I'm Still Here (Unfortunately)

It's amazing how quickly half a year can go by when you're working full-time. This blog looks abandoned. I'm still alive, though, and I'm still finding the time to enjoy my favorite time-wasting pastime despite a lack of time. I'm even still following game industry news, to some extent, even though I rarely buy new games anymore, and even though the current state of the game industry and today's so-called "gamer" "culture" make me sick. Sometimes I do want to abandon this blog and never write about games again because the whole thing has become such a joke.

I guess that's why, recently, I've been playing a lot of older games like Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi (which was fantastic), and if not older games then remakes of older games, like the latest Gauntlet (which is definitely not bad with friends). But, apparently, not even old and old-school games are safe anymore.

Last week, the Siege of Dragonspear expansion for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition was released, and the Internet exploded upon discovering in the game some sparse but hard-to-overlook examples of what many believe to be ham-fisted progressive agenda-pushing and unnecessary injection of obnoxious political correctness. One controversial scene in the game is a cringe-worthy exchange with what appears to be a token transgendered character who, of course, brings up her gender transition so that we all know how progressive the writers are.

But hey, like, whatever. Let's all chill out and stuff. Right? Ultimately, as Siege of Dragonspear writer Amber Scott already pointed out back in August 2015 — in response to another discussion of the appropriateness of putting token minority characters in video games — she has the same right to creative freedom as any other writer.

Creators have the right to create whatever they want, just as customers have the right to refrain from buying those products if they don't like what they see. "Don't like it, don't buy it" is the law of the universe, as always. Sure, the character might have been a deliberate social-justice insert, but is it really hurting anyone? Of course not. So, if that's really what the developers want to do, I can only wish them good luck with it.

But then there's the character Minsc blurting out some line about "ethics in heroic adventuring" as if it were meant to get big laughs. Someone, please, just stab me in the face.

For readers who are not aware, the "ethics" gag is a reference to a stale joke from the early days of the GamerGate controversy that started back in 2014: "Actually, it's about ethics in game journalism!" The frequently repeated but rarely funny phrase, delivered sarcastically, was usually intended as dismissive mockery of the voices behind the #GamerGate hashtag, who claimed their interest was in ethics (i.e., the radical idea that game journalists should not write positive coverage and positive reviews for their friends or for others in return for personal favors). The implication here is that the true goal of GamerGate is not ethics but rather the random harassment females/minorities/liberals in video game journalism/development/fandom (take your pick of each), as GamerGate's opponents and the mainstream media have often claimed with cherry-picked online posts from anonymous nobodies as evidence.

I say this is usually how the joke was used because, occasionally, the most strongly anti-GamerGate folk seemed to be taking it a step further by actually making ethics itself the butt of the joke, unironically implying that good ethics is not something to which people should aspire but rather some kind of tool of oppression. Presumably these are the same people who balk at the use of evidence and facts and the idea of "innocent until proven guilty" when it comes to judging those accused of crimes against members underprivileged groups, for which, I guess, an accusation is supposed to be as good as a conviction. Likewise I can only assume these are the same people who criticize the very idea of free speech in the same way, as if they don't realize that free speech is exactly what allows them to be so annoying.

But none of this has anything to do with video games, right? Really, I shouldn't be able to come up with any excuse to bring up these issues on a video game blog. But in following "gaming" news, and in paying even a minimal amount of attention to the goings on in "gaming" culture, I've found that this social "justice" insanity is nearly impossible to avoid.

Regarding the "ethics" line, it's even less funny now than it was back then. It's not even topical anymore. The joke was already old when, in yet another slightly altered form, it was awkwardly slapped onto a page of a Thor comic last year. I'm sure all the social justice warriors high-fived each other, but readers who hadn't had the misfortune of stumbling upon idiotic Twitter drama were probably left bewildered by the extremely forced and obscure reference to something that had pretty much nothing to do with comics or anything about which actual comics readers are likely to care.

