, but Minthara's throaty voice, like she's got a breath mint in her mouth that she needs to work around to speak properly, is properly noble yet demanding. She also carries the baggage of expectations, because the Drow in D&D and The Forgotten Realms have a long history that can't easily be ignored.
On the flip side, Xal's photo realistic look is scarier due to the red flags I see in them. Like, oh, the carvings in her cheeks. While I've seen my share of facial tatoos over the years, I very rarely see facial carvings; the only people I've ever seen who actually put carvings on their face are those who really don't give a damn about anything.
And let's not forget those eyes. Sure, WoW has tons of races with glowing eyes, but Xal's have a certain... something about them. Maybe it's the shapes in the center that appear to be small mouths. Or that the glowing portion is mainly the irises, unlike entire eyes that glow (looking at you, Sin'dorei, Kaldorei, and Draenei). Or that it makes the eyes look like moons, and not in a "ooo, how beautiful" way either.
Speaking of which, here's another graphic of a Big Bad with similar red flags:
Oh yeah, Ahmanet works. Better than the movie itself, to be honest. From 2017's The Mummy (and Reddit).
Ahmanet gives a whole new meaning to the term "four eyes", and those raised tattoos don't endear her to people, either.
I guess the biggest red flag among them is the malice that to a greater or lesser extent they all inhabit. It doesn't exactly give me warm fuzzies if one of them were to strike up a conversation with me at a bar. Since they all wear their intentions on their collective sleeves, it's kind of hard to look beyond that. Unlike some baddies...
This YouTube video was posted only this morning (my time), but...
The Baldur's Gate 3 music is kind of surprising.
They could have gone with, say, Elwynn Forest
and it would have been better in my opinion.
Yes, I realized that it was done in the same vein as Baldur's Gate 3, but I have to admit that this little 2 minute video underscores just what an RPG set in the Warcraft universe would look like.
The thing is, I'm not sure whether Blizzard could actually create a good CRPG based on WoW. What your character is --and is capable of-- in WoW is vastly different than in an RPG such as Baldur's Gate. You're practically a walking demigod in Retail WoW, whereas you'd have to scale back everything to you being pretty much a nobody in a Warcraft CRPG for it to work well.
I'm not trying to put my biases from Retail WoW here, it's more that I've played a few pencil-and-paper RPG campaigns where you start out as a big ol' hero and... Well, it just doesn't work well. It's much easier to build yourself up from zero to hero and have a satisfying campaign rather than essentially starting out as high level (or high society) and trying to figure out the world when you're already supposed to be an expert. When you start like that, the DM ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting as you get up to speed, and you frequently feel like you're watching the DM play with themselves for hours at a time.
If Blizz were to swallow some humble pie and create a story that starts with a bunch of nobodies or lowbie types and follow an arc like in one of the Baldur's Gate, Pillars of Eternity, or Neverwinter Nights CRPGs, yeah, that'd work. Although knowing Blizz, they'd probably model it after one of the Divinity games but amp up the power scaling very very quickly.
This is something that's been bugging me ever since I started playing Baldur's Gate 3, so I figured I'd get it out in the open now rather than later.
Who the hell came up with your companions' backstories??
I mean, I knew that the Forgotten Realms were a bit higher in magic content than I prefer my average D&D campaign to be, but I play WoW, so I can adjust my expectations as needed. But the backstories? They're a bit bonkers.
Don't worry, I'm not going to divulge any spoilers here.
I have to wonder about who came up with Gale's backstory. And given what we know, why is he 1st Level when we meet him? From PC Gamer and Larian Studios.
Now, I get that the companions' backstories feed into the overall plot behind Baldur's Gate 3, but the backstories are so far removed from those in the first Baldur's Gate that it feels like we're living in an entirely different Sword Coast. I suppose that we are, given the Spellplague and the Sundering* explaining why races such as the Dragonborn are around.
I guess I can explain the difference in the backstories between Baldur's Gate 1 and 3 in a World of Warcraft analogy: Baldur's Gate 1's companion backstories are to Baldur's Gate 3's version as to what a toon in Vanilla Classic WoW is to that in Retail WoW. In Vanilla Classic WoW, at the end of Naxxramas your toon is just one piece in the army that took down Kel'Thuzad; you don't report directly to faction leads, you're not constantly lauded in game and told how great and awesome you are, and there isn't a big ol' cheering squad when you turn in the lich's phylactery. Contrast that to the end of a Retail expansion, where you get your own personal Star Wars Throne Room scene.**
The companions in Baldur's Gate 1 were all, by and large, relatively normal people. Minsc was notable less for his prowess on the battlefield and more for his sayings, his companion (the miniature giant space hamster Boo), and his less-than-impressive intellect. Jaheira and Khalid were married, so there's that; Khalid stuttered, which was different; and Branwen's entrance to the game was a bit unusual, but in a post-Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets world it's not so unusual these days.
But in BG3, things are different. All of your companions have incredibly important or weird backstories that remind me of a new player creating a PC and going for maximum angst and/or drama.
This old comic from Dorkly comes to mind.
Although I'm only in the Shadow-Cursed Lands right now, this change in direction between your companions' backstories has also changed how I approach BG3. My skepticism in how things are --relative to BG1-- is pretty much at an all-time high. If there's an NPC that you encounter who seems normal, maybe I ought to simply not believe them one damn bit and save myself the trouble.
In this respect it's a lot like when you're out in the middle of nowhere in WoW and you just happen to bump into a couple of Elves. Sure, they might be Elves, but... come on. You just know they're going to be dragons in disguise, because it certainly seems at times like it's a meme that Blizzard just feeds into.
***
I get where people want to be the hero of their own story, because for the most part our own lives aren't what I'd call heroic. There are days when just going to work, getting work done, and coming home can feel like an heroic accomplishment, but in general we're not part of saving the world --or even our local community-- from some Big Bad.
