I am not exactly sure what is going on, but I have been on this single player game kick. It sometimes happens over the Holiday break and then continues forward into the next year. I went on a bit of this last year playing through several of the titles by Spiders, the game studio behind Greedfall and a number of “Bioware-like” titles. I’ve talked about bouncing off of Dragon Age Inquisition and the joy of revisiting that game and finally latching onto it. Similarly I bounced off of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords back when it came out on PC late 2004.
There were of course a number of reasons why I bounced, not the least of which was the fact that World of Warcraft had just released. On top of that there was also the suicide death of my nephew that we were contending with. I know at some point I gave the game an attempt at playing it, but ran into a number of technical difficulties that I never quite pushed through. Similarly when a re-release happened on Steam in 2012 I once again gave it an attempt at playing but kept running into technical problems. We scan forward to now and a dozen unofficial addons later, and I am now successfully playing and engaged with the sequel to one of my favorite games.
Another reason I was super interested in playing KOTOR2 is the pedigree of it coming from Obsidian. This is the same studio that created my beloved Fallout New Vegas which was a very similar scenario of them working within a pre-established IP. However I had forgotten that they also created Neverwinter Nights 2 between these two games, a game that I so thoroughly bounced off for both mechanical and narrative reasons. So I went into this game hoping for hidden greatness, but what I am ultimate finding is lightly messy “goodness”. This is another game that had a fraught development life cycle and a number of things were left on the cutting room floor that have been since restored by fans of the game.
The key problem I am having as I play through it is that the game as a whole is missing the clear call to action that Knights of the Old Republic had. Each planet in that game lead you to the next planet in sequence and there was a sense of urgency in your actions because you were trying to beat another group to the chase. In KOTOR2 you have some vague threats and a galaxy that has more or less forgotten that the Jedi were ever a force for good and see them as destroying the galaxy in some fool crusade. You have a few evil forces working against you, but there is no clear path forward other than “maybe find some other Jedi”.
The other challenge that this game has against it is that it takes a really long time to get into what feels like the normal flow of the story. The game starts with you taking control of a droid and attempting to save the Ebon Hawk, the ship from the first KOTOR. This sequence plays out fairly slowly and acts as a prologue, which is skippable. Then you become stranded on the Peragus mining facility and finally take control of your primary character throughout the game. This effectively ends up being prologue 1.5 and it is very much not skippable and the actions taken within this section start to have some weight applied to them.
Finally if you make your want through Peragus you gain control of the Ebon Hawk once again… only to immediately lose it as soon as you dock with the Citadel Station at Telos. Surprise surprise your first “planet” is a space station where you are under House Arrest. This serves as the “tutorial planet” where you have to determine which of the factions you are going to support in order to finally go on a mission to reclaim your ship. Which leads you to finally encountering your first plot point in the form of the individuals that seem to have stolen your ship and indirectly send you out on a mission to find other Jedi. I am being purposefully vague here because plot points happen, but also they happen in a way that ultimately feels bad.
So I presently find myself in this uncanny valley of enjoying myself, but also at the same time admitting that Knights of the Old Republic II is not exactly what I would consider to be a good game. There are moments of greatness, but the tapestry that is woven has giant chunks that went horribly wrong. Granted I do realize that we have not arrived on the Bioware formula with this game that ultimately lead to things like Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars the Old Republic MMO. KOTOR and KOTOR2 are the prototype upon which those games were built, and KOTOR2 specifically seems to be trying to do some interesting things that are mostly landing flat.
This however is the challenge of spelunking into the backlog and pulling out a game that is at this over fifteen years old. Normally the thing I struggle with these older games is when the mechanics of gaming has evolved in a different direction than what was the standard at the time. This however is not really a problem with KOTOR2 because it does a good enough job of mouse look once you invert the Y axis. What I am struggling with instead is that this game comes from an era when the plot lines were not so emphasized and things just sort of evolved as you progressed through taskwork. KOTOR2 struggles with this more than its predecessor, but I am now engaged and committed to seeing this through.