Putting this nonsense in Baldur's Gate is even more pathetic, given the timing. A year ago, some people might still have cared enough about GamerGate to be offended or amused by this, depending on their political views, but now I find it hard to imagine any reaction from anyone except a cringe and perhaps a disappointed sigh. It's frustrating to see a professional writer leave such a poop stain of an esoteric inside "joke" in a game which might otherwise have been good. Now, at least in the one moment in which a player hears that line, it's not good. While this single line isn't really capable of spoiling the whole product, it sure is a "wow that was stupid" moment. At worst, it's an inappropriate political statement shoved into a game where it doesn't belong. At best, it's a meme shoved into a game where it doesn't belong. And, last time I checked, game developers who use Internet memes as jokes in their games are no-talent hacks, regardless of your political leanings.

Honestly, though, in all seriousness, it's not just the one line that convinced me not to buy this game. I very much doubt that the overall writing quality is any good in a game written by someone who feels compelled to put anything like this in a final product.

To make matters worse, Siege of Dragonspear developer Beamdog's CEO, Trent Oster, can be seen on the Beamdog forums begging for positive reviews to counter-balance the negative ones which he sees as illegitimate:

Whether the severity of the low scores given to the game in those negative reviews are fair or not, asking customers to post positive reviews en masse with the specific goal of affecting a game's overall score is unprofessional. People who like the game enough to warrant a positive review will post one without being asked. More importantly, when one of those people does write a review, the given score should be a reflection of the game's quality according to that individual, not an attempt to exert the maximum influence on the average. When customers start writing reviews with the overall score in mind, the result is a misleading pile of zeros and tens with nothing in between, which is helpful to no one.

This last part doesn't really apply to Steam in particular, where "recommended" and "not recommended" are the only two scores that exist, but attempting to raise an army of like-minded reviewers is still an attempt to game the system. And yes, customers will often try to manipulate the average even when they aren't told to do so; there are already too many zeros, according at least to Oster, and he seems to think this is the reason. But I think it's likely that a lot of the negative reviews (many of which don't even mention the controversies described here) are not from trolls but from legitimately unhappy customers. It's not up to Oster to say that their reviews are any less real than the ones he's encouraging Beamdog's forum users to write.

Update (Wednesday, April 6, 2016)

I fully expected Beamdog to stick to their guns, to double down, to meet every complaint about any aspect of their game with an automatic accusation of bigotry while hiding behind a female writer and her poorly received (albeit well-intended) minority character. I didn't expect any acknowledgement of the game's shortcomings, and I certainly didn't expect any promises to make things better. But they surprised me. In another post on the Beamdog forums, CEO Trent Oster gives a quick recap of the negative reactions to the game and outlines some future changes.

While he expresses pride in the game (of course), and takes a clear stance against the harassment directed at the company's employees by angry internet people (of course), he also accepts the negative feedback on the transgendered Mizhena, namely that there wasn't sufficient character development to make her anything more than a token gesture of inclusiveness. Further down in the post, he mentions plans to patch up various bugs, to fix problems with the game's multiplayer mode, and even to remove the controversial (but mostly embarrassingly dumb) "ethics" line uttered by Minsc.

Like Oster's plea for positive reviews, this post is likely a reaction to the negative reviews flooding various sites. Last time I checked the reviews on the same three sites Oster had mentioned in his April 3rd forum post, my findings were as follows:

• average feedback for the game was "mixed" on Steam, with 69% of reviews being positive, but with negative reviews absolutely dominating the "most helpful" list;
• the user score on Metacritic was 3.8 out of 10, again with negative reviews rising to the top of the "most helpful" list;
• the average rating on GOG was three-and-a-half out of five stars, with lots of negative reviews in the first few pages of a list which appeared to be sorted by helpfulness ratings like the others.

So maybe Beamdog is just backpedaling now in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding. But if they're going to make an effort to make the game more fun and less obnoxious, it doesn't really matter why.

