RPG Tourist

Saturn viewed from orbit of Saturn's moon Tethys Disclaimer: I grew up during Nasa's peak in popular imagination and culture and sandbox RPGs are my preferred video game genre. Before Starfield's release I spent several months playing Fallout 4 and No Man's Sky. This contributes to my point of view on Starfield. Few games allow the player to interact with world objects to the degree that Bethesda's games do. There's a reason for this. Much of the game's available resources has to be dedicated to storing, tracking and animating objects. Not to mention physics calculations or the multitude of scripts running concurrently to manage the game world behind the scenes. It makes my head throb just to think of it. I'm not a professional software developer but I have dabbled in database management, animation and simple game and app programming so I understand something of what's involved. Bethesda also allows custom characters and a number of NPC companions wh...

 Anyone who has followed my Twitter account might tell you that I can develop some weird obsessions in video games. No game has given me more to obsess over than Starfield. Collecting potatoes is just one of these things. The photo below was taken while exploring Huygens III in the Huygens system. At the top of the stairs and an elevator lies an Abandoned Freestar Collective Garrison. Now I may have visited one of these facilities before but if so, it was long ago and I have forgotten. It wasn't marked on the planetary map as a point of interest so I assume it was deposited there when I landed. Shortly after dispatching the usual Spacer scum I discovered this slate belonging to Freestar Pvt. Brown.  Touch or click to expand. To summarize Pvt. Brown was a recent arrival who was very bored, questioned the mission and felt excluded by his colleagues. However he knows how to distill liquor and believed that might be his ticket to acceptance. He mentions using potatoes in his final...

 Added What I Learned from Elden Ring playlist. That I did not get "gud" seems to be the only thing that I learned.

Apologies for a long gap in posts. Several time intensive projects fizzled out late last year. The household also acquired a PS5 a few weeks before Christmas and that has been quite disruptive. The console was bundled with Gotham Knights and Elden Ring. Concluding Elden Ring's main story took me 275 exhausting yet thrilling hours. For now I'm just trying to order my thoughts about the game. 

 A while back I took myself to task for not engaging enough with Dragon Age Origins' tactical systems. I did a playthrough of Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age followed by a replay of Dragon Age Origins for comparison both on PC and I might have been a little hard on myself. Both games offer roughly similiar systems but Dragon Age introduces presets for roles and behaviours. This allows the player to rely on defaults and merely tweak the templates as needed or wished. Modified presets worked well for me most of the time. Some enemies required a custom setup but the default profiles seem to support players on lower difficulties effectively. I didn't seem to need to pay attention to cooldowns as much as I did with Dragon Age II. FFXII has no difficulty settings on the other hand. The tactics system is fairly bare boned when introduced. The player purchases gambits (conditions and actions) as required. Party roles are developed through the complex licensing system and behaviours ar...

Sometime back in 2019 I started a Witcher 3 new game plus and managed to finish it just recently. Witcher 3 is tagged as an RPG and one of the greatest RPGs made at that. Sadly I didn't get it. I viewed it as an excellent action adventure featuring great story telling and immersive quests. Witcher 3 is one of the games that set me on this "what is an RPG anyway?" quest. This new game plus save is an attempt at a role play. I picked a combat style, ability branches and a character type for Geralt and tried to adhere to it. He wound up a hybrid combat/alchemy build of the cat school. This version of Geralt always bargained for cash and never turned down an opportunity for a game of Gwent, a drink or a tryst. He was often rude and impatient. He frequently took the easy way out unless an ally was involved. I read an article recently describing some narrative choices that Geralt just wouldn't make. I struggled myself with some of those choices and came to the same conclusi...

 A decade later and I'm still annoyed about the armour cap. Not that it exists but that no where is it mentioned in the official documentation. It's common knowledge now and I suppose I should get over it but it's helpful to know when constructing a character. I just completed a fourth playthrough and the third attempt at a specific roleplay. I have always been intrigued enough with the vanilla versions of the game that I have only installed one mod. I suppose the temptation to create some warrior/blacksmith/enchanter whatever class that is will always be there. Especially since Bethesda eventually removed the level cap and made every perk attainable. Depending on armour choices it's even necessary to put some perks in the smithing tree if you want to improve it. There are some useful perks in the armour tree but boosting the rating beyond the cap is pointless if you are also crafting.  There are some other details that are good to know but that's the big one for me...