Like I said I am enjoying myself and I am enjoying the character development, but also it seems to be just dumping large amounts of exposition on me that I don’t necessarily feel like I have earned yet. Obsidian had some really interesting ideas and I am glad that they used this game to polish those ideas so that we ultimately got Fallout New Vegas, but this game is a bit of a challenge. I see why I ultimately bounced off when I was nowhere near as focused as I am currently.
The post Lacking Plot Urgency appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I am not exactly sure what is going on, but I have been on this single player game kick. It sometimes happens over the Holiday break and then continues forward into the next year. I went on a bit of this last year playing through several of the titles by Spiders, the game studio behind Greedfall and a number of “Bioware-like” titles. I’ve talked about bouncing off of Dragon Age Inquisition and the joy of revisiting that game and finally latching onto it. Similarly I bounced off of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords back when it came out on PC late 2004.
There were of course a number of reasons why I bounced, not the least of which was the fact that World of Warcraft had just released. On top of that there was also the suicide death of my nephew that we were contending with. I know at some point I gave the game an attempt at playing it, but ran into a number of technical difficulties that I never quite pushed through. Similarly when a re-release happened on Steam in 2012 I once again gave it an attempt at playing but kept running into technical problems. We scan forward to now and a dozen unofficial addons later, and I am now successfully playing and engaged with the sequel to one of my favorite games.
Another reason I was super interested in playing KOTOR2 is the pedigree of it coming from Obsidian. This is the same studio that created my beloved Fallout New Vegas which was a very similar scenario of them working within a pre-established IP. However I had forgotten that they also created Neverwinter Nights 2 between these two games, a game that I so thoroughly bounced off for both mechanical and narrative reasons. So I went into this game hoping for hidden greatness, but what I am ultimate finding is lightly messy “goodness”. This is another game that had a fraught development life cycle and a number of things were left on the cutting room floor that have been since restored by fans of the game.
The key problem I am having as I play through it is that the game as a whole is missing the clear call to action that Knights of the Old Republic had. Each planet in that game lead you to the next planet in sequence and there was a sense of urgency in your actions because you were trying to beat another group to the chase. In KOTOR2 you have some vague threats and a galaxy that has more or less forgotten that the Jedi were ever a force for good and see them as destroying the galaxy in some fool crusade. You have a few evil forces working against you, but there is no clear path forward other than “maybe find some other Jedi”.
The other challenge that this game has against it is that it takes a really long time to get into what feels like the normal flow of the story. The game starts with you taking control of a droid and attempting to save the Ebon Hawk, the ship from the first KOTOR. This sequence plays out fairly slowly and acts as a prologue, which is skippable. Then you become stranded on the Peragus mining facility and finally take control of your primary character throughout the game. This effectively ends up being prologue 1.5 and it is very much not skippable and the actions taken within this section start to have some weight applied to them.
Finally if you make your want through Peragus you gain control of the Ebon Hawk once again… only to immediately lose it as soon as you dock with the Citadel Station at Telos. Surprise surprise your first “planet” is a space station where you are under House Arrest. This serves as the “tutorial planet” where you have to determine which of the factions you are going to support in order to finally go on a mission to reclaim your ship. Which leads you to finally encountering your first plot point in the form of the individuals that seem to have stolen your ship and indirectly send you out on a mission to find other Jedi. I am being purposefully vague here because plot points happen, but also they happen in a way that ultimately feels bad.
So I presently find myself in this uncanny valley of enjoying myself, but also at the same time admitting that Knights of the Old Republic II is not exactly what I would consider to be a good game. There are moments of greatness, but the tapestry that is woven has giant chunks that went horribly wrong. Granted I do realize that we have not arrived on the Bioware formula with this game that ultimately lead to things like Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars the Old Republic MMO. KOTOR and KOTOR2 are the prototype upon which those games were built, and KOTOR2 specifically seems to be trying to do some interesting things that are mostly landing flat.