The Benefits of Cowardice

Recently, I've been playing a lot of the Gauntlet-style PC game Hammerwatch. Like The Binding of Isaac, my other recent indie game obsession, Hammerwatch came into my game collection by way of a dirt-cheap bundle whose other games I haven't touched. My digital game collection is filled with perhaps too many of those bundle B-sides — games which I only own because buying an entire set of games happened to be the cheapest way to get a single game which I actually wanted (most often thanks to Humble Bundle, Bundle Stars, and similar sites). I tell myself I'll get around to enjoying these incidental purchases eventually, but life and video games don't often leave time for each other, so it rarely happens. Sometimes takes me quite a while even to try the games I bought on purpose. For instance, I didn't actually get around to playing Hammerwatch for several weeks after the bundle went on sale.

And now, according to Steam, I've spent over 50 hours playing it. There's the first problem with Steam: It permanently records my playtime, without any option to reset the count, and displays the information publicly unless my entire profile is made private. The only way to avoid the shame of my friends knowing exactly how much of my life has been wasted is to play a game in offline mode (or run the game outside of Steam entirely if possible). The other problem with Steam is that it taunts me with achievements. Oh, sure, I can ignore achievements in a bad game. I won't play garbage just to increase the number of unlocked achievements shown on my profile. But any good game with achievements is just begging for 100% completion, and as an occasionally obsessive completionist, I often can't resist. Any set of challenges or unlockables will do the trick, in fact, but achievements — being (like the playtime counter) public and permanent — are particularly good at keeping me playing a difficult game past the point where I might otherwise have given up.

It was exactly for this reason that I found myself playing Hammerwatch's unreasonably punishing survival level, completion of which is related to two achievements (one for medium difficulty and one for hard). After the first few attempts, I began to suspect it was virtually impossible to beat, at least on my own. Hammerwatch is a multiplayer game but, having no friends currently playing the game and having no desire to play with strangers, I had been flying solo up to this point. My brother owns Hammerwatch, so I could have enlisted his help, but he hadn't played in a while and had never accumulated as much playtime as I had. He would have been rusty, at best, and might have been little more than dead weight in a game of survival with shared lives. So I continued playing survival mode on my own, determined not to let two little achievements stand in the way of total victory.

The survival level in Hammerwatch works like this: Only one extra life is given to start. Waves of increasingly numerous and increasingly powerful enemies spawn to attack the player, while the eventual boss (the Crystal Lich) sits in the center of the map, invincible but able to shoot any player who comes too close. Vendors, reached by way of a portal in a hidden room, sell upgrades and extra lives, which can only be purchased with currency obtained by inflicting damage on a few large crystals placed around the map. Meanwhile, stalactites periodically fall to the floor in random places, doing serious damage to everything in a huge area; these can kill a player instantaneously. After about 45 minutes, the regular bad guys stop spawning and the Crystal Lich comes out to fight.

My first character of choice in the game's main campaign had been the paladin (equipped with a sword which deals damage in a wide arc, a shield which blocks most projectiles coming from ahead, and some other incredibly useful abilities). However, I had heard the ranger (equipped with a long-range bow and not much else of import) was the most viable choice for beating the Crystal Lich (whose homing projectiles travel almost as far as the ranger's arrows). Unfortunately, the ranger isn't as well suited to the pre-boss fight against huge waves of enemies. The paladin would have been better for that. I could only pick one, though, and I didn't want to play 45 minutes to get to the boss only then to find myself in a virtually unwinnable fight, so I was committed to using the boss-killing ranger throughout my solo attempt.

I died. A lot. I died dozens of times without ever getting a chance to fight the Crystal Lich. After all, the ranger (who deals damage at long range but in a narrow line as opposed to the paladin's wide arc) doesn't do well when surrounded, and getting surrounded in the survival level is all but inevitable. The one obvious benefit was the ability to farm crystals somewhat effectively without stopping. The ranger can shoot a crystal while approaching and then shoot some more while departing. Even so, I could never afford enough upgrades to stay on the winning side of the arms race for very long. Eventually, I'd always start dying faster than I could farm enough crystals to replace the lives I was losing.

