Endgame Viable

A Wheel of Time-length blog post to start a new series dissecting each episode of Wheel of Time. Until I lose interest, of course. It’s a lot of work to write these and it hurts my back.

I read all of the Wheel of Time books some years back. Well, I listened to the audiobooks starting with book 10. I liked it. There’s a ton of things to criticize, but I still liked it. Wheel of Time, the book series, is an experience more than it is a story.

If you want the flavor of it, you can read the first book and skip all the rest. The first book is the only self-contained one. The rest of them are one long never-ending story.

I once rated the first four books as the best, then book five fell off a cliff, then there was a return to form somewhere around book nine or ten? (Unfortunately it might have been the last Jordan book.) Then Sanderson’s three books to finish out the series were good enough, with the last one being a fairly satisfying conclusion.

To make a long epic fantasy series short, I agree with the general consensus that Rosamund Pike is carrying the show all by herself. Which makes sense, since she’s also producing the show. I was also pleased to see Harriet McDougal’s and Brandon Sanderson’s names on the credits as consulting producers.

Remember when we used to write blog posts after each weekly episode of a show? I don’t either. It was a long time ago. But I like being able to do it again. So I’m doing that.

Fair warning though that this post absolutely, positively will not interest anyone who hasn’t read the books. You know how everyone hated the people who kept constantly comparing the Game of Thrones show to the books? Yeah, that’s what I’m doing here. Except I’m intentionally not re-reading the books to refresh my memory before watching the show. Only after.

There will be tons of spoilers. It goes without saying that you should watch the available shows before reading these posts. But I’ll try not to spoil anything in the show with knowledge from the books, and put the book discussion into a different section.

Amazon dropped the first three episodes all at once, so technically this is a three-episode summary, which makes it a lot more work for me.

Morraine and her bodyguard Lan arrive in the tiny backwater of Two Rivers looking for The Dragon Reborn, the reincarnated soul of A Very Important Pawn In The War Of Good Versus Evil (my interpretation). Four of the Two Rivers Kids are the right age: Rand, Mat, Perrin, and Egwene.

To prove how serious it is, horned satyr-like Trollocs attack and destroy Two Rivers, because The Dark One is also looking for The Dragon Reborn. Morraine convinces the Two Rivers Kids to leave with her and return to the safety of The White Tower, so the Trollocs will follow them instead of reducing their home town and everyone they love to dust and ash.

Morraine is injured in the Trolloc attack and gets sick on the road. They seek refuge in a scary dead city. Shadows attack them so they have to run, splitting up in the process. The Fellowship is already broken in the second episode.

Rand and Mat enter a town and stay at an inn, where they meet gleeman Thom Merrilin. Rand is almost killed by a Darkfriend in disguise, proving once again that Things Are Serious.

Perrin and Egwene end up going a different direction and find a camp of Traveling People (ie. fantasy gypsies). A pack of wolves (who for some reason look like ordinary pet dogs) seem to have taken a liking to Perrin.

Meanwhile Nynaeve from Two Rivers, the plucky youngest-ever Wisdom, has been following and sneaks up on Lan, tending the wounded Morraine. They encounter evil Whitecloaks and a scary Red Aes Sedai woman with a prisoner in a cage and then we have to wait a week for the next episode.

I absolutely hated that they began the show with almost a full minute of boring exposition. In that first minute, I had no hope whatsoever for the show. If it had been an unknown intellectual property, I would have turned it off and never come back. I can’t stand it when fantasy shows start with “and now, here’s the history of the world up until now.” Nobody cares.

I thought the first two episodes were a bit shaky, but the third episode seemed markedly better and gave me some confidence that the show might actually reach a second season. I was immersed enough by the end that I wished there were more episodes to watch.

In the third episode the characters split into separate groups, and it gave the show a little more time to breathe and get into character development, which is a staple of the Wheel of Time series.

Wheel of Time is a massively character-driven series, which appeals to me. It’s so character-driven that sometimes entire books go by with little or no plot advancement, and thus the reputation of the series was born. My preference for character-driven stories is probably why I was able to get through the series where many people can’t.

Overall the show is good enough, but nowhere near as good as Game of Thrones, the bar for fantasy book adaptations. It’s more like the quality level of Legend of the Seeker, which would undoubtedly annoy Wheel of Time fans to no end because as I recall there was a bit of a rivalry between Robert Jordan fans and Terry Goodkind fans.

(Disclaimer: I liked Legend of the Seeker and those Terry Goodkind books, although I only read a couple. He had an almost primal writing style that appealed to me.)

The scenery in the Two Rivers was amazing. First time I’ve ever wished I had a 4K television.

Weirdly, though, sometimes things were crisp and sharp and amazing, and other times it looked like somebody forgot to focus the camera or forgot to put lights on the set or filmed it on somebody’s old 8mm handheld from the 60s. Budget issues again, no doubt.

I hated the wool costumes for Two Rivers folk. It looked like everyone was wearing sweaters from a Land’s End catalog.

I wasn’t amazed by the music, either. It was just okay. “Good enough,” as it were.

I thought the Trollocs looked dumb and not even a little bit scary. Almost like old Ray Harryhausen Sinbad movies.

The best scene of the first three episodes was when the kids started singing, and then Morraine delivered that story of Menetheren. It was a good representative sample of the epic fantasy world of Wheel of Time, and it was Rosamund Pike demonstrating how much of better actor she is than everyone else in the show, when she can captivate attention even when reciting boring exposition.

Morraine. Every scene with Morraine is great, Rosamund Pike has nailed the character. I greatly fear what will happen to the show if Morraine isn’t in every scene, and they’ve already demonstrated that she won’t be.

Lan. Is fine. Just kind of there. Much like the character is supposed to be, you don’t notice him much.

Rand. Has a major Hayden Christensen from Attack of the Clones vibe going on, and not in a good way. But honestly it might work, because I never liked Rand in the books, so it’s natural for me to sigh and groan and boo and want to skip ahead to the next scene whenever I see him.