That being said, when I end up in a situation like I find myself in with Baldur's Gate 3, I start to wonder just why the hell am I hanging out with all of these people anyway. Matt Colville loves the brain worm's usage in BG3 as a reason for all of the players to get together,
To say that Matt is not a fan of "you all meet in a tavern" is kind of an understatement.
and from the perspective of bringing a party together where there's always one person who is kind of an ass about "why would my character want to join up with these people?" I completely approve. But from the standpoint of a story like BG3 where everybody else but you has these fantastic backstories that kind of border on Mary Sue/Marty Stu levels, you just go, "Uh... So why am I here again?"
I mean, my character's backstory via the character creation process is that he's a city guard. No more, no less. This is exemplified by one of the quotes my character makes in BG3: "No one back home would ever believe this."
See? Travolta isn't the only one who's confused. From Pulp Fiction.
When you've got extraplanar entities interested in your activities --and no, I don't just mean that inevitable "Warlock with an Infernal Pact" player or companion, either-- you start to question your place in the universe.***
***
Are my characters as normal as I think they are?
Maybe that's a nonsensical question because I've played numerous video game RPGs and MMOs, and it always seems to move in the direction of you becoming the Hero. Not just a lower case, garden variety "you saved those kittens from drowning" hero, but a world/galaxy/apocalypse saving Hero.
And I'm not sure I'm on board with that.****
I'm old enough to know that doesn't happen in real life, and I'm also old enough to no longer fantasize about that sort of thing. Truth be told, fantasizing about living longer than five years past my congestive heart failure incident is probably at the top of my list*****, with far more mundane desires following behind.
The side effects of notoriety surrounding such earth shattering acts of Heroism are things people don't talk about much, unless it's to put down the people who performed those feats. History is riddled with people who performed heroic acts yet either they or their family couldn't handle the fame that accompanied it or they became the target of all sorts of ne'er do wells, the latter ranging from people looking to cash in on their friendship/family status to hangers-on scumming for money to even threats/acts of violence against the hero and extended family. It's not only superheroes who become a target.
Insane antagonist not included. From memeful.com.
If there's one comforting fact about being "normal", it's that your "normality" keeps you from being a target. Well, not explicitly so in a public fashion, anyway.
***
So, what do I make of Baldur's Gate 3?
I'm not sure.
I mean, I enjoy the game, and it does scratch that RPG itch that I have, but if this were a campaign I were designing I wouldn't have gone in this direction. Throwing everybody together in the manner Larian did works, but those backstories are a bit too overpowered for my taste. I think I can handle the romance angle as well, but it certainly feels rushed. Like everybody --and I do mean everybody-- is excessively horny. (And I began playing AFTER the adjustments to the game Larian made to correct what they believed as excessive horniness among the companions.)
It's not that I don't remember my 20s or something, you bet your ass I do, it's just that I don't remember the sheer volume of horniness coming out like this. Maybe it was me attending a Catholic university had an impact here, but I knew enough horny Catholics that I doubt it.
Those items aside, the power and narrative creep in the campaign is part Larian, part D&D 5e, and part Forgotten Realms. Likely equal parts, to be fair, but still all three parts share a hand in creating the story --and the characters-- the way it has.
I'm going to see Baldur's Gate 3 all the way to the end, and pump the brakes as much as necessary to keep myself from going off the rails and ignoring my real life. At this rate, it'll probably be November or later by the time I finish the game, which isn't a bad thing. At least I will have gotten a lot of gameplay out of it.
*I only barely paid attention to both events, because my D&D group played in our own homebrewed campaign that wasn't based in the Forgotten Realms, but those events were basically excuses to explain the transition from D&D 3.x to 4e (The Spellplague) and from 4e to 5e (The Sundering). I do know that when The Sundering was revealed at Gen Con, my brother-in-law said the crowd was not impressed; a similar reaction to when Cataclysm Classic was revealed at BlizzCon.
**While you could point to The Burning Crusade as when some of this "You are THE Hero" began appearing in WoW, it was in Wrath of the Lich King where Blizzard went all in on with your toon as The Champion. (Just ask Arthas in The Culling of Stratholme instance.) If you started playing WoW in Wrath, as I did, you never realized that this aspect to the game simply didn't exist in Vanilla WoW. To me, you were always the hero of your own Lord of the Rings-esque story, and the reworking of Azeroth in Cataclysm removed all aspects of a previous, non-heroic environment. It was only when WoW Classic appeared were my eyes opened as to how much the game didn't revolve around you back then.
Yeah, I get that there's the few turn-ins for a buff in Vanilla, such as the Onyxia/Nefarian head and the Rend head, but that isn't the same as a full on cutscene. This isn't limited to WoW either, as SWTOR also was notable for a full-on cutscene at the end of their vanilla campaign.
***You could also argue the same thing about when NPCs/party members start flirting with you. Maybe it's scars from my youth, but in my experience that sort of stuff just doesn't happen out of the blue. And if it did, I'd question as to whether there's an ulterior motive involved. (Yes, there's a lot of baggage to unpack here. Maybe another time, since nobody really wants to read about puberty-driven angst in a gaming blog.)
****For the record, our AD&D 1e campaign doesn't have any of those "You Are THE Hero" moments in them, but if you wanted to put them in there you could. My game group, however, really isn't interested in roleplaying how awesome they are. We joke around and don't take ourselves seriously enough for that. I realize that in Pathfinder adventure paths or D&D 5e published campaigns this movement up through to becoming THE HERO is very much a thing --just see Baldur's Gate 3 for a video game interpretation of that, I suppose-- but it wasn't all like that in the past. And in other RPGs, notably Call of Cthulhu, you know you're going to eventually go insane, it's just a matter of when. Or if you play Fiasco, which I've described as being in your very own Cohen Brothers movie, there are no real Heroes there either.