This however is the challenge of spelunking into the backlog and pulling out a game that is at this over fifteen years old. Normally the thing I struggle with these older games is when the mechanics of gaming has evolved in a different direction than what was the standard at the time. This however is not really a problem with KOTOR2 because it does a good enough job of mouse look once you invert the Y axis. What I am struggling with instead is that this game comes from an era when the plot lines were not so emphasized and things just sort of evolved as you progressed through taskwork. KOTOR2 struggles with this more than its predecessor, but I am now engaged and committed to seeing this through.
Like I said I am enjoying myself and I am enjoying the character development, but also it seems to be just dumping large amounts of exposition on me that I don’t necessarily feel like I have earned yet. Obsidian had some really interesting ideas and I am glad that they used this game to polish those ideas so that we ultimately got Fallout New Vegas, but this game is a bit of a challenge. I see why I ultimately bounced off when I was nowhere near as focused as I am currently.
The post Lacking Plot Urgency appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Last week I talked about rediscovering X’s Adventures and the fact that he is currently doing an adventure in Minecraft Hardcore Mode. I also talked a bit about how I thought it might be fun to do the same thing given that I had no clue Hardcore Minecraft even was a thing that existed. Since then I have started recording clips of me playing Minecraft in Hardcore mode and uploading them to my YouTube channel. They are pretty low production value because I am recording them directly from OBS and then uploading them more or less uncut. If you are interested in listening to me ramble while trying to sort out how Minecraft works, then this may be your jam.
As of this blog post, there are three parts to the series and each of them are in the neighborhood of 30 minutes. It seemed like 15 minutes wasn’t really enough time for me to actually accomplish much of anything. Seeing as I am not exactly doing this thing to get internet famous and really for my own personal amusement I am sticking to that format. The funny thing about this video series is that I don’t believe I have ever used my name aka “Belghast” as a seed for a Minecraft world. Turns out that seed is really solid because it put me really close to a village.
I need to sort out what exactly I want for a goal, because right now I am more or less going through the same routine that I have always gone through. Initially it was a hunt for Wood, Coal and Shelter and that evolved into a search for Iron. Which will in itself lead to a search for the bounty hidden without the bowels of the earth like Diamonds and such. However I am not entirely certain what my goals SHOULD be. An initial goal was to get a full set of armor, but past that I am going to have to sort out what my long range goal needs to be. I could in theory hide within mines for any number of videos because that is something that is relatively safe to do.
However I somehow doubt that watching me hollow out the innards of the earth is exciting content. I have various projects that I would like to complete, but the challenge with that is a lot of them are going to require large chunks of time to do them. My fear at doing “offline play” and then showing the results is that since this is Hardcore Minecraft… one death means the end of the run and should probably be something that is recorded. I’ve done a few things offline now, but they are simplistic like building some proper stairs or organizing my inventory. Something like “Let’s build an inside garden!” would take significantly more time and also with that brings forth significantly more dangers. I might be able to do the safe indoors tunneling work offline and then do the final bits while recording.
I will have to figure out exactly how to make this work. For now I have been releasing a video each day, but I somehow doubt I will be able to maintain that schedule for very much longer. It isn’t like I have an awful lot of viewers right now, but what are some projects that you would like to see tackled? It seems like a double edged sword because there is a certain act of discovery from not having played in so very long and not fully understanding how the world works. However that also means I don’t know a lot of things that might be interesting to go after.
The post Bel Bungles Minecraft appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
It has been a pretty wild ride for me and Dragon Age Inquisition. I remember when it initially released I had a pretty negative reaction to it, not in the least part because I ran into some significant technical difficulties. The negative opinion might have also been brought on by the fact that I had an awful lot of things on my plate. Warlords of Draenor was ramping up and that was an expansion I absolutely was serious about raiding in, as well as the fact that we were still very much actively raiding in Final Fantasy XIV as well. The combination of all of these left a pretty sour taste in my mouth, but I think a bit part of the experience was the fact that narratively it set me on a path of playing someone I considered to be the bad guys of Dragon Age 2.