Mat. I didn’t like Mat much in the books either, and he’s similarly unimpressive in the show. He’s trying to be The Funny One like his character, but it’s in the same way that an annoying college kid tries to be funny: It’s only funny to his drunk college friends and nobody else. If they wanted to rewrite the books and kill off Mat (and Rand too, for that matter) for the show, I wouldn’t mind.

Perrin. The best of the boys so far, but that’s not saying much since, true to his character, he hasn’t actually said much yet. He only broods a lot. (He was my favorite Two Rivers Wonder Boy from the books, by a country mile.)

Egwene. Took some time to get used to but by the third episode she was fine, although she hasn’t had any opportunities to shine yet. I wouldn’t mind if they completely changed the books and made Egwene The Dragon Reborn. She’s a better actor. (It wouldn’t make any sense to do that, though. Also, we already saw the Darkfriend trying to capture Rand.)

Nynaeve. Also took some time to get used to but again, by the third episode I thought she was doing a good job with the character. Nynaeve was one of my favorites, certainly in the first book.

Thom Merrilin. He was okay. A bit overdramatic, but good enough. Seemed silly to have ordinary acoustic guitars in Wheel of Time though.

The Darkfriend tavern keep was a good guest star. Unfortunately I’ve already forgotten her character’s name.

Here’s where you should stop reading if you haven’t read the books, because I might accidentally spoil something in the show.

I haven’t read the books in almost ten years, but I thought it might be fun to write down what I remember being different from the books, and then see how my memory fared.

There’s a very long blog series on Tor.com called The Wheel of Time Re-Read by Leigh Butler. It’s a good source if you want to know what happened in the books without having to re-read the bazillion words in the books. There are probably many other series like that for Wheel of Time, but it’s the only one I know about.

That series of blog posts also heavily influenced me in the writing of this series of blog posts.

I had no memory whatsoever of Perrin being married at the start of the series, and I gasped when he accidentally killed his own wife during the Trolloc attack. I didn’t remember that at all, but I don’t think it detracted from or changed what I did remember of Perrin’s character. It seemed like something he might do. I seem to remember Perrin as generally broody and plagued by guilt in the first book and throughout the series, so it fits.

Based on a random sampling of the idiotic review bombs from stupid people on Amazon, I didn’t remember Perrin killing his wife because that didn’t happen in the books. Perrin wasn’t married to the blacksmith, he was the blacksmith’s apprentice. (Although I have an extremely vague memory of something like that scene happening with Perrin, perhaps many books later in the series?)

My memory was that the books didn’t show the Trolloc attack on Two Rivers at all, so if anything happened with Perrin it would have been off-screen anyway. As I recall we only saw Rand fighting one Trolloc with his dad, and then they arrived in town to find the aftermath. Or something like that.

And I remembered that correctly. In the books, the Trolloc attack occurred in Emond’s Field (specifically Mat and Perrin’s houses, for reasons), while the viewpoint was on Rand up at the farm.

I didn’t remember Morraine throwing any fireballs or bricks or anything in the first book. I actually don’t remember Morraine using much magic at all in the entire series, certainly not destructive magic. I didn’t think that was the Blue Aes Sedai’s thing.

It turns out I was partially correct: Morraine used what was described as “ball lightning” to fight the Trollocs, but it was off-screen, so we didn’t actually see it. As for her usage of magic in the rest of the book, I’ll have to re-read them to find out. I can tell from perusing the Wheel of Time Re-Read though that she definitely did throw fire around sometimes.

I was shocked when I saw Rand’s dad … didn’t die. I was 100% sure that Tam al-Thor died in the beginning. They also didn’t even show Rand taking the heron sword with him, it appeared out of nowhere in the third episode, in the hands of that Darkfriend.

It turns out Tam al-Thor didn’t die in the Trolloc attack; I completely misremembered that. Morraine healed him and Rand actually spoke to him before they left. That must mean that when Perrin (I think it was Perrin) finally returned to Two Rivers a hundred books later, Tam al-Thor must have still been there. I vaguely remember there being a big battle in Two Rivers at some point. Maybe that’s when Tam died. Don’t spoil it for me. I’m sure the show will get there eight or ten or fifteen seasons from now.

Oh, they also didn’t mention the fairly significant plot point that Rand might not have been Tam’s son, either. It was a big thing in the book. Too complicated for the show, probably.

I didn’t remember Rand and Egwene having such an “adult” relationship at the start of the books either, but that didn’t fundamentally change anything.

Yeah that definitely wasn’t a thing in the books. Rand just had vague adolescent boy “feelings.” The Two Rivers kids were basically children at the start of the books–naive, inexperienced, doe-eyed “sheepherders” as Lan liked to say. And Egwene was younger than the boys, who were around 16ish.

I didn’t remember Nynaeve getting kidnapped by Trollocs. It seemed rather uncharacteristic for a Trolloc not to mutilate their prey immediately. But the end result was the same and it made Nynaeve look like even more of a badass, so it was fine.

Confirmed: Nynaeve was busy healing people after the Trolloc attack and was in no way kidnapped. But it’s completely believable for her character anyway. It’s just not believable for the Trollocs to kidnap people.

Nynaeve did catch up to Morraine and Lan after Shadar Logoth similar to what was portrayed in the show, but that was actually the second time she had caught up with them. They cut out a ton of road trip from the second episode.

I found it a bit odd that all four of the kids left Two Rivers with barely a word of protest. Morraine delivered her speech, they shrugged and said, “Okay, you’re the producer I guess. Bye forever, home and family!”

There was a little bit more to it in the book, but it was still a “hurry up, we have to leave now or the Trollocs will level your home” situation. Or at least, that’s what Morraine the tricksy Aes Sedai wanted them to think. I don’t remember why Egwene went with them in the books, and I don’t remember why Nynaeve followed them. I think Egwene just wanted to get away from Emond’s Field, but with Nynaeve it was something about wanting to bring the others back home, thinking that perhaps Morraine had kidnapped them.

