Tobold's Blog
Monday, February 27, 2023
 
Virtual morality

A reader requested that I make a post about moral decisions in Hogwarts Legacy, and I am happy to comply. Hogwarts Legacy doesn't really have a system where your "alignment" would be measured over the course of the game. Although there are different endings, they depend on the decisions you do at the end, and not how you behaved during the course of the game. And in a way, that is an advantage: Hogwarts Legacy gives you many choices over the course of the game, where you can freely decide how nice you want to be, without doing things just to keep an artificial moral score up.

Over the course of the game, you are given the choice whether to learn three unforgivable curses as additional spells. Unlike most other spells, you have the choice of refusing to learn them. You can finish the game without ever using Dark Magic. And part of the story shows the conflicts of another student who choses Dark Magic as a way to help his sister, a way that is rejected by his family and friends.

While that (and your end game choices) is probably the biggest part of the moral decisions you need to make in Hogwarts Legacy, there are numerous smaller ones. There are a lot of quests where other students asks you to gather something for reasons that aren't always noble. And at the end of the quest you are given the option of whether you want to hand over the gathered quest item(s) or not. There are also a lot of dialogue choices where you can choose nicer or not so nice responses. Again, that doesn't change a thing. You get the same quests and quests rewards regardless of your dialogue choices.

My characters moral choices up to now haven't been very consistent. I chose to learn Dark Magic, not out of moral considerations, but simply to see how the spells work. And they are rather powerful. I usually choose the nice options in dialogue, but I didn't return the gobstones to the annoying girl that upset her schoolmates with them. I did however deliver the coward student the "proof of his bravery" to brag with.

In pen & paper roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons I am not a fan of really evil player characters; at least not if they do evil things to other players' characters, as that causes bad blood between the players. I once kicked a player out of my campaign for constantly trying to sabotage the group and the other players because he wanted to play "evil". But I have also had campaigns in which the whole group was "evil", but all evil acts were directed against non-player characters, and that was fine with me.

So in Hogwarts Legacy I don't take the moral decisions very seriously, because there are no other real humans involved. I haven't learned the death curse yet, but I will be happy to sling it around. Who cares whether I use "Dark Magic" to kill poachers or burn them to a crisp? Hogwarts Legacy is full of situations where you are forced to fight and kill, and is a lot more violent than the Harry Potter books. Making a distinction between "good" and "bad" magic, if both are used to kill people, seems a bit pedantic to me.

- posted by Tobold @ 7:46 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
 
ISS Vanguard - First sessions

So I finally got the ISS Vanguard board game and was able to play 5 "sessions" or "cycles" or "runs" or whatever you want to call a complete loop of going through ship management and planetary landing once. I am going to write about my experience here, which will be full of spoilers; you have been warned.

Have you ever started a game, either board game or video game, played a bit, and then started over, because you realized that you had done a lot of starting mistakes? I kind of skipped the first part of that by watching a YouTube channel play 9 sessions of ISS Vanguard. They didn't do very well. But by watching and learning with them, I was able to identify two major mistakes you can make when starting the game, which will set you up for failure later: The first is that ISS Vanguard isn't balanced for different player counts, as it claims. If you play with just 2 characters, every planetary landing will be a lot harder, and because one important reward is "every character in the landing party ranks up", you get only half of the reward if you take only half the number of possible characters. The second is that you shouldn't advance too fast; in particular you should visit all 4 planets listed on the campaign objective O02, even if you already got the next campaign objective. And some of the planets are best visited at least twice.

After 5 sessions, I already visited Brimstone twice, and the next session will be a third visit to complete everything there. Between those two Brimstone landings, I did one session where I flew by Atropos, but took the option to abort the mission without penalty. You can only do that once, but it allows you to do two ship management phases, and thus advances your research and production projects. That is an important aspect of the game: Every ship management phase advances you in terms of available equipment, landers, and other upgrades. Thus the planned third Brimstone visit, which might not yield much in terms of success tokens and discoveries anymore, but will sure give me another ship phase; and in my case I really want that to unlock another lander. You start with one basic lander, the Space Ranger, and quickly get another lander, the Pelican. But the Pelican is basically useless, due to taking much longer to land, and not having the stats to get through landing very well. Yes, it has a bigger cargo bay for more supplies, equipment, and discoveries; but none of that is very helpful if the landing sequence already shot you into pieces.