*****From Medical News Today, "Research estimates that more than half of all people with congestive heart failure will survive for 5 years after diagnosis. About 35% will survive for 10 years. However, in some cases, a person can extend their life expectancy through lifestyle changes, medications, and surgery." If you're keeping track (as I am for obvious reasons), I'm 2.5 years past my little incident and halfway to the 5 year mark.
The other week, my son asked me how Baldur's Gate 3 was going.
"I haven't really touched it since we last talked about it a month ago," I replied. He is quite aware that I try not to go bananas when playing a video game, and for me that means playing a game in fits and starts.
Yes, I'm aware that I play MMOs --and WoW Classic Era-- very regularly. The thing is, in those games I'm not very goal oriented these days, so it's more to play just so I can hang out with other people. Or people watch wherever I'm at.
There's always something going on in Vivec City. Even at the bank.
Still, I worry about my ability to control myself, as I have the tendency is to go "all-in" on playing a game I like that I'm progressing through. So I play a bit, then I force myself to back off. Once I create a bit of separation, that magical pull that a game or a book or a piece of music has on me lessens, and I feel better able to balance my desires with my needs.
BG3 is definitely a game that I enjoy playing. It has some moments that make me go WTF, such as your companions' backstories*, but overall I enjoy it a lot. It scratches that RPG itch that I don't get often enough these days, just as Age of Wonders 4 scratches that Fantasy building game itch that Master of Magic first gave me.**
Hey Sundren, how are you doing? I remember you from Age of Wonders III.
So when I told my son that I hadn't played in what was effectively a month, he wasn't surprised. One of his friends had begun playing BG3 recently, and he was having to balance the video game with all of his grad school work that needed to be finished before the end of the semester. I didn't envy that friend of his one damn bit.
***
I suppose I've always known to a certain extent that I am prone to addiction.
If I find something I like, I tend to do it over and over to an almost unhealthy extent. Even before the Satanic Panic derailed my D&D youth, I used to read and re-read The Lord of the Rings. And before that, The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald.
This was the version of the books that I had. From Amazon.
I clearly remember my dad coming into my room when I was in 8th Grade and sick with a cold, and he informed me I had better start reading something else than "those darn Tolkien books". Of course, that made me want to re-read them even more often just to spite him, but I instead turned my mind toward other Fantasy and Science Fiction***.
During my freshman year at college, I had problems transitioning to college level work because I got distracted by Star Trek, of all things.**** That Fall of 1987 was when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted, and the friends at college and I would watch the show religiously and talk about it after. The internet was still in its protracted infancy and email access was restricted at UD, so those of us who liked geeky pastimes could only rely upon face-to-face contact for such discussion. So there I was, struggling to keep up with my studies, but all I could think about was Star Trek.
Yes, I was a nerd. You had to ask?
When my grades began slipping to the point where my scholarship was in danger --and my dad made sure I knew about it-- I had to take drastic action. So I began dialing it back on Captain Picard and crew.
I wasn't as self-destructive as some people I knew in college, such as the person who lived in the dorm next to me. He didn't last a semester at college, as about 6-8 weeks in he discovered the pleasures of partying and simply stopped caring about his classes.***** His girlfriend (who was attending Notre Dame) contacted us because he had even gone silent with her, and she was worried. My roommate and a couple of other people on our dorm floor, including our Resident Assistant, basically held an intervention and convinced him it was smarter to drop out to get his life back together before he ruined it completely.#
Still, watching that happen was a sobering experience. There were several instances of people on my dorm floor imploding and getting themselves on academic probation, enough so that the joke was that our floor had the lowest GPA in the entire building, and that was despite several people with excellent grades calling our floor home.
***
Even today I have to be careful lest I get sucked into some distraction to the point where I haven't gotten any of the normal activities of home life completed. This goes for work as well, because I've had to be told more than once over the course of my career to basically "stay in my lane" and not do other work I found interesting but wasn't part of my job description.
So while I'd love to be farther along in playing some of these video games, I know that I have to be on my guard. Writing down lists of things to do, much like how you'd write out a grocery list, help to keep me on track from being distracted too much, but even then my sense of time can get all thrown off when I'm absorbed in something. Maybe I ought to set a timer.
You and me both, Jodi.
*I have a post I'm working on about that.
**I should clarify that the original Sim City, Sim Earth, and hell, even Santa Paravia for those old farts like me were the video games that inspired my love of building and development games.
I actually have a printout of the source code of the game in TRS-80 BASIC. I'd meant to convert it to TI-99 4/A BASIC, but I never got around to it. Something something hormones something something. From datadrivengamer.blogspot.com.
***Likely to his displeasure. He never read fiction, much less F&SF.
****Given that I went to an all-boys high school, you'd think that I'd have said "girls" instead of Star Trek. And you're not wrong in that having girls in classes were a distraction after years of not having them around, but you have to understand I dealt with that already in high school. My junior year of high school I took Spanish III, and since only two of us signed up for the class they sent us over to the "sister" all-girls high school next door. I should have known that something was up when my classmate and I discovered we were in two separate classes, but even I was surprised on that first day of school I walked to the classroom and knocked, only to see thirty pairs of eyes turn and look at me.
"Spanish III?" I asked.
The teacher smiled. "SÃ sÃ," she replied. "Red?"
"Uh, yeah," I said, my face likely showing my mind turning to mush, as a wave of laughter swept the the class. It wasn't enough that I was outnumbered 30:1, but that they were all really attractive as well meant that I was in for a very long year.
"Do you want to sit somewhere up here?" the teacher asked, motioning to a desk in front.
"No, I'll take this one right. back. here." I replied, sliding into the desk in the back by the door to another round of light laughter.
TL;DR: I survived the year, but that's because I made myself as invisible as possible. I'd say about 5-6 of the girls knew me from grade school, so most of them were a total unknown to me. My biggest takeaway from that year was that if you kept quiet you got to hear all sorts of interesting things about people's lives, particularly their love life. I also (now) realized that I missed a few obvious hints that some of the girls dropped that they were interested in me. This period of my life will come back from time to time, so don't be surprised if this reappears in a subsequent post.