They spent almost no time in Shadar Logoth in the show, which I remember being called “the City of the Dead.” I remembered it as a lengthy and exciting part in the books. I suppose they didn’t have the budget for it.

It was never called “the City of the Dead.” I have no idea where I got that from. It was Shadar Logoth, or The Shadow’s Waiting.

In the books, they only spent a chapter and a half there, so it wasn’t as much as I thought. Thom Merrilin (who was with the group from Emond’s Field from the start) and Nynaeve were there as well.

I remembered Perrin’s and Egwene’s trek between the (not) City of the Dead and The Traveling People being a lot longer and more interesting. It was the time period I recall starting to like those two characters. They may have had a run-in with the Whitecloaks then.

They didn’t run into Whitecloaks until later, but they did encounter Elyas and his pack of wolves, a character who has apparently been deleted from the show thusfar. Fortunately they didn’t delete the wolves, because otherwise Perrin doesn’t have any character traits.

Speaking of which, I would have been fine if they’d erased the Whitecloaks from the story entirely if they were looking for something to streamline. I don’t remember them being nearly so cartoonishly evil in the books.

I don’t think the Whitecloaks make much of an appearance in the first half of Eye of the World, actually, until after Perrin and Egwene travel with the Traveling People for a while.

I thought I’d listen to the audiobooks again, to make sure my memory of the books is accurate. I figured I’d head off all the comments correcting me by correcting myself first. Not that I have comments yet. Anyway, this section contains musings after re-listening to the book.

Based on a review of the chapter titles of the first book, the first three episodes of the show covers roughly the first 25 chapters of the first book, with Rand and Mat’s tavern bits coming from way up around chapter 30. That’s a lot. Robert Jordan chapters are enormous. The sheer magnitude of epic fantasy that was cut from these first three episodes is staggering.

In the books The Two Rivers is a big area, with several different little towns in it. The place of the Trolloc attack was actually called Emond’s Field, something I forgot.

They spent a lot of time in the Two Rivers at the start of the books, and erased a lot of it from the show. Egwene was the mayor’s daughter, for example. Perrin was supposed to be the blacksmith’s apprentice. There were other kids, too.

The Two Rivers kids are much older in the show than they were in the books, not surprisingly.

The girls' braids were supposed to signify being of “marriageable age.” The Women’s Circle was a different political body. There was also a (men’s) Town Council that I don’t think they mentioned in the show. Which is fine.

The detailed culture of the Two Rivers and its people is way too complicated for an hour-long episode, especially when they’re about to leave forever anyway. That’s why the books are so long. Jordan goes into a lot of depth about that kind of thing.

In the books, Morraine was only looking for Rand, Mat, and Perrin as potential Dragon Reborn candidates. The Dragon Reborn in the books was very specifically a man, which is why the Aes Sedai were so terrified of him and interested in finding him. (Because men who can do magic historically go insane and blow up the world, killing everyone in it–a somewhat undesirable outcome.)

But in the show, Morraine added Egwene into the list of potential Dragon Reborn candidates, and they pointedly remarked it could have been a man or a woman in the prologue, no doubt a nod to 2021 sensibilities. There’s a lot of interesting story ramifications there for Wheel of Time purists.

One might surmise that the show depicts a different “turn of the wheel” than the books did. That’s another theme of the books: Everything’s happened before and everything will happen again.

For a brief horrifying time I thought they might be merging Egwene and Nynaeve together into one character, since they almost never said anyone’s names out loud in the beginning.

I actually forgot that the braids signified something in the Two Rivers, and wasn’t merely a style choice. I think Nynaeve was the only one who continued to wear her braid after leaving Two Rivers, and thus the legend of Nynaeve pulling on her braid for fifteen books was born.

As with the books, the core group of women are probably going to be far more interesting than the core group of men. Egwene and Nynaeve (and soon Elaine, perhaps?) are portrayed by noticeably better actors than the dudes so far.

One of the core themes of Wheel of Time overall is a gender role reversal, where the women hold all the power over the men. I was worried they might try to sanitize the “battle of the sexes” portrayed in the books for a 2021 audience, but I’m pleased to see they aren’t erasing it completely. It’s one of the things that makes Wheel of Time unique.

But I can tell they’re being careful with it too. They added Egwene as a potential Dragon Reborn, for example.

It’s not problematic in 2021 to show the disdain Aes Sedai hold for men, but it could be problematic to depict how much the men in Wheel of Time resent the Aes Sedai. It’ll be interesting to see what happens if they ever get to the Dudes Channeling Society, the real name of which I’ve forgotten.

Okay this blog post has spiraled way out of control. Wheel of Time does that to you. I had intended to watch the first three episodes, then write up some commentary, then re-read the relevant chapters of the book (or listen to them), then write some more commentary, then re-watch the three episodes, then fix the commentary I got wrong the first time, and so on, until I had completed a blog post.

I got through most of that for the first episode. But the sheer volume of text that is covered in the second and third episodes is entirely too much to process on a weekly basis, so I’m going to pull the ripcord and get the heck out of this blog post before I spend the entire week working on it.

I stumbled upon a new (to me) tactical RPG based on the D&D rules.

I’m glad that Endwalker has been delayed a bit because I’m not yet finished writing and/or publishing my posts about Shadowbringers. That would have been awkward to continue posting about the old thing when the new thing arrives.

So far in November I started NaNoWriMo, then gave up on the second day. Then I had fairly significant back pain that kept me away from recreational computing, sitting down, standing up, or moving much at all for a week or so. And now somehow nearly half the month is over in the blink of an eye.

My heroes finding clues.

I’d previously posted about playing Valheim again, but that’s now a distant memory.