Then I noticed that the hidden room with the portal to the vendors, although it's a cramped dead end, is actually very safe: Few enemies spawn in range to see the player, and stalactites don't fall there (except in the case of one scripted stalactite drop which destroys the portal at the start of the boss fight). Perhaps best of all, the nova-firing trap in an adjacent room is close enough that it will fire when the player stands in the hidden room, and this periodically damages a nearby crystal for free money (as does the occasional lucky stalactite drop). This free money isn't as much as what a player can get by actively mining the other crystals, so I had no intention of hiding in the hidden room throughout the entire pre-boss battle. Still, it was the best solution for the second half of the fight, during which any attempt at mining was likely to cost me more lives than I could buy with the money I had gained.

And by retreating to the hidden room when things got too hard, taking my free money like a welfare check while waiting for the boss to appear, I finally loved long enough to fight him. At that point, it was just a matter of fighting him from a distance while finishing off any nearby enemies left over from the pre-boss phase. I won.

Thus I was left with a somewhat viable solo strategy for the survival level in Hammerwatch, using the ranger:

1. Don't destroy the nova-firing trap in the east room.
2. Farm the crystals in the north (behind the green spike trap), west (behind the red spike trap), and center (near the Crystal Lich). Each should have enough time to recharge while you're farming the other two.
• Don't bother with the crystal in the east (behind the blue spike trap); the active nova-firing trap makes it difficult to escape the room safely.
• Eventually a crystal in the south will be made available, but that little room with two small openings is a death trap. Don't go there.
3. Buy upgrades for speed, bow damage, and bow penetration. Buy an extra life when needed, but keep in mind Step 4 below.
4. When things get too difficult (and you're dying more often than you can mine enough cash for the next extra life), go to the hidden room and stand just south of the portal, ready to shoot anything that comes after you. You are not totally safe here, so don't fall asleep.
5. As you get free money from the crystal in the east (which should be taking damage from the nova-firing trap), keep on buying upgrades and/or stock up on extra lives, at your own discretion.
6. When a stalactite starts to fall above the portal, get out of the hidden room. Avoid the boss until you've cleared the nearby remaining enemies.
7. Fight the boss from a distance, coming a bit closer to shoot him and backing up to a very safe distance when he fires back. It will take a while, but if you can avoid the stalactites and any leftover enemies on the map, you'll win.

This cheesy strategy allowed me to beat the survival level on medium difficulty. Unfortunately, it wasn't so reliable for hard difficulty. After fighting and farming as much as possible without repeatedly dying, I was able to hide in the hidden room until the boss emerged, but the necessary task of clearing out remaining enemies during the boss fight became much more difficult. My damage output just wasn't sufficient to avoid being overrun once a group of enemies caught my scent, especially since the area of effect of the ranger's attack is constrained to a thin line.

Ultimately, I ended up playing with strangers to beat survival on hard mode, but even finding a suitable game wasn't easy. At any given time, I only saw one hard survival game (or none at all), and the first few games I joined were full of novices who didn't really know what they were doing. Even when I managed to join a game with more experienced players, lack of easy communication made things very difficult. By some miracle, however, I was eventually able to join a game with a couple of players (a warlock and a ranger) who were unbelievably good. Even when we were joined by a fourth player (a paladin) with no survival level experience, we weren't dragged down. I ended up getting killed before the boss was dead, but the other ranger lured the boss into a narrow hallway in which his attacks were blocked and finished him off.

So I got lucky. My advice for Hammerwatch's survival mode without friends? Try my solo strategy. If that doesn't work, I'm all out of suggestions, because you can't really count on finding a game full of expert players who are able to coordinate a victory with complete strangers. In other words: Good luck!

But, whatever. I got mine.