*****I was there when it happened; we'd gone out on a Saturday night to the university village, nicknamed The Ghetto at the time, and we came across a student house that had kegs there but very few people in attendance. At the time I didn't drink so I passed (they got me a Mt. Dew, I think), but about halfway through his first beer our floormate decided he really really liked that stuff and he just started plowing through the beer like there was no tomorrow. He and another guy we were with got totally plastered and it took us the better part of an hour to walk them back to the dorm.
#As far as I know, it didn't help. Someone who was a mutual acquaintance ran into him at a concert back in their hometown a year or two later, and he was well down the "throwing your life away" path.
EtA: I corrected the time from 3-4 weeks to 6-8 weeks, as it was late October when this began.
Something that frequently gets overlooked is that --relatively speaking-- non-mobile video games are still something that not a lot of people play.
Sure, video games may make more money than movies and music do combined*, but when you look at sales of the games themselves, you realize that a lot of money globally comes from not that many people.
I was curious about how many copies of Madden 2024 were sold, and I discovered that it was around 5 million or so. To put that in perspective, EA sold Madden 2024 to roughly the entire population of Alabama. That may seem like a lot, but when you remember the population of the US --the prime target of Madden, given it's American Football-- is 333 million, you realize that's kind of a drop in the bucket. And when you realize that the average viewership of CBS' comedy Young Sheldon is 8 million viewers, you get a better comparison between passive viewing and active playing.
MMOs are even more of a niche market, given that the largest MMO out there, World of Warcraft, pulls in somewhere between 4 to 8 million or so subscribers** globally. Yes, only at best 0.1% of the world's population play WoW.
So, when people talk about how WoW was a phenomenon, it's all relative. More than twice as many people bought the Spice Girls' Spice than the best numbers World of Warcraft posted in the last 8 years.
And we don't want to compare WoW to the number of people who have cable and/or satellite television subscriptions, do we?
***
So why bring this up?
I was reminded of this because I frequently interact with people at work and at other places who aren't gamers of any sort, and they have --at best-- only the vaguest idea about what might be going on in the gaming industry. They may know that game companies are making a ton of money because it improves their retirement accounts, but beyond that they are left in the dark.
When people find out I'm a gamer, I usually get a "Oh, like Madden?" question directed my way.***
If I respond with an "Actually, I play WoW," I get "those" looks.
The "you're a weirdo" looks. The ones that I used to get when people found out I play Dungeons and Dragons.**** I have no idea what it'd be like if I said League of Legends or Fortnite --since I play neither of those-- but I'd imagine there'd be similar reactions.
The irony is that people in my WoW friend group aren't all aware of the industry beyond WoW itself. When I mentioned Baldur's Gate 3, only one person in the chat said "Yeah, I play that too!" There were a couple "can't afford that right now" and a few "Huh? What game is that?" reactions.
Usually right about now someone will point out those profit numbers and how many people tend to watch the League championships. That's nice and all, but League still has a ways to go to match the viewership of the 2023 Major League Baseball World Series, and that World Series was the least watched Series in television history.
By comparison, 300 million people worldwide watched Joe Frazier beat Muhammad Ali in 1971. From Sports Illustrated.
It's kind of strange how boxing doesn't have the cultural cachet that it used to have, but I honestly believe that the pursuit of profit and moving boxing from something you could see on television to a strictly pay-per-view environment hurt the long term health of the sport. If you don't have eyeballs watching your product, it'll fade from public consciousness.*****
So, video games are this financial juggernaut, but that's largely on the backs of mobile games and live service games, where you constantly feed money to the beast.
But the long term cultural impact? Well, that remains to be seen.
My perspective as a gamer is that gaming is having a large cultural impact, but that's because I'm inside the ecosystem. However, my work and life take me outside the ecosystem, and for that reason alone I remain skeptical. We may no longer be in a world where a single cultural event dominates over all others --such as the final episode of M*A*S*H or the release of Michael Jackson's Thriller-- but that doesn't mean that gaming is lost in the noise.
I think that we gamers just need to realize that we're not as culturally important as we think we are.
*As of 2022 via a Forbes article which I won't link to because it's behind a "stop using your adblocker" wall.
***If they don't at first think that I go out to gambling casinos, that is.
****That's gotten better over the years, but you still have to read the room before you declare your full frontal nerdity to people.
*****And before somebody pipes up with the violence inherent in boxing, the popularity of MMA and UFC belies that. Those latter two can be easily found on television without pay-per-view.
My son informed me the other week that he'd finished Baldur's Gate 3.
Considering that after that first week's worth of excessive playing my time in BG3 had shrunk to practically nothing for a month, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I'm not into rushing into new content when an MMO expansion hits, but that initial week's worth playing BG3 gave me enough dopamine hits that I could understand the urge to keep playing.* When I realized I was eschewing work to play BG3, I had to dial it back for my own sanity. (And to keep my job, but that kind of goes without saying.)
My son didn't have those issues, since he was able to fit in most of BG3 before his current semester of grad school started, and more power to him for that.
I'm not going to lie and say I was totally fine with all this; I felt a pang of jealousy at how he cruised through the game while I'm plodding along. It's not as if I'm savoring the game, either; at times it feels like when I was speed leveling that Draenei Shaman when TBC Classic came out: I'm constantly plotting my next move and trying to figure out how to progress further through the story.**
Yes, my MMO playing is at exactly the opposite inflection point from where I am playing a single player RPG. You could say that I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3 like other people play World of Warcraft, and you'd not be wrong.
***
It's the equivalent of reading a really exciting novel: the pages fly by and you want to get on to the next part just to see what happens.
I get that, I really do, but I think that I need to be reminded of that from time to time that people who blitz through content aren't doing it "just to get it over with", but genuinely like the content so much that they're constantly turning that next page to find out what happens.