I gave up because progress is just too artificially slow for me. I was vexed by the daunting chore of making metals, and while I did finally find the second boss, the prospect of traveling halfway across the world to spend hours setting up yet another forward operating base wasn’t that appealing.

I played a little bit of XCOM 2 (for the first time) and Wasteland 2 (again), both of which have good tactical turn-based combat, but the enemies in XCOM 2 have many unfair advantages and I don’t particularly like the parts of the game between the missions. Wasteland 2 also suffers from fairly tedious gameplay in between the combat encounters.

Overland journeys are a neat idea but it gets old.

In looking for another of the same kind of tactical RPG, I landed on a game called Solasta: Crown of the Magister. (Which I consistently mislabel Magister of the Crown.) I’ve had it in my wishlist forever, but I only recently noticed that it was fully completed and launched out of early access, and even has DLC already, and it was on sale to boot.

I didn’t expect much from it, as I often don’t with games that originate on Kickstarter, the “please give us money to write our first game in Unity so we don’t have to get real jobs” platform, but it’s actually good. Well, decent. It’s rough around the edges to be sure, but the core game is solid.

Town is where you do all your inventory management and buy magic stuff.

Solasta is a turn-based tactical RPG that uses the “Dungeons and Dragons SRD 5.1 Ruleset,” which probably means more to D&D nerds than it does to me. I just know the lingo sounds similar to Critical Role, except it’s missing the obvious Wizards of the Coast trademarks. For example, the spell is called “Hideous Laughter,” not “Tasha’s Hideous Laughter.”

I haven’t actually played Dungeons and Dragons since the first edition rules when I was a kid, which wasn’t even called the first edition back when I played it. In computer form, what I played is closest to the rules that are in the original Baldur’s Gate.

I believe Baldur’s Gate is actually the second edition ruleset, mutated for real-time combat. But if you’ve tried to play Baldur’s Gate with the “Core” difficulty setting, that’s the D&D rules I’m familiar with. (I recently played a game of Baldur’s Gate on “Core” difficulty and it’s brutal, especially if you start out as an Illusionist.)

This was the exact moment I learned that Counterspell was in the game.

Anyway, Solasta uses fifth edition rules, which, as far as I can tell, is 100% focused around managing the state of “having advantage,” a concept that did not exist in my youth. If you “have advantage,” you’ll probably be successful on your dice rolls. If you don’t “have advantage,” many of your attacks from your pitiful low-level characters will miss and most of your spells will fail and your party will die because of it.

God help you if you “have disadvantage.”

I learned a harsh lesson about disadvantage because I played my first Solasta game with the “Iron Man” difficulty setting enabled, which means if your party dies, the game is over. I tend to do that with tactical RPGs lately, like Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, or Wasteland 2. It makes for a more exciting video series. There’s not much dramatic tension if you can make mistakes willy nilly and re-load whenever.

This was a terrible place to fight, even with lights.

Anyway I was doing fine until I got to Caer Lem and a big underground fight with Soraks (lizard people who look a lot like the aliens in the 1980s hit miniseries V) in a cavern that had tons of verticality, and did not realize the importance of taking the time to light all the torches hanging all around the battlefield.

You see, if you don’t have enough light, there’s a good chance that all of your attacks will have disadvantage because the enemies are “unlit” and you’ll miss every time and everyone in your party will die screaming while you watch helplessly. (Even though you, the player, can see everything.)

After my party died, I realized I was enjoying the game enough that I wanted to continue. But I had to start all over again, and starting an RPG a second time can be painful. Thankfully Solasta makes it bearable by allowing you to skip the tutorial.

Solasta’s story isn’t fantastic but it’s good enough that I’m invested in seeing how my plucky randomly-generated adventurers react to stuff.

I'm sure that crown won't do anything bad if we touch it.

The voice acting is good enough that my player characters have some personality, even if you can tell that two of the female voices sound like they might be same actor. (Actually my rogue sounds like Daphne from Frasier.) But it’s not as bad as, say, Oblivion.

Most of all, I enjoy the combat encounters in Solasta. The camera viewpoints are frustrating sometimes but otherwise it has a turn-based system that keeps me engaged and on the edge of my seat throughout each encounter, forcing me to have to make good decisions throughout if I want to be victorious. I usually don’t know if I’m going to win or not until some clutch dice roll turns the tide of battle in my favor, and my party barely survives to fight another day.

At least, that was my experience in the first three or four levels. After that, it got a lot easier, but that’s a topic for another day.

Notes on the Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers Patch 5.3 Content, Reflections in Crystal, which I finished well over a month ago at the time of this publication.

Super duper big-time spoilers ahead.

This time there are twelve quests to get through, which is a lot for a patch. And these are major, epic quests, too. This particular patch felt huge.

When I finished patch 5.2, not having seen any different, I had a theory that Endwalker would be all about fighting Elidipus. But that went out the window in a hurry with 5.3, because this one single patch was that. We dispatched Elidipus handily by the end, and we finally bore the Scions back to The Source.

So this patch felt like the official “end” of the Shadowbringers expansion story, and the beginning of the prologue for Endwalker.

Which, now, is likely to involve Zenos and this new Ascian in the body of everybody’s favorite kid, Ahasi. I recognized his sly grin and voice at the end of the last patch right away.

Plot twist! 2P turns against us! The whole dwarf village is destroyed by powerful explosions!

In modern Final Fantasy terms, that means everyone’s fine except a couple of tables were knocked over. They enshrined most everyone and everything in impervious plot armor after Heavensward.

In any case, it turns out 9S was our friend all along. Then 2B shows up out of thin air.

That likely means little unless you’ve played Nier: Automata, of which I hadn’t played more than a couple hours by the time I entered this raid. In short, they’re androids.

Anyway there’s a new Alliance Raid, The Puppet’s Bunker, which is considerably harder than The Copied Factory. But I managed to get most of the gear drops from only two runs. The music in these Alliance Raids continues to be amazing.