I went through my first Brimstone visit as fast as possible. That was basically cheating; I knew from watching it streamed that the first visit ends with a "bad things happen, you need to flee quickly" event. By minimizing my interaction with the planet on the first run, using a rank 1 crew, I was able to bring a rank 2 crew to the second run, and maximize my interaction with the planet to the point where I managed to rank them up to rank 3. That is the highest rank they can be, and having at least one rank 3 crew is very important for some of the harder parts of the game. The third visit will be with a fresh rank 1 crew, and I am not 100% certain that there are enough successes left to get them to rank 2. But if I get just a success token or two, no rank-up, and maybe a few common discoveries, that will already be good.

On planetary explorations, there is an aspect to ISS Vanguard that reminds me a bit of Gloomhaven. Whether you succeed in missions of Gloomhaven depends very much on whether you have understood the system of using, burning, and recovering cards. Whether you succeed in planetary landings of ISS Vanguard depends very much on whether you have understood the system of using, burning, and recovering dice. Especially if you want to gather the 6 success tokens necessary to rank up from 2 to 3, using only your supplies to rest and recover dice isn't sufficient. You need to push beyond that, by sacrificing dice to refresh other dice. Brimstone is an easier version of that, because you will quickly discover camp sites that allow you to refresh more dice per rest. As I am playing 4-handed, which is already easier, and did that extra ship phase at Atropos for better equipment, my second Brimstone run was very easy. As I said, it's a bit cheating by knowing what happens, but if you do know, you can easily set it up to reach rank 3.

One final tip is to not rely on luck for your dice check. By rolling slightly more dice than necessary, using other characters to assist, and using both section cards and equipment aggressively, you can make it rather unlikely to fail dice checks. Which is important, because ISS Vanguard isn't much of a "fail forward" game. Failed dice checks instead can result in things like injuries, which make the rest of the planet run harder. Obviously you can't overdo it, and roll all of your dice on every minor dice check, as you will run out of dice too quickly. But most of the time it is advisable to throw at least one extra die; you can always use the result for some dice combination effect if the roll succeeds too well. Just don't use a Vanguard die if the dice check has a penalty for "accident" rolls, because the Vanguard die has three sides with that.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:55 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Saturday, February 18, 2023
 
What Hamlet can teach us about life

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them.

The famous monologue of Hamlet is very frequently misunderstood. Many people think that Hamlet is contemplating suicide, but if you read the text a bit closer it turns out that he is contemplating whether to engage in an action that he considers potentially suicidal: To openly oppose his uncle, who killed his father and stole his throne. Hamlet's question is really about whether he should try this very dangerous path of open opposition, or let it slide and accept his uncle on the throne.

Once you understood that, the rest of the play falls into place. Yes, there is a lot of stuff happening with a lot of characters. But at the very heart of the play is Hamlet's decision on the question of "to be, or not to be". Hamlet can't decide, he postpones the decision, he vacillates, he is trying to do both. And the play then proceeds to show the consequences of Hamlet's indecision: By not deciding between opposition and compliance, Hamlet ends up reaping the worst possible consequences of both. At the end the viewer is supposed to contemplate that either "suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" or "taking arms against a sea of troubles" both would have resulted in better outcomes.

And there is a very general life lesson in that. Which obviously you don't need, if you are already a very decisive person. But a lot of people tend to fall into a particular trap when faced with a decision on which they don't have all information: They believe that there is a "good" decision, and a "bad" decision, and that the "no decision" option falls somewhere in between. So as they don't know which decision is the "good" one, and which is the "bad" one, they believe that the "no decision" option is the best available one.

Now there are certainly cases in which this is true. Sometimes, when faced with a lack of information, postponing the decision while searching for more information is really the best option. But that depends on the urgency of the decision, and the likelihood to get the required information in time. There are lots of other cases, where taking *any* decision is better than taking none. A very simple example would be you driving on a road which ends in a T-section. You need to decide whether to go left or right, and it is possible that you don't know which way is better; but it is certainly much better to make a fast but wrong decision here instead of driving straight on into a wall.

As it turns out, there are actually a lot more situations where taking either decision leads to a better outcome than taking none. People tend to underestimate the damage that taking no decision can do, but tend to overestimate the damage that making the wrong choice would do. A lot of things in life are unpredictable, and waiting to have perfect information is simply not an option, as you will never get there. Sometimes you just need to take a leap of faith, and decide on your gut feeling, because not deciding anything will be worse than guessing wrong.