I guess I get cynical about things when, like in TBC Classic, everybody was supposed to follow a playbook to get themselves raid ready as soon as possible. I thought it was only my guild that did that, because a few people I met out in Outland while leveling had completely different (and better) experiences with their guilds in terms of pacing and prepping for raids. However, on further reflection those better experiences had more to do with helping their own leveling Shamans to get leveled and not abandoning them to their fate when the Dark Portal opened. Those guilds, while more helpful to their Shamanistic (and Blood Knight) brethren, still had goals to achieve and raids to prep for; they were just a tad nicer about it, that's all. There were quite a few guilds raiding Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and Magtheridon while I was somewhere out in Terokkar Forest***, plodding away.
A blast from the past, from June 18, 2021. If I were in the "sweaty" raid, I'd have only a little over two weeks to get to L70 and through the attunement gauntlet. Our raid team was the one with the "casual" reputation that I despised and started raiding in the last week of July, 2021.
If I were in those guilds, I'd not have been abandoned, true, but I'd have also been pushed into the regimen all of those other guilds were doing.
So why am I okay with it when I'm playing a video game such as Baldur's Gate 3?
***
As is typically the case, I believe it has to do with agency.
Typically, the way to get me to do something is to let me figure it out on my own and I'll likely end up doing what needs to be done. If I'm forced into doing something by some external force, then I'm going to drag my feet and refuse. Think of it of how people approach taxes: everybody in the US has to file their income tax by April 15th, and a lot of people will procrastinate until the last possible moment to do their taxes. I know people who do that on principle, complaining about their tax rates and whatnot, but I am one of those who simply don't like being told to do their taxes, especially if I'm given some sanctimonious bullshit like what I got as a kid when being told to eat my dinner "because it's good for you."
From Calvin and Hobbes.
Likewise, at work if I'm told I have to do something, I'm probably going to be one of the last people to actually get it finished. I would not do well in a highly regimented environment, such as the military.
Hawkeye is my spirit animal. From Imgflip (and M*A*S*H).
From that perspective, you can see why I clashed with progression raiding in an MMO format. When I joined the progression raid team, I did so willingly and pushed myself to get up to speed both gear wise and add-on wise. There weren't requirements for how exactly I went about getting my toon(s) ready for progression raiding; just that I get myself ready. And yes, I willingly went to SixtyUpgrades, Wowhead, and Icy Veins to see where my gaps were. It wasn't a directly communicated expectation, but rather something I did on my own to become a member of the raid team.
It was only when TBC Classic came along and raid/guild leadership began making exact demands on the gear and process of getting raid ready did I rebel. The concept of raiding went from only being concerned with the end result ("raid ready") to trying to dictate how it should be done, and those demands weren't limited to my guild. Almost all of the actively raiding guilds on Myzrael-US were guilty of making the same demands on their members starting in TBC Classic, and whether their demands were cloaked in a velvet glove or not, the demands were pretty much the same iron fist: do it or you're not on the raid team. The lone exception that I was aware of was one guild who basically told its members to go do whatever for a month when TBC Classic dropped, and they circled back after that month to see where the guild stood before getting ready to raid.
***
Okay, that's just raiding. Still, there's nothing that says you can't do whatever you want in an MMO in general.
At it's core, that's correct. The design of an MMO is to allow a player to do a variety of activities without saying "you must conform". You could make the argument that modern MMOs have a ton of alternate activities designed with this player choice in mind.
This old chestnut highlights the player choice the modern MMO has versus good ol' Classic. Can't even recall who first made this meme.
The thing is, MMOs are not merely the sum of systems: there's a social element to them as well, and that is how the problems creep in.
In any social endeavor, certain niceties are expected if you want to fit in. Just like proper social etiquette in real life, there's an MMO version of social etiquette when interacting with people. The Wil Wheaton saying "Don't be a dick" is just the bare minimum for social interactions; beyond that MMO interactions are a bit more complex. If you want to do group content in an MMO --especially in today's age-- you're expected to have done the "correct" things to maximize your output. What that entails varies between guilds and groups, but there's a measure of commonality driven by the knowledge that in the "group finder" MMO environment players are interchangeable: if you don't have the right specs/gear/systems settings, you can be painlessly replaced by someone else. And in a pre-group finder MMO, be prepared to submit for inspection if you want in on some group content.
Developers have attempted to circumvent such social restrictions with new ideas --LFR raids being the most notable-- but that's a technical solution for what is inherently a people problem. And when I play any group content in an MMO, I feel the social pressure. I never used to, but once you've crossed the Rubicon and been on the progression side of things, the veil of obscurity has been ripped away and you now see things from the lens of those who are judging whether you're good enough to join their raid team.
The best way to find good candidates for your organization is to create what I call positive encounters. Actions speak louder than words, so you need to ensure that these potential new members have some actions by which they can judge you. When you need a specific class, get your best group runners together and advertise that you need said class in order to do an instance. Once you get them in your group, don't mention recruitment. Just run that instance and do your job well. If they do well, tell them you hope to group again and then part ways. If they aren't in an organization, you may subtly mention that you are looking for their class. Do this enought times with enough people, and word will get around that you're a solid outfit. You can't buy better publicity than that and it creates more opportunities for you to use the soft sell.
--The Guild Leader's Companion by Adam "Ferrel" Trzonkowski, Page 41.
The irony is that I thought this way before I bought The Guild Leader's Companion, because I'd be on guild runs in an instance and guild chat during the run would have a lot of commentary on any pugger's technique, both good and bad, and what their prospects were as a potential member of the raid team. I never saw it myself until I formally joined the progression guild immediately before TBC Classic, and there were plenty of times I wished I had remained ignorant and just enjoyed a dungeon run or a raid.