There’s more trials, presumably, in the Werleht questline, but I didn’t feel like I needed to continue that. I don’t care that much about Gaius or his adventures, to be honest.

I decided to try out Valheim again.

The first time, I bought it, played for less than an hour, then returned it, wondering why everyone was raving about it. It seemed obvious to me that it was an average survival game that wasn’t finished. I don’t understand why it caught fire with the MMORPG community.

Some six months later, is it more finished now?

Home sweet home and hearth, or something.

Nope, not really. It’s riddled with bugs and annoyances and quirky behavior. The character animations look like middle school art class projects. You can’t walk up even the slightest incline. You can’t hit anything if you’re standing on sloped terrain.

They’ve just done a supposedly major “Hearth and Home” update, but it doesn’t seem that major to me. They seem to be tinkering with whatever, following no plans or visions, blowing whichever way the wind and/or player forums blow, like a leaf on the wind and like most open source projects. Maybe it’ll get better, maybe it’ll get worse. Who knows?

But I can see why people like Valheim, especially fans of 1990s MMORPGs which had more bugs than features. The emergent gameplay of trying to brute force your way around the bugs, and the collective social bonding over dying to infuriating buggy behavior, was half the fun of 1990s online gaming. “Better in beta,” and all that rot.

The third-person camera is also a good distinguishing feature for Valheim, as compared to other survival games. I personally can’t play first-person games as much anymore without getting physically ill.

Anyway, I had a three-day weekend so I decided to give Valheim a more solid effort. I got through the first boss. It took two tries.

Slightly harder than a Boar.

The first time, I severely underestimated how much damage that electrified deer would do to me, and lost all my stuff. (I, of course, did not consider the possibility that I might lose to the boss and was carrying everything I owned. Fortunately your stuff never disappears, even if you die multiple times, or don’t come back for 60 days.)

After dying, I discovered the boss doesn’t go away after you summon it, and I got stuck in a death cycle, because I built my “forward operating base” a little too close and Eikthyr kept chasing me after each respawn. Eventually I got far enough away that I was able to regroup and rebuild. For future reference: Bosses have a massive aggro radius.

Tipa told me on Twitter I had to go to the Black Forest to get Troll armor before I could fight the first boss, so, being an obstinate gamer, I took that as a direct challenge to not do that. :) Besides, Hugin the friendly bird warned me not to enter the Black Forest until after I killed the first boss. And even though I died the first time, I whittled the boss down to half its health, so it seemed possible to defeat it, with slightly better dodging and blocking.

The second time, I had figured out how to upgrade my workbench to level 2 (not intuitive, ahem) and brought deer leather armor and a tower shield to block a little better. So after dodging its straight-line lightning bolt attack, the one unavoidable ground stomp only did a couple points of damage with the shield up. Then I chipped away at it with a flint knife until he was dead. (I forgot to make a flint spear the second time.) Easy peasy.

After that, I started wandering around the Black Forest wondering how to progress. I’m sure I can Google a checklist of things I’m supposed to do to advance, but I still cling to this weird idea that games should explain what the player is supposed to do. The last thing Hugin told me was to “explore the Black Forest,” so presumably I’ll stumble upon the next breadcrumb eventually.

Somewhere in here there's a path to a fun survival endgame.

That’s one of the problems with Valheim: The pacing is really slow. It takes hours and hours and hours to search around and get materials to make the simplest things.

I’d estimate that up to 90% of the time I spend in Valheim is “down time,” that dreaded condition that used to be so common in online games, where you’re not doing anything except traveling from point A to point B, or farming resources to make something, or methodically searching a large area, with nothing to do but think about all the productive things you could be doing with your life if you weren’t stuck in front of the computer holding down the “forward” key. Don’t even think about playing this game unless you’ve got a big stack of podcasts or audiobooks or television shows queued up and ready to listen to.

Anyway I’ve found copper and tin in the Black Forest, and mined a fair bit of it, but Hugin told me I need a smelter to do anything with it. Naturally the game hasn’t informed how to make a smelter. Again, I assume I could Google this, but the “correct” way to play this game, according to what it’s presenting to me on the screen, is to wander around hoping to stumble into the next arbitrary threshold beyond which I’ll be given the knowledge to make a smelter.

Tipa mentioned Trolls in the Black Wood, but for the longest time I never saw anything but dopey Skeletons and annoying Greydwarves. But I finally found a Troll yesterday. It’s big and intimidating! But it has a slow heavy attack that you can consistently dodge and avoid all damage.

Bigger than I expected, but easy to fight.

But … as soon as I assessed its basic attack pattern (it has precisely one), the moment I thought to myself, “Oh, this is easy,” a gaggle of greydwarves rolled up out of nowhere and ruined everything.

Greydwarves, you see, run around in chaotic patterns and never stand still, making them daunting foes in groups. And they throw things at you from range. So timing the dodging of a circus troupe of greydwarves and a massive Troll club at the same time became rather difficult. And also I was on a slope so movement was extra challenging, because for reasons that can only be to punish players and keep them from having any fun in their game, the developers made it so you can’t move up even a slight incline without sliding back down.

I had to run back to my base if I wanted to survive. Of course the Troll followed, where it proceeded to smash the palisade walls. I climbed up on top of my house inside to pelt it with arrows, then it did that massive club AOE attack that smooshed me from all the way outside the walls.

Then I spawned a million miles away at the original starting point of the game, because it turned out the troll had destroyed my bed inside the house while it was bashing on the palisades. It didn’t send me to the next-closest bed, but that stone circle starting point. Super lame and annoying.

Can't go there without a winter coat, apparently.

And that’s basically all there is to Valheim: The crazy stories that come out of unexpected adversity. It makes up roughly 1% of your game time.

Anyway I went back and killed the Troll and unlocked all the Troll armor. It was a pain to make the Troll armor, because I only have one Tier 3 workbench way back in the first zone, back in the Meadows. It’s rather time-consuming to gather flint and especially leather scraps, so it’s a massive pain to upgrade more than one workbench without tons of running back and forth.

