tburkhol

tburkhol, 7 miesięcy temu

If you have VR headsets, Walkabout Mini-Golf is surprisingly fun. In fact, I’d argue that it only becomes fun with 3 people.

tburkhol, 7 miesięcy temu

Valheim, but I can ride a dragon? Keeping my fingers crossed.

tburkhol, 8 miesięcy temu

Back in the day, you weren’t allowed to plug a private phone into AT&T’s network. You had to rent phones from Ma Bell, for something like $10/month, back when $10 would fill a gas tank.

Between that and Columbia Music Club, so when Netflix was still sending DVDs in the mail, I decided I’d rather buy one movie a month than rent 4. Ripping them wasn’t so easy in those days, but there was already library organizers. Now, it’s like 20 years later and I’ve got something like 250 movies I can watch any time. Mostly good ones, now spread over four different streamers, if they’re even out there. Plenty to keep me entertained.

It’s a corollary of Pratchett/Vimes “boots theory.” More expensive to buy stuff, and the first few years you go without a lot, but in the long run, you get enough for less.

tburkhol, 9 miesięcy temu

I have a nostalgic affection for making my own maps. I remember discovering hidden rooms based on unfilled squares of graph paper, and mapping mazes of twisty corridors, both all alike and all different. I think that translating the digital representation to physical added vividness to the imaginary worlds when they were presented as simple wireframes, 8-bit graphics, or even just text.

Today, I don’t have time for it. I would almost certainly end up visiting the same - I’m guessing - half dozen places I could keep in a mental map, decide the game is boring, and play something else. Lazy. Jaded. Spoiled. Whatever - that phase of my development from reading static books, to reading interactive text, simple avatars, now near-photorealistic animations…the phase where I enjoyed the physical crutch for imagination is just gone.

tburkhol, 9 miesięcy temu

omg. I’m just 15 hours in, haven’t discovered temples yet, but that seems unconscionable. Like, MMO levels of grind. I mean, I’ve happily put hundreds of hours into each TES-offline, FO-offline, Deus Ex, CP2077, BG3. I don’t mind repetitive if the mechanic is fun.

MMO grind is for when you expect your customers to spend hundreds of hours just hanging out with their friends and you need to find something for them to do. It doesn’t have to be fun or rewarding, just distracting. Maybe TESO and FO76 have distorted their priorities.

tburkhol, 11 miesięcy temu

Gotta admit, I only went looking for the dragon because everyone in game said it’d be super helpful, and there’s a quest called “Gather your allies.” My talker had like 20 charisma and expertise in all the charisma skills…I resolved a lot of conflicts without violence. Disappointed to be forced into combat with the dragon by our guardian angel.

Kind of disappointed with all the interactions with our ‘guardian angel’ once their true nature was revealed. Maybe I made wrong choices, but their guidance just seemed…off. Not wrong. Not evil. Just somehow not quite right. Maybe somehow inconsistent with their revealed nature, and pushing towards ex machina, like a number of things I don’t see how I’d have discovered if they hadn’t outright told me. The dragon interaction is part of that not-quite-rightness.

I definitely found the ending to be the least satisfying part of the game. I went straight from the dragon to the final battle, and I think that sequence intensified the less-than-satisfying feeling.

tburkhol, 11 miesięcy temu

Own 8/10 - assuming you count Phantom Liberty different from CP; finished 7/10 (likewise PL), mostly before this decade. Some of them before 2010. I wonder if I can still find my Baldur’s Gate CDs…

I’m old.

tburkhol, 11 miesięcy temu

A lot of Bethesda content is quasi-procedural. TES and FO maps are littered dungeons/encampments that are pretty formulaic. Re-used passage & room artwork, generic antagonists, just little opportunities to engage in combat mechanics. And they respawn periodically, so you can go back and get your mechanics fix.

Everything in BG3 is scripted. There are no random encounters, wandering mobs, or replayable dungeons. Everything in the game is there intentionally, and everything in the game has been hand crafted.

tburkhol, 11 miesięcy temu

I feel like there’s two parts. On the one hand, Larian’s engine is fantastic and allows really creative and diverse approaches to their puzzles. There’s a number of fights that feel more like puzzles than fights, because they’re nearly impossible if you just go in spells blazing, but not nearly as threatening with a little preparation. They’ve honed that engine through DOS & DOS2, so it’s much more mature than you’d get if this were a pure derivative of BG1/2. The first time I lit Shadowheart up with Spirit Guardians and dashed her around a battlefield reaping the canon fodder…I actually giggled with glee.

Then there’s the storytelling. My journal is filling up with quests & side quests, but I don’t think any of them have been the “Kill 5 orcs,” “gather 10 blood moss,” or “deliver this McGuffin” variety. The NPCs you meet tend to reappear later and react differently depending on how their previous quest ended. I suppose, technically, that’s similar to going back to the same quest-giver, rising in their ‘ranks’ toward some prize, but it doesn’t feel the same. The NPCs, even the side-quest NPCs, feel like they’re woven into the overall narrative and it makes for a much more immersive experience.

I can’t imagine how much writing, animation, and voice acting had to be done to accommodate all the choices I won’t make. Even just the times some NPC voices my gender.

tburkhol, 11 miesięcy temu

I kind of stopped paying attention to side quests. In a lot of RPGs, I feel like they’re discrete, separate errands, and usually contained within the area where they’re given. BG3 side quests seem a lot more integrated, in the sense that I’ll often just happen along the next step in one as I pursue main quest. If not, then it may be because the next step is in the next Act. And some of them seem to be mutually exclusive.

Maybe because it’s my first play through, but I’m now in ‘if it happens, it happens’ mode, and I’m confident that there are enough opportunities for me to make different choices to have a substantially different experience next time.

tburkhol, 11 miesięcy temu

I feel like someone generally familiar with RPGs will be fine with the basic mechanics of BG3. It’s my first exposure to the 5e rules - bonus moves, reactions, feats, etc - but they mostly make sense. I may not have combat as optimized as someone with tons of practice, but it works most of the time.

Long term character building, though? When I was presented with class specializations at L3, with nothing to tell me about what they get at L4, 5, 6…those choices seemed completely arbitrary. Being able to respec on the cheap if you feel like you’ve made a mistake is nice reassurance.

OTOH, making choices of specialization and feats without a long term plan, but entirely on the immediate circumstances and whim, feels a lot more like how I planned my IRL degree, job, home… So, immersion?

tburkhol, rok temu

As I’ve been lurking around the fediverse, running instances seems to be universally a hobby project, and it’s a little concerning. It kind of gives the impression of all being idealistic young kids embarrassed to ascribe value to their own time. I mean, you can do a lot with volunteer labor, especially if it’s a good ecosystem with appropriate recognition and gratitude, but the people are absolutely the most valuable parts of kbin.social, lemmy.world, etc, and they do have to eat, pay rent, go on vacation. It’s tough to respond to a 3am message about your instance being hacked if you have a job to be at four hours later, and leads to a whole different kind of burnout.

It’s early days yet, but I hope the bigger instance teams get some input from people who’ve managed growth spurts in non-profits, and especially the transition to their first paid staff members (even when that staff member is the owner).

tburkhol, rok temu

ipv4, and the structures that came before it, were meant for academics and military commands to talk to each other on government funding. It was the definition of an elitist space and filled with idealistic kids and dilettantes who didn’t need to worry about rent. Nobody in the public would even know it existed for a decade.