***
I guess that's where the irony creeps in. A single player game, such as an RPG, doesn't have that sort of social pressure. There's nobody looking over your shoulder, judging your gameplay, dropping comments and/or hints about how you could have done better. Nobody is pulling you into a Discord chat about how you could up your DPS a bit more so you could overcome that last fight more quickly. Nobody is telling you what extra gear pieces you should farm for. Nobody is suggesting a link in Wowhead to go check out to improve your gameplay. In a single player game, the only person you have to please is yourself.
And Garrus. You ought to please Garrus too. From Tumblr.
Because of that, I can focus as much or little of my time on the metagame without any recriminations.****
I haven't gone and pulled up walkthroughs or YouTube videos or gone to other websites that would cause spoilers in BG3, but the plotting does remain. I know that there's an optimal way of doing things --that's a drawback to any game, really-- but I don't seek it out. Most importantly, I don't have people telling me (or others in a chat I'm not part of) that I'm not playing it right in one form or another.
To a certain extent ignorance is bliss, I suppose.
Now, about that Arcane Tower in BG 3...
*Sort of. I still don't quite get people who took off for a week's worth of vacation when TBC Classic (and other WoW expacs) released, given that at least here in the US paid vacation isn't very copious to begin with, and if I told my wife I was going to burn a week's worth of my vacation time playing video games for upwards of 18 hours a day she'd have a conniption fit. If I were retired that'd be a different story, but I think I'd be expected to travel a lot, and I'm not as big on that these days either.
**For the record, yes, my character has been immersed in the other party members' backstories. Let's just say I was surprised at how easily certain relationships "progressed", which made me wonder if there was something I was missing out on in real life if fictional relationships moved at this sort of speed.
***The Terokkar Forest zone was exactly in the middle of the Outland leveling experience. So, while I was halfway through, I still had a ways to go.
****Unless you're streaming, I suppose, but I don't stream because I don't like having a peanut gallery watching my every move.
I was commenting on Shintar's latest WoW Classic Season of Discovery post when her reply gave me some food for thought:
She's right; I haven't been talking very much about what I'm up to, game-wise. Especially compared to the first four or five years' worth of this blog --or even the first three years' worth of WoW Classic-- I've gone mostly silent on my actual video game activity.
Well, I can answer the question "What have I been up to?" pretty succinctly: not much.
Seriously.
This is my spot.
Ever since WoW Classic's Season of Discovery dropped, a lot of people have abandoned WoW Classic Era and jumped on the SoD bandwagon. The resulting emptiness in Classic Era, while not nearly as bad as it was when Burning Crusade Classic came out, is very noticeable. And it suits me just fine.
I suppose I could level an alt or try to get into a raid or something, but I've found myself not really interested in doing that. Over the past few months one of my Classic Era friend group pulled me into a Molten Core raid, but that experience was soured by that raid's leadership giving a piece of tank gear my friend could have used to a spellcaster alt of one of the raid team's guildies, in explicit violation of the gear distribution rules.
Main Spec over Off-Spec my ass.
Several people in the friend group have joined other raids and raid teams, and some even go into AQ40 and Naxxramas (the last two raids of Classic Era), but I've just not been that interested in doing so. My Questing Buddy does want to join some raids, but her raiding requirement is in the evening on Pacific Time (US West Coast), which most raids in the server cluster don't do. There is one guild that does, however, and she briefly joined that guild only to discover she was unceremoniously benched to make way for another guildie to attend. No apologies or anything, just a "you're benched" from that guild's raid team right before the raid was to start. It'd be one thing if they said that she was being benched for another Hunter, but they instead brought an 8th (or something) Warrior instead to Zul'Gurub, a 20 person raid, where you want Hunters to do certain pulls or be damage soakers or whatnot.
So yeah, I'm not interested in any of that petty bullshit.
With the dearth of people in Classic Era, it's also been difficult to get into any Alterac Valley Battlegrounds, as most of the Horde players are (you guessed it) in Season of Discovery.
I do help out my friends by running their low level alts through instances or questing, or if they need a body for a dungeon run, so there is that, I guess.
However, for the most part I just stand around in Darnassus, doing random buffs to people who run by, and providing portals to people who need it.
***
What about Season of Discovery?
Well, I was happy to move at my own pace, and explore just for exploring, and I'd even created a Horde Mage just to play with my Questing Buddy who'd never played Horde before. I honestly had a good time watching Barrens Chat* and figuring out where all the quests were out there.** Hell, I even got into a Ragefire Chasm group or two, which I hadn't done on the Horde side since... 2010?
I got said Mage up to L22 or so before Season of Discovery's Phase 2 dropped, but my interest in SoD evaporated when Blizzard decided to provide all sorts of information about the upcoming Phase and then stuck Phase 2 in the Public Test Realm before release, which kind of defeats the entire purpose of, you know, discovering things. Some websites have at least paid lip service to the concept of letting people discover things on their own, but once Phase 2 dropped my YouTube Main Page was overwhelmed with "Here's Everything You Need to Do in SoD Phase 2" videos.
When I did login after Phase 2 dropped, I found that Blizz had added a 50% XP buff to push people into the new content more quickly. I figured that in order to delete it I'd have to do what I did with that Joyous Journeys buff and talk to an innkeeper, but since Blizz couldn't stay with the actual theme of Season of Discovery and instead turned Phase 2 into a "normal" mini-expansion, I abandoned Season of Discovery.***
***
I've logged into other MMOs, such as Elder Scrolls Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic, but...
Let me put it this way: I've logged in, started a character (or logged into an existing one) and... I just kind of hung around, doing nothing. Just watching people run here and there.
And then I log off.
Yes, I've played a bit of the original Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 3, but... I've reached a certain point in both games where I'm fine with where I'm at. I don't feel like pushing very hard, and I don't feel like starting over. In BG3 I know what I need to do to keep moving forward, but... that requires me bashing my head against a virtual wall for a while until I figure out how a clever way of solving a few quests. Despite a lot of temptation out there in the form of guides and whatnot, I want to figure the game out for myself, without any help.