Don’t even get me started an the irritating resource bottleneck with leather scraps. They only drop from Boars, which are the rarest of all creatures in the Meadows, and you need them for everything, and you need a lot of them to upgrade a workbench to level 3. Spending hours wandering the Meadows hoping for Boars to spawn might be an accurate throwback to 90s gaming but is not my idea of a fun game design in 2021.

I don’t understand why nobody rattled off these long, long lists of problems with Valheim back when it came out. All I ever heard were good things. There’s a deep state conspiracy to suppress the truth about this game, for reasons I still can’t comprehend. There are some good things–the landscapes are fairly pretty–but there’s a lot of bad things, too.

For example, a teeny tiny bump on the ground will physically block your character from walking over top of it! What is that? I’ll tell you what that is: A bug. And an annoying one at that. Especially in the middle of melee combat when you have to dodge to avoid attacks, but some tiny little bump on the ground behaves like a brick wall. It’s a bug that should be fixed immediately in one of these patches that come out every other day, but mysteriously hasn’t been.

Getting killed because of weird terrain collision issues is one of my top pet peeves in gaming, and Valheim seems to have been specially designed for the player to get stuck on terrain a lot.

If only this meadow was teeming with Boars.

And the building system? It’s almost impossible to get two consecutive pieces of wall to snap together. That’s not normal. In ARK, you click-click-click and have a house in seconds. In Valheim, it’s an epic struggle of man versus nature to make a corner. It reminds me of Landmark, which incomprehensibly made their building system for industry 3D artists instead of casual players. In Valheim, they seem to think that I’m going to want to build a log cabin one log at a time for fun.

Still, Valheim isn’t bad. It’s just not finished. But for $20, you too can enjoy the constant frustration and time-destroying tedium of average 1990s online gaming.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is good, with some caveats.

It’s essentially a different version of The Last Of Us. A stealth game with heavy story elements, it’s set in an alternate history medieval France during the bubonic plague years.

I love historical fiction games. They’re somewhat rare in the gaming industry. It was the main draw of Assassin’s Creed. Kingdom Come: Deliverance as well. A Plague Tale veers moderately far away from historicity (eg. lots of modern-sounding Gen Z dialog), but there’s enough in there to push those buttons.

Examining the iconography in these tapestries is fascinating.

French is also one of my favorite accents, so the fact that most of the voice acting is distinctly French is a big selling point for me personally. Your mileage may vary.

The biggest deficiency in A Plague Tale is the gameplay mechanics. It feels like it isn’t quite finished, or they didn’t have time for quality control. Subtle bugs and jankiness abound, which repeatedly pulled me out of the story immersion.

The mouse-and-keyboard controls chaff: There’s a lot of stretching to reach many keys simultaneously, so it felt like playing complex chords on a guitar at times. (Usually in the middle of fighting for your life, where the slightest mistake results in death and starting over.)

This is a bad time to be fumbling with controls.

There are (several) times when gameplay challenges undermine what could be powerful story moments, especially in the final climactic chapter. The music builds, the voice actors are voice acting powerful emotive dialog, and then you take one step in the wrong direction and die instantly, and start over. After the second or third of fourth time of hearing the same dialog again and again, the story impact is lost.

In situations like that, the game forgets that it’s a story game, so the story should be the most important part of the experience. Challenging gameplay should be put between the powerful story moments, not in the middle of them. If you want to put gameplay in the middle, it has to be so easy you can’t possibly fail it.

The Last Of Us got things like that right. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was also brilliant at getting out of the way of its own story. A Plague Tale doesn’t.

That kid is too adorable.

But despite that, it’s a good game and worth playing. Not great, but good. It’s a solid story with twists and turns I didn’t expect, if you can push your way through the shaky gameplay foundation underneath of it.

Notes on the Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers Patch 5.2 Content, Echoes of a Fallen Star.

Super duper big-time spoilers ahead.

Another ten quests to get through. These post-Shadowbringers patches are big and meaty, unlike what I remember of the first couple of post-Stormblood patches, which I remember as being fairly inconsequential. (No, I still haven’t fixed the images on older posts yet.)

The bodies of the Scions back in The Source are still deteriorating, even faster now, so we have to hurry up getting them back. So of course we’re soon distracted from that task again.

Instead, we start working on clearing the name of poor Ardbert, the First’s much-maligned Warrior of Light, who’s reputation was ruined. Then, much to our surprise, Ardbert himself strides into The Crystarium and declares that he needs all the people of the First to rise up and become Warriors of Light like him.

They don't always get facial expressions right but this time they nailed it.

Long story short, it’s not Ardbert (whose soul has actually merged with the player’s soul), but that last pesky evil unsundered Ascian Elidipus in Ardbert’s guise, because of course it is.

After a quick trip to the Tree Village of the Bunny People for a fun adventure with the Bunny Sisters, we end up going back to another underwater ruin in The Tempest to research the Ascians, with the help of everyone’s favorite flying whale. This results in a moderately interesting dungeon run, the first part of which has the dungeon going past you while you stand still, which was a neat twist.

When we get back to The Crystarium, Elidipus causes meteors to fall from the sky and everyone hears the voice of Hydaelyn speaking to them and it’s all a grand spectacle with earth-shattering implications. Unfortunately you have to be a hardcore Final Fantasy nerd to understand even a little bit of it.

From a practical standpoint, the only thing that matters is that Elidipus is bad and we need to stop him. But not in this patch.

There’s a couple of new quests, but no new raids. The wacky dwarves of Komra are getting ready for a carnival.

There’s a new set of four raids but I didn’t do any of them. I played through the opening quests to unlock the first one, then walked away. I wasn’t all that enamored with the new character Pouty McPoutyFace, so I guess I’ll never know what becomes of Ryne, and Thancred and Urianger will forever remain in a time paradox, stuck in The First.