  Fur   Glass   Stalhrim   Dragonscale   Nightingale   Skaal   Ancient Shrouded Cowl   Orish Scaled   Daedric Mail   Amber   Studded Dragonscale Staying warm in survival mode presents a new challenge for role players especially in the northernmost regions. Heavy armor is the easiest option. Steel armor with high warmth ratings appear as loot early and only requires one smithing skill point to craft. Glass is the earliest craftable light option. It requires 70 points to unlock the perk in the light smithing tree and becomes lootable at around level 36.  Early game light armor builds need to either wear heavy armor or stick around warmer areas of the map until some warm light sets can be acquired. I've included here a list of the warmest light armors that I am aware of with screenshots of the sets that I have acquired. The maximum equipment warmth stats that I have seen are 54 for body armor, 29 for helmets and 24 for boots and g...

 The anniversary edition adds a number of Creation Club player homes designed to enhance role play. Because survival mode removes most forms of fast travel some of these homes are unfortunately less than convenient. This is a subjective list of homes I found useful. It assumes players have all Creation Club content installed but I include non CC options as well.  Shadowfoot Sanctum This Creation Club home is my personal favourite but my character for this run is a dual dagger wielding thief/assassin. Located in the Ratway in Riften, it offers full amenities including a smelter which the Riften blacksmith lacks and easy access in and out. The hired carriage is close by. Riften is a fishing town which means lots of food and salt pile for the scrounging. It's fully furnished at 7500 gold which makes it cheaper than upgrading Riften city home Honeyside. Players can make use of a free bed and a cooking pot at the boarding house while saving gold for the purchase. On the downside, R...

 December was a very slow month for me and January is looking even slower. Nine days in to 2022 and I'm just getting around to this. It's a short list because I only played four games actually released last year. First up The Signal State for PC, a modular synthesizer logic puzzle game. I got halfway through and then became stuck on a puzzle so basic that no one had posted a solution to it. I'm hoping to return once I have completely forgotten anything about the game and just magically solve the puzzle. Then it was Lost in Random for PS4, a game I wrote off as being very clever.  Lost in Random (review) I had no intention of getting Far Cry 6 but gave in after seeing so many Twitter folks having fun with it. Of course they all posted their trophies/achievements and moved on while I was still saying "Hey Chorizo. Let's see what's on the top of THIS mountain."  Far Cry 6 - Fun and Terrible All at the Same Time Last but by no means least there is Guardians of...

Sometimes I think Ubisoft makes games for me specifically.  By terrible I mean the seriousness of the subject matter. The writers do make some points about violence, corruption and power. The question of whether the ends ever justify the means hangs over the main story missions right to the end. But otherwise it's all just ridiculously over the top. This is only my second Far Cry game but I assume this is typical for the series. I was so entertained by exploration, random encounters and playing in the sandbox that I hardly needed a mission structure. A half hearted attempt to get some achievements only led to more nonsense and photo shoots. The crafting system had me enthusiastically infillitrating military targets. Unfortunately the process usually began with me doing careful recon and noting priority targets only to hit the wrong buttion and fire a grenade. Chaos! Incoming air support! Military vehicles headed your way! Playing on PC with a Steam controller only added  to th...

Ended the game with another peeping thing. It only took like five months but I finally calmed down enough to finish Divinity Original Sin 2. So now I'm all puffed up because I didn't need to go online for help. It only took dying a few more times to see the path through. I have to confess though that I had forgotten all about the weapon I had been saving for this exact moment and pulled it out just as all was to be lost again. Eureka!  That bad feeling I had that my heroine maybe shouldn't be doing all this stayed with me to the end. My ultimate decision was good in the short term but had long term negative consequences. I don't feel like contemplating the political philosophy of that and I'm just letting it go.  I did watch The Cantina's YouTube video on Why Skyrim is Not an RPG  right after. I can't say that I disagree with anything he said. My issue with Skyrim is that you can role play within it's systems if you like but Bethesda doesn't offer an...

Drax is the best Guardians of the Galaxy is populated with great characters but my favourite is Drax. Edios-Montreal went their own way with this title but stayed faithful to the tone and charm of the movies. Not an easy feat. The music, the writing, the artwork and the gameplay all just worked together as an experience. When I first entered the ship as Peter Quill I felt drawn in by it's imagery. Combat might be a weaker aspect but the game has momentum. As usual, I didn't find much of anything. I didn't even save many photos or clips. I was just swept along. There is an option to start a new game plus and look for those missing collectibles but for now I'm savouring a first trip through. It wasn't entirely bug free and there was some frustration with loading screens and repetition but the game never broke. There's not much else to say besides this is a likely game of the year contender. Oh and I shut the fridge door.  

