Baldur's Gate 3 Impressions (And More!)

This month really got away from me.

I had planned to work my way through Silent Hill 2 and while I have started it I haven't exactly done a whole lot else. I'm liking what I've seen and I'll have some impressions on it when I'm done but until then I thought I'd talk about what I have been doing. Also, I didn't like the idea of skipping a month on this blog but I didn't have anything in my back pocket to write about so I felt I needed to at least put something out there.

To kick things off I've been spending a lot of time playing Baldur's Gate 3. Steam says I've put about 100 hours into it but my ingame save says I've played a little over 50, so between my save-scumming and my accidentally-leaving-the-application-open the real number is probably somewhere between those two figures. Even after all that time, however, I'm only in the first Act. Games typically take me a long time to finish because I like to fiddle with mechanics to try to figure out the limits of what I'm allowed to do and with a game as sprawling as this that experimentation has been especially time-consuming. 

This game has stealth mechanics, of course I'm save-scumming

I imagine I'll have more to say about this when (or should I say if) I ever finish it, but the thing that keeps me coming back is that it feels incredibly responsive to my actions and decisions. Using Dungeons and Dragons as a base, combat allows you to take advantage of a variety of systemic interactions to do some truly fun and inventive stuff and the dialogue options typically seem to account for most everything I'd consider doing in any given situation. It's all very impressive and I'm eager to see more of it.

The game is also very funny at times

Switching gears, I had the opportunity to rewatch a lot of the TV series "The Venture Brothers" and, man, that show is something else. I feel like it deserves its own post to truly do it justice so I'll keep this brief, but despite seeming like just another superhero parody on its surface its one of the densest and most rewarding shows I've ever watched. Yes, they took several years to create each season and that rate of production was probably what ultimately led to it being canceled but the end result was my favorite thing on television so it's hard to say they were wrong for taking their sweet time. Last month they put out a direct-to-video movie that effectively serves as the show's finale and if that's all we get it wouldn't have been a bad ending, but I'm still holding out hope that I'll be able to these characters again, in some form or another. If you haven't watched it yet I can't recommend it highly enough. The first season is a bit rough and not all of the show's humor has aged particularly well, but when this show hits it HITS.

I'm gonna miss this show

This last thing has come as a bit of a surprise to me but I've been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 again. This was a game I adored when I was younger but I ultimately stopped playing it after my friend group (and I) had moved on to other things. I've paid attention to it off and on over the past few years and I took advantage of that Unusual bug when I heard about it, but beyond that it's mostly just been a game I've looked back at fondly. Now, for whatever reason, Valve put out a pretty substantial update earlier in the summer and that lit the fire under me to give the game another serious go. Unsurprisingly it's still fantastic.

I'm still trying to find my footing again, I'm currently very bad

I've devoted serious time to a handful of other shooters but none of them have ever been able to recreate the things this game does so well. There's a playfulness to this game that nothing else I've played has ever managed to recapture. Spamming identical voice lines, forming an unspoken truce with a player on the enemy team because of some shared in-joke, or even just the silly hats, this game (more than almost any other competitive thing I've played) often devolves into a playground where you can just sort of... have fun. (I feel like there's probably something in Ian Bogost's Play Anything that'd help me elaborate on this but I'm not in school any more and I don't feel like tracking down a quote so, uh, take my word for it.)

 

  I've never interacted with any of these people before

Team Fortress 2 is a special game to me and I'm glad I've had a reason to go back to it. One of these days I'll talk about the actual game of it all and why I love that so do dang much, but for now just know that I still adore it.