Pouty McPoutyFace

The main scenario quest directs you back to The Locks of Gyr Abania, where you unlock a Trial. The game sort of implies that you have to do the trial to continue the story and save the world, but in fact you can ignore it (which is what I did, because I didn’t have the required item level).

But I went back and did this trial after I finished the 5.2 Main Scenario Quests. I jumped into a PUG and got through it on the first try.

I can’t say I was terribly invested in the story surrounding Gaius and his adopted kids, so I doubt I’ll do any more of this quest line. I don’t know Gaius and I certainly don’t know his kids, and I don’t know how any of it’s related to anything.

Without a compelling story, I don’t know why I’d want to do these Werleht Trials, other than just to say I did them. I suspect they drop weapons or parts for weapons, but with Endwalker almost upon us, one hardly need bother working to get new gear that will immediately be replaced.

Some time back I mentioned that I wanted/needed a service that would listen for updates to my RSS feed.

I figured I’d have to write my own. But I stumbled upon a service I’d never heard of before called Zapier, which is a generalized automation tool that reads stuff from places and puts stuff in other places based on triggers. One of those triggers is new posts arriving in an RSS feed.

For example, I set it up to post a tweet to Twitter when I publish a blog post, like this one, and to post a link to that self-same blog post in a Discord channel.

(That channel being my super secret Discord that’s been doing nothing since 2016. Maybe I could leverage Discord for blog comments, he thought tentatively?)

The free plan is extraordinarily limited, but I think it’s good enough for my measly blog, as long as I don’t post more than 50 times a month. Har har.

It was very easy to setup. Simply log in with a Google account and hand it a million more permissions than it actually needs for Discord and Twitter. I’m sure it’s perfectly safe and is not in any way scraping tons of my data to sell to marketers!

There’s also a service I have heard of before called IFTTT which does the same thing, but the functionality in the base applets seems much more limited and there doesn’t seem to be any way to transform the data, at least in the free platform.

In Zapier, I can strip newlines and truncate text to make the tweets prettier. Doesn’t seem to be possible in IFTTT.

Anyway, that’s one more blog problem checked off the list.

P.S. One thing I love about development posts is I can just use that one image I’ve always used and don’t have to spend half my day trying to find new images.

P.P.S. Yes, the whole purpose of this post is to test Zapier “in production.”

Searching for the next game to play, and also apparently listing every game I’ve looked at recently.

I’m one of those people who only plays one game at a time. I’m the Charles Emerson Winchester of gaming:

“Gentlemen, I play one game at a time–I play it very well–and then I move on.”

With New World booted from the the “main game” spot, that leaves nothing pressing for me to play, and it also leaves me feeling somewhat burned out and uninterested in games. I’m in that mood where I start a game, look at it for a minute and sigh, then log out and watch YouTube. For me it usually happens after playing an endless treadmill game for too long (in this case, it was Shadowbringers). I have to go through a detox period.

There’s no reason to log back into Final Fantasy XIV until November anyway. I haven’t yet posted all the posts I was going to post about it, but the truth can finally be told that I’m done with the Shadowbringers Main Scenario Quest. (I’ve been done for weeks, actually.)

I re-installed Black Desert Online, but discovered I was supposed to do some kind of account transfer earlier in the year, which I didn’t, so all my characters and my entire account is gone. I have to buy the game again. Or play it for free. I think you can do that now.

I re-installed Elder Scrolls Online, but as soon as I saw the login screen I remembered I don’t like ESO that much. My characters mean nothing to me, and I can’t think of any zone story or NPC characters that mean anything to me. The most fun thing for me to do in that game is try to guess which NPCs are voiced by Critical Role cast members.

I even forced myself to log into Bless Unleashed a few times, but I just can’t with that game. Any time you add “combos” to a combat system, I’m going to back away slowly.

I logged into Guild Wars 2 a couple times, but meh. Not into it. Don’t care about the expansion. Maybe some other time.

The Mortal Online 2 stress test might still be available, but that game is hard work to play. That’s the game everyone says they want–an experience just like playing an MMORPG in the late 90s–but of course nobody is going to touch it because no sane person actually wants that. Also, it’s first-person only.

In the single-player realm, I wanted to finish Nioh, but at this point, I might as well admit it’s dead to me and uninstall it forever. I quit in the middle of some ice lady boss, and you can’t go back to any Souls-like game in the middle of a boss fight. I didn’t like the repetitive nature of that game anyway.

I could try Nioh 2, but I’ve already assessed that it’s the same as Nioh 1.

I started Greedfall a while back, but it didn’t click with me. It was “okay” but running back and forth to watch cut scenes is the main game activity. It wasn’t a good game for videos.

In a similar vein, I started A Plague Tale, which I like a lot, but it’s another game of watching cut scenes and listening to voice acting, and it isn’t a good game for videos.

With that kind of game, I could theoretically play it without recording it, but it just seems like a waste of time to play games now without leaving some kind of creative work or archival record behind to show for it. (And before you ask, blogging is too much work.)

I started Hellpoint some months ago but lost interest. It starts out as a decent indie Souls-like but it drifts into repetitious mediocrity after a while.

On to other games I’ve looked into recently. I have some interest in continuing Nier: Automata, but that’s a controller game so I can only play for a couple of hours a week if I want to retain the use of my left thumb for, you know, real life. Also, it’s a fantastic award-worthy soundtrack, but the game feels hollow.

Another controller game that I like but can’t play very much is Wreckfest. It’s by the same people who made Flatout from olden times, which I also liked. One of the first ragdoll games! Anyway, you get in a car and wreck other cars. That’s it. Pretty cool. Sometimes you drive lawnmowers instead. Also cool.

I’m near the end of Final Fantasy XIII, but I haven’t had much interest in continuing since the Stupid Face Boss. You just know there’s going to be even more annoying bosses to come. Also, it’s another game that’s not good for videos. It’s button mashing and cut scenes. Incidentally, I also bought Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Lightning Returns in a recent sale for some future day.