I'm not saying I don't believe you, but I've played my share of CRPGs over the years, and I've learned to never trust people who say that. (No spoilers, thankyouverymuch...)
***
What have I been doing?
Work, I guess.
I'm up to my eyeballs in work, and even though my hours are still roughly 40-ish hours per week, the timing of that work is impacting my down time. For example, I've had a meeting scheduled for very very early morning, and that same meeting has been delayed several times. The problem is not only that I have to go to bed very early to make this early morning call, the delays usually come in when I'm asleep, so I wake up for the meeting only to discover the meeting had been delayed. Again and again and again. So I've not been on much in the evenings because I've got to get to bed.
While I wrote this post, I set up the timer on my coffee machine because I don't want to follow that 10th voice and sleep in. From Grab Your Coffee Facebook group.
When I'm not doing work, I'm running to and fro for various family obligations and whatnot. I haven't had this many family obligations to go to since more than one of the kids were back in high school, and I can't really explain why.
I would say that I need a vacation, but every time I think of taking a couple of days off from work, more stuff comes in --both personal and work-- that kind of have to get done. If I took time off from work, the extra work would still be there (and I'd already be behind in getting it done) and the personal stuff would have had to be finished while I was "on vacation".
While I'd like to say that I'm overworked, I'm not. My Questing Buddy's husband is really slammed at his job right now, which is why I don't complain about my work. I guess there's nothing really exciting me right now, and that is reflected in my lack of video game activity.
***
Okay, I do have to set one thing straight: even if I were busily playing video games, I'm not so sure I'd even bother to post about it anyway.
Remember how I've said (numerous times) that I'm a private person and don't open up much? Well, I've been in one of those moods over the past several months where I'm just not interested in opening up, period. Sure, there's the blog and all, but beyond that I'm just not into talking about my activities. I push myself to posting about such things because it feels like I ought to be at least a bit social, but I also know that posting about what I'm playing doesn't generate much interest compared to other topics.**** It's kind of funny how a blog is social media, but when I post about social things, those posts are very often the least read on the blog.
So... If I'm not enjoying writing those posts, and people aren't reading them, why should I force myself to do it?
Good ol' Arsenio Hall. This was probably what, 1987 or so? My freshman year roommate and I used to watch his show and then turn on Late Night With David Letterman. From imgflip.com.
I'll probably post about my goings on from time to time, but not nearly as much as I used to. I'd rather talk about other things than making the blog about me, honestly.
*Except for one evening where some people decided to talk politics and the Middle East, and let's say it did not end well.
**In case you're wondering, by the time a Blood Elf character is finished with the two Blood Elf specific starting areas --Eversong Woods and The Ghostlands-- said character is about L20-L22 already and can pretty much skip The Barrens entirely. So the WoW Classic version of Neve never quested in The Barrens at all, but instead went straight to the next zones after them.
***I will give Blizz some kudos for banning GDKP raids/groups on Season of Discovery servers, which for the uninitiated are raids in which people bid for gear that drop off of bosses with in-game gold. And yes, the GDKP raids are the big reason why gold farmers and (technically illegal) gold selling goes on in WoW Classic servers. But if you ask me, I doubt Blizz will stick to their guns for very long. I mean, just look at how quickly they abandoned the "discovery" portion of Season of Discovery.
****My first post about my hospital stay notwithstanding.
On more than one occasion I've had ex-military personnel explain to me what it's like coming down from being on active duty. I'm not talking about whether you've seen combat, which is a whole other matter, but just the routine of military life. By far the biggest difference between military and civilian life, they've said, is dealing with the freedom to do whatever they want.* They're so used to having their lives planned out in detail that the concept of "eh, do whatever" becomes foreign to them.
This isn't exactly a new phenomenon, given how monks' lives were planned out in meticulous detail back in the Middle Ages ("Hellooo, St. Benedict!"), but I was thinking about this tendency toward specific goals and rules as the crux of the difference between Classic and Retail World of Warcraft.
Or, in an MMO versus an RPG, such as Baldur's Gate.
It's... not too far off, if I had about 30 fewer pounds on me. Alas that this is about as "aged" as I can make a toon without turning them gray. And yes, Lucius is the name of my Cleric from that now ended D&D 3e campaign, although this fellow is a "I hit it with my sword" Fighter.
When I finally broke down and bought BG3 as part of the Winter Steam Sale --likely the last sale on that game for a while-- I started playing the first Baldur's Gate again and got as far as reaching Baldur's Gate itself. The siren's song of temptation finally proved to be too much for me, and so I created ol' Lucius above and started poking around.
In the case of both games, there are obviously some differences --the different D&D rulesets notwithstanding**-- but in general there are timers involved in-game that keep you pushing forward. In the original Baldur's Gate they are more overt and party driven, such as having to get certain quests done or else party members will either leave or attack you. In other RPGs, such as The Witcher, if you try to collect quests and try to get everything good and ready before you "continue" a quest (such as what you'd do in an MMO), you might discover that the timer for that quest has already expired and you've got some NPC mad at you for dithering when they needed help.
The concept of just wandering around and doing whatever is pretty much lost on the player, as the story is paramount.
By comparison, Retail WoW is very forgiving. You can do quests (or not); you can do dailies, run dungeons, raid, etc., but there is very little that's actually required of a player when you play the game. And unlike an RPG, where once you kill enemies others don't respawn after a set timer, you can pretty much go ahead and deal with whatever whenever you want to.
The irony is that all of those items in-game in Retail WoW become "required" by the player base, who enforce a "correct" way of playing based on whatever the min-max numbers say, so it ends up that we, the players, turn a self-directed environment into a regimented game all by ourselves.
***
And, of course, that mentality has trickled down to WoW Classic, where I am resisting it's pull with all my might.