As such it might come as somewhat of a surprise when I now tell you that after finishing Dragon Age Inquisition over the weekend, that I am pretty certain that it is now my favorite in the series. This game does more for the overarching cosmology of the setting that any of the previous games. It answers so many questions that were left hanging as well as creation all new mysteries to leave us waiting a fourth outing. Additionally to bring up a point raised on the podcast this weekend, Dragon Age Inquisition shows you a world worth saving. Ferelden during the blight was a miserable place, and Kirkwall similarly seemed to be horrible place as well. It isn’t so much that Orlais is that much better but you do get to see that the outdoor world of Thedas truly is breathtaking.
The real charm of Dragon Age Inquistion and the thing that ultimately won me over to its side… are the characters. In every other Bioware game there are always going to be one or two characters that by the end of the game I hate with passion. My friends have had to listen to my rants about these characters for years. In Dragon Age Inquisition there isn’t a single character that I did not come to love in the end. They all evolve over the course of the missions and the two of you grow together so that in the end you can look back on your time spent together fondly. I could not have said the same in those early hours with this game, but after over a hundred hours spent on this one play through I regret that the journey is over.
One of the more interesting things about Inquisition is that it has given me a new found respect for Dragon Age 2. The only problem is that now I cannot view my adventures in Kirkwall as anything other than the opening story arc of the Inquisition story. It makes me want to go back and play my way through it again because the events of Kirkwall play so directly into the events of the Templar and Mage war that I feel like knowing where it is going will give me a better appreciate of that story. I enjoyed Dragon Age 2 when I first played it, but it is a more cloistered experience than Origin or Inquisition. It is telling a smaller tale and as such it doesn’t feel like you had quite the same epic sweeping adventure. That said if you never played the second game I would absolutely suggest it as “required reading” for inquisition, because there will be plot points that probably land a little hollow. There wasn’t really a direct continuation of the story in Origins, but it feels like Inquisition takes place moments after the events of the second game.
So there we have it. The fifth time playing this game absolutely was the charm. I am looking forward to the next outing so much and I am hoping that maybe just maybe we see it before the end of the year. However given the lack of details and the still very early state the Game Awards Teaser appeared to be… I fully expect it to be a 2022 release. After experiencing the main story and DLC content I can say without a doubt that I am happiest with the way that Inquisition wraps things up. As such it is bumping Dragon Age Origins out of the way for my “favorite Dragon Age game” slot. Unfortunately this also bumps down Dragon Age 2 a rung, because it is still an overall worse experience than the first game but still one very much worth playing.
While I am apparently on this redemption arc for Bioware games kick, I am trying the OTHER title that I have never successfully made it thorugh. KOTOR and KOTOR2 originally released on the Xbox and I did not get to play either of them until the eventual Windows releases came out slightly afterwards. I loved Knights of the Old Republic when I played it in late 2003 and was absolutely rabid for a sequel. So when KOTOR2 The Sith Lords released in early 2005, I made every attempt to play it but encounter so many bugs that ultimately halted that experience. Similarly when it was finally released again through Steam in 2012 I gave it another attempt… but still largely found it to be a buggy mess. So here we are nine years later and an intricate series of third party patches applied… and things seem to mostly be going fairly smoothly.
It is a MUCH slower gaming experience than the more recent Bioware titles that I am used to. However I am starting to get into the swing of things. This is an era when this sort of third person RPG experience was not a “solved problem”. Interesting thing of note… sometimes Tam and I discuss when exactly mouse controls flipped so that what was inverted Y is now standard Y. Apparently it was sometime around the release of this game, because I ultimately had to flip the Y axis in order to get a control scheme that was more comfortable overall. The other interesting thing of note is that this exists in a world before “Quest Tracking” really existed and as such I find it interesting how there are no real waypointing going on directing you towards your objectives. I guess it was a different time in gaming, but I am getting used to it and hopefully can make it through the experience this time.
Now I am curious. Do you have any games that you bounced off and would like to return to? Drop me a line below. Also feel free to contest my proclaiming Dragon Age Inquisition the best Dragon Age game.
The post The Best Dragon Age appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