  The Inside Story of Mass Effect 3's Endings, Finally Told - YouTube Bioware Writer Reveals the Truth for the Most Unsubtle Line in Mass Effect (fanbyte.com) Bioware creators shared some much appreciated insights in these interviews. I spouted off about Mass Effect 3's ending myself. It was purely subjective and relayed as I experienced it but I don't think the ending detracted that much from the overall quality of the series. I should have made that more clear. Most of my complaints about Bioware games are technical. I'm unhappy with the user interface or how obscure systems can be to the player. Stuff like that. I've always liked the writing and the effort creators go to engage players. I respect developers like Bioware for doing hard things and taking the flak for it. And I'll never turn down a new Dragon Age or Mass Effect.

  Obsessed with this eye patch for some peculiar reason. At long last I have played through Red Dead Redemption's main story. Inept me gave up too quickly on my first effort but I always intended to try again. If I worried that RDR would be a disappointing step down from RDR2, I shouldn't have. This game holds up. I even managed to become utterly confused for a minute during one session start. "Why am I in New Austin?" "What is John wearing?" "Why is everything so crisp and detailed?" "Ohhhh I have started the wrong game."  Playing RDR2 first probably made it easier for me. I enjoyed a little simpler control scheme and game systems. Fear of never leaving McFarlane ranch caused me to set the mode to casual. To compensate I played with the mini map off most of the time. I never, ever knew what was going on and the results were usually hiliarious. I bought a lot of property in the hopes John would respawn somewhere remotely close to where he...

 It's kind of clear by now I am not going to get around to playing any of the DLC. I'm not sure the reasons for this make any sense but I just can't get into it. I started out enthusiastically in the main game but that wore off in England at some point. I was a little disappointed that the raiding crew was just a side activity. I wanted them as offshore companions whether that was reasonable or not. Most likely I really want to play Dragon Age 4.  I was going to make a post called "Saxon collaborator kills all the fun and exciting Vikings" but that would have been really unfair considering that was exactly the nuanced aspect of Viking history Ubisoft developers were trying to portray. Plus that isn't exactly true either. For example, I still have Rollo in my crew and the latest DLC is all about Paris. I just skimmed a walkthrough for Siege of Paris and apparently Rollo doesn't appear at all in it. So I would have been disappointed about that. Ubisoft has b...

 I made a rather silly post on Twitter because I discovered the POVRay bot. POVRay is a 3D raytracing engine I have been struggling to use ever since the last DOS version. I uploaded this GIF which is a sine wave plotted by tiny spheres. I have posted the POVRay code on a separate page just in case some one would actually like to see it. Some of it is commented out because I rather obviously poached a scene file from the examples. 

  Sometimes games I wouldn't normally purchase just appear on the PS4. That's the fun thing about a shared console. And I have to at least try them just because they are there. I enjoyed this one enough to finish it and even upload a couple of videos. Everything about this game is clever from the artwork to the game play, story, characters and dialogue. At it's core it is live action gwent or whatever similiar card game you fancy. The story revolves around a socially stratified realm called Random made up of six separated regions. Random is ruled by a mad queen who determines everyone's fate with the roll of a dice. It's like central planning was just Stalin sitting at a craps table. A robotic army keeps the enslaved citizenry in their place. Our protagonist, a little girl named Even, travels through the six districts seeking her sister Odd who has been taken by the evil queen. Even's companion is a vocal albeit incomprehensible animated die she calls Dicey. And...

 I wrote this for a family member a couple of years ago and forgot completely about it. I just forwarded it to another new Inquistor so might as well post it as well.   I thought I would send you some tips for playing Dragon Age. Some of these aren’t relevant until later in the game but helpful to know. Levelling: Your companions are never more than one level behind you. As I mentioned killings enemies 4 levels or more below you no longer grants XP. The game automatically raises base health rating and any attributes relevant to character class as you level. If you look at the attributes tab in the character menu you’ll see that there is a ton of them. These stats can only be directly affected through passive abilities and equipment attributes. I will get to the stupidly complicated crafting system later. The inquisition levels too through power and influence. Influence is harder to raise than power. Requisition quests help but they consume resources so it’s a trade ...

 I bought some new games on Steam to try out on the new 'puter one of which is Crusader Kings 3. Before I begin this cry baby tale, I want to say that I've never played a Crusader Kings title before and I am very impressed with this one. I am also impressed with the nvme ssd that I installed. It's not necessary but definitely a benefit for this challenging game. I left CK3 still trying to master the tutorial. I tip my hat to this title's brutal learning curve. It should be called "The Curse of Unanticipated Consequences" or in my specific case, "Medieval Wedding Planner". I wasted a lot of time making my very first player character become soul mates with his wife. What does a girl do when her liege is her soul mate? She does an incest with the primary heir that's what. I tried to cover it up because the other options seemed kind of bad and who needs piety anyway? Well yeah I eventually learned that in Christian kingdoms piety counts for a lot. Wh...