I think it needs to be said, however, that after some sessions with Baldur's Gate 1 and 3, I've discovered that it is very freeing to login to WoW Classic Era and just, well, hang around without needing to actually do anything at all. Once you tell the collective min-max crowd to go piss off, playing an MMO such as Classic Era is, well, fun in a way that story driven MMOs and RPGs aren't.
That's not to say I suddenly don't like RPGs, but it's a different kind of fun than that found in WoW Classic Era. Sure, Era can feel kind of empty in terms of "things to do", but sometimes that's exactly what you want out of a game. And sometimes you want to do some things here and there that you can't do in Classic/Classic Era but you find in Retail. Or another MMO. And then, you want a story that keeps you moving, and there's one of several RPGs to choose from.
It's all different, and that's okay. And I think I need to be reminded of that on a regular basis.
*A very distant second was dealing with all the rules. And the bureaucracy. If you thought academia or government had a ton of arcane rules and regulations and absurd bureaucracy, wait'll you meet the military. Of course, being in the private sector my whole life, I often say the same thing to people who bitch about "waste in government", and they're offended for some reason that capitalism hasn't wiped that waste out. I'm personally of the opinion that it's just a reflection on human nature, and you just have to live with it.
**I'm still having issues dealing with Short Rests that exist in the modern game. I'm so used to hoarding supplies such as healing potions that the concept of a Short Rest --where you can get a bunch of your hit points back twice in a day-- before you need what I'd term a "regular" or Long rest is confusing me. I try to figure out how to win an encounter without needing as many healing potions or spells as possible, but the encounters are designed for people to expect those "mini mass heals".
It's kind of weird, really, that the Steam Autumn Sale came and went and... I just kind of shrugged.
Oh, plenty of games were on sale, and quite a few in my wishlist, but I just wasn't interested in buying anything. I mean, that's good for my bottom line (particularly given just how many car repairs I've had to make this past year), but when push came to shove, I just didn't want to buy anything.
Yes, I did have Baldur's Gate 3 on my wishlist, but a) it wasn't on sale, and b) I just don't have the time to devote to playing it. Even if I gave up playing MMOs and all other video games to play BG3, I just don't have the hours in a day to play the game to the extent I want to.
There's also the matter of me wanting to go back and finish BG1 and BG2 once more before delving into BG3, just for continuity's sake.
Yes, I am that sort of player. I mean, you do read the blog, don't you?
***
Some months ago I stumbled on an old Blizzard gift card the kids gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago, and given that Blizz was running one of their sales at the time, I used said gift card to buy Diablo II Remastered. I figured why not? I was essentially getting the game for free, so it made sense to try the game that people still say was the best in the Diablo series out before delving into Diablo 3 and Diablo 4.
So.... Does that count as a new game purchase, despite the gift card itself being at least 2 years old?
Eh, whatever.
Now that I think about it, that's the exact same reaction I had when I played it for 4 hours some weeks ago.
Your character is your character, just like if you were playing Gauntlet back at the video game arcade*
"Warrior needs food badly!" From the WMS Gaming channel on YouTube.
And if you don't like your character's appearance, well... That's tough luck.
Believe it or not, there's a screenshot there.
Hmm... Now that I think about it, from what I can tell there's not much more story here than what was in that old Gauntlet game back in the day.
Or The Bard's Tale, for that matter.
Back when the name Electronic Arts meant something good. Yes, kids, that actually was a thing: EA being a good company.
I did discover that if you died in D2, you lost all your gear and you have to run back to get it. Which can suck.
But in the end, there's really not a lot of "there" there. Run around, kill things, take their loot, use it. Rinse and repeat.
So.... Gauntlet, anybody?
*Boy do those two things take a body back to the 1980s!
Back in the year 2000, when most non-gamers thought of computers, they thought of the Millennium Bug. Or maybe the Dot Com Bust, which began in March of that year.
But for us gamers, the year 2000 was more well remembered for two games that released within a few months of each other, and because they both kind of fit into a similar game type their fates became intertwined: Diablo II and Baldur's Gate II.
Released on June 28th, 2000. From Wikipedia.
Released on September 21st, 2000. From Wikipedia (again).
The fact that the game that released first, Diablo II, was an Action RPG and that Baldur's Gate II was more of a "traditional" RPG was kind of lost in the discussions that followed, as the fans of the two games devolved into two separate camps as to which game was superior.
I know, the concept of both games being good was kind of lost on people --myself included-- as I found myself being the Baldur's Gate fanboy among my gamer friends at work.
And yes, I will freely admit that I was outnumbered in the arguments that followed. Part of that was simply because I lived with D&D for so long --and dealt with so much crap for it back in the 80s-- that a good, well-designed D&D game was always going to get my love. That what my friends loved the most about Diablo II, that you could use gems to customize your gear, wasn't why I played Baldur's Gate II. BG2 had story, the setting, a familiar system, and honest-to-god romance storylines in the game that blew me away. In an early prelude to my love-hate relationship with gear in MMOs, my friends' preoccupation with gear wasn't what drove me to play either of these games.*
***
The irony is that here, in 2023, we're back to the Diablo vs. Baldur's Gate arguments with the releases of Diablo IV and Baldur's Gate III within a few months of each other.
Just like before, D4 released first, on June 5th, 2023. From Wikipedia.
And BG3 followed suit later, on August 3rd, 2023. Can you guess? Yes, it's from Wikipedia.
One thing is certain: I won't be playing either game any time soon. I've got other games to play, and once I settled all of my bills for the month, I had other spending priorities in mind.
I mean, I'm sure both games are nice enough, and they likely scratch the itch of their respective fanbases, but at this stage in my life I can afford to wait.
That being said, if people want to make arguments here, go for it. Just play nice. It's been quite a while since I've had to wield the ban hammer on someone other than a spammer.
#Blaugust2023
*Although having also played a Paladin in my early D&D days, I'll freely admit that Bioware adding Carsomyr, an actual Holy Avenger, to the game was highly inspirational. No, I didn't play a Paladin in BG2, but my heart soared knowing it was out there.