I got a little indie visual novel called Tiny Bunny which popped up on my Steam front page on sale one day. I got it because I thought a scary nightmare bunny was a funny idea. I played it for an hour, but it’s not well-written, or at least the English translation isn’t well-translated. Tons and tons of adverbs. Don’t use adverbs in your visual novels, he advised sagely.

I tried to get into State of Decay 2 but I just can’t. I loved the first game and played it to death, but the second one is just … the same. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime game concept, apparently.

I made the mistake of buying Mortal Shell because it had been on my wish list for a while and finally launched. Learn from my mistakes. I thought it was going to be a cool Souls-like. I played an hour or so, and it’s not a cool Souls-like. The beautiful graphics are a trick, as they often are. I should have returned it. [UPDATE: I forgot to mention the worst part: You can’t dodge while moving, and if you hold down the dodge key slightly too long, it doesn’t dodge at all.]

Speaking of returning games, I bought Biomutant in a sale, played for an hour, and returned it. It’s a cool idea, but it’s not executed well.

Buying games, playing for an hour, and then returning them might be a good model for me going forward. It’s rare that I find a game I want to play more than an hour. New World would have been a game I returned in an hour if everybody in my social circles wasn’t constantly emoting so much about it.

I played a bit of Wildermyth, a game which was all the rage for a week or so. It’s cute, and a cool concept, but it ran out of steam for me in a couple hours.

I was going to play Ashen, another Souls-like-ish with an interesting visual aesthetic, but it mysteriously crashes on my new gaming PC.

I got DOOM Eternal on sale, but I haven’t even installed it yet. I assume it’s exactly the same as DOOM 2016, which itself got somewhat repetitive around the middle. Other big name games I’ve gotten recently but haven’t installed include Far Cry 5, Disco Elysium, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and XCOM 2.

And I think that about covers all the games that have crossed my desk in the last six months that I haven’t already mentioned before. I feel no inspiration to play any of the above games.

Maybe I’ll try Valheim again. And I’d like to try Deathloop, because Dishonored was fantastic. But what I should do is avoid games and play guitar or watch television or something else instead until I’ve recharged. Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker is coming up in November and then in January the big, big, big game Elden Ring, the biggest, biggest, biggest game release since Sekiro.

On the seventh morning of New World I think I can confidently report that this game isn’t for me.

I don’t particularly feel like logging in any more. I’d rather spend my time replaying A Realm Reborn, or finding a new game, or watching YouTube, or writing blog posts, or just about anything else.

I somewhat enjoy gathering in MMORPGs, but I don’t enjoy competing for resources. I’m on a quest now where I have to find silver nodes and craft silver ingots to make this vitally important Azoth Staff.

Yes, a crafting quest is in the main story of New World. A long one, with lots of scavenger hunting. Lots and lots and lots of running back and forth, or else burning up your limited supply of azoth to fast travel. I’m not that much into crafting, or running.

Anyway, these silver nodes aren’t easy to find. I dare say they’re impossible to find without Googling where to find them, which I did. There’s a handy interactive map of where to find every single thing in New World already. (For which I’m grateful, because it’s definitely not fun to search for things.) Then, when you get to the nodes, the area is crawling with enemies and other players looking for the same scarce resource.

So just like that, it became “work” to play New World. It went from a game to a chore, and it became very, very easy to set it aside.

There’s a lot of a peer-pressure to keep playing, because, after all, everyone else is reporting having tons of fun, organizing new companies, setting up Discords and communities, finding amazing screenshots to take, etc.

So what’s wrong with me? Maybe I should push through this chore because apparently something great awaits on the other side?

But no, it’s not me. It’s the game. There is no other side.

It’s a game for a very particular kind of MMORPG player, the kind who likes to live in a game, who can just sit there all day every day, and doesn’t mind an open-ended time commitment.

That’s not me. I like to log into games, do things for a fixed amount of time, typically 30-45 minutes, then log out and get on with my day. (Coincidentally that’s about the maximum amount of time my back allows me to sit in a chair at a PC without a break.) Maybe I’ll play two or three 30-45 minute sessions if the game is really good, or maybe I won’t.

New World is also mainly for people who enjoy gathering and crafting and building, and watching numbers go up. Racing to make those numbers go up. “Collectors,” or “Achievers,” I think it was, in Bartle parlance.

That’s definitely not me. I enjoy gathering sometimes but I find that when I’m zoned out in games doing repetitive tasks, it’s either a sign that I’m avoiding something else in my life, or it’s a sign that I need to take a break from gaming entirely to recharge. It’s likely I’m playing just because it’s a habit, and not because it’s actually fun.

And there’s this: The combat in New World is terrible. There, I said it. It’s just bad. It’s always been bad, ever since the first alpha I played. It’s the worst action combat I’ve ever seen in an MMO. Maybe it’s all the lag. Maybe it’ll get better in a couple months.

But right now it’s so frustratingly imprecise, glitchy, random, laggy, and chaotic. I end up just doing strong attacks over and over again and hope I don’t take enough damage to require down time to heal.

New World does make me want to log into Elder Scrolls Online again, to remind myself what the last successfully-launched mainstream MMO looks like. ESO was somewhat of a train wreck at launch too, and it, too, turned into a chore within a month. But it’s still here, still charging us for every little thing, so there’s reason to hope for New World’s future success.

Oddly enough, when it first launched, ESO was supposed to be a PvP-only endgame, too. There used to be quite a focus on PvP in that game. Whatever happened to that? Oh I remember: Nobody actually played it, so they changed their focus. A wise decision on their part.

I’m sure I’ll continue to log into New World now and then (no subscription!), and I’ll be watching the patch notes to see if they start to work on adding something for me. Otherwise New World needs a couple more years to bake, just like ESO did.

The real question is: What happens if/when the streamers leave?

Bullet points because I don’t feel like writing an essay.