- posted by Tobold @ 10:28 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
 
The consequences of Brexit - viewed from the other side

Please read this as written in a conversational tone. As an European, I didn't get to vote for or against Brexit, and it only affects my life in very minor ways. But as I just had one of those minor experiences, I just wanted to talk about how it is now.

I used to buy stuff from the UK all the time. That has to do with the fact that I am a German living in Belgium, my English is better than my French, and my Dutch is nearly non-existing. So I used to order things like games, books, or DVDs from the UK, if they were only available in the local languages in Belgium. Then Brexit happened, and I mostly stopped ordering from the UK. When I still do, I get a reminder why I shouldn't:

If you followed my blog, you might have read that I really, really wanted the board game ISS Vanguard. I had missed the Kickstarter, and when I "late pledged" it turned out that only put me on the list for a copy of the next print run, end of this year. So I looked around at an aggregator site for board game prices and availability in Europe. And while ironically *now* that site shows a wide availability of ISS Vanguard, at the time of me checking there was only one shop who had the game in stock. And that one shop was in the UK.

Now that UK shopped only delivers in the UK. I suspect that has to do with Brexit, but I am not sure. Anyway, having had previous experience with online shops that only deliver nationally, I use a forwarding service. With the UK games shop doing "free" national delivery, the shipping cost of the forwarding service aren't actually much higher than usual international shipping fees. So I decided to do that for ISS Vanguard. Thinking, to quote Top Gear, "How hard can it be?".

Well, "hard" maybe not. But "slow" and "expensive" certainly. ISS Vanguard in the UK cost me £112, or about €125. But there is a 20% UK VAT on top of that. And by importing the game myself, without having the proper means to recover VAT, I ended up paying Belgian VAT *on top of* the UK VAT. Plus €37 for custom fees. And the Belgian VAT was not calculated on the actual price, but on a higher estimate of the value of the goods in Europe. So in the end, with all fees, shipping cost, and taxes, I ended up paying a total of €236, nearly twice the original cost of the game. In addition to that, there was the wait. Basically the box was stuck in customs for over two weeks. From the time I ordered the game to finally receiving it, it took three weeks.

None of this is really surprising, if one understands what a "common market" is, and what the likely consequences of "leaving a common market" are. But with all the added cost and delays it has become quicker and cheaper for me to order from the United States than to order from the United Kingdom. Trade from the UK to Europe has fallen by 16%. But the trade that has disappeared is disproportionally concentrated at the smaller scale. A small UK shop selling to consumers in Europe is hit much harder by Brexit than a multi-national company, because the large companies can easier deal with the paperwork for VAT and the like, especially with repeat B2B business. I will think twice before ordering from a small UK shop again.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:27 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
 
Hogwarts Legacy - An unpolitical review

I have now played 25 hours of Hogwarts Legacy. I completed 34% of the challenges, and 41% of the quests. So I am still a good distance from finishing the game, but am in far enough to have seen the large majority of the game systems and form an opinion about them. So, how is Hogwarts Legacy? In short, it is a good game, and you might want to buy it. But I guess, you want the long version.

The latest news about Hogwarts Legacy is that it outsold Elden Ring, which is quite an achievement. But that doesn't surprise me, because it speaks to the first major observation about the game: It is *very* accessible. In Elden Ring I mostly felt as if the game was designed for people a lot more hardcore than I am; in Hogwarts Legacy I feel as if it was designed for more casual gamers than me. Yes, I turned down the difficulty from normal to easy, but at easy the game is *really* easy for me, and that isn't even the lowest difficulty level. I could still turn it down a notch to "story mode". But the main point where I always feel that the game isn't designed for the more hardcore gamers is that it is far too easy to "game the game". For example, most loot comes from chest, and is random. Thus if you want a complete set of legendary gear, you don't have to do anything special, you simply savescum until you find it. And the chance of finding random legendary gear in a chest is high enough that it only takes you a few minutes of saving and reloading to get there. You can also respawn all the stuff you need by pressing a wait a few times while at a different location. For a MMORPG player, used to lots of limitations in order to prevent people from exploiting game systems, Hogwarts Legacy is astounding in doing away with all those limitations. If you want infinite money and xp quickly, there are ways to get there.

The difficulty setting affects a range of different things, including mini-games like nabbing beasts (if you do that a lot in order to get infinite money, you might want set difficulty to story mode temporarily to save time). But mainly it affects the speed of the enemies. In a combat system which revolves around pressing the right button at the right time, to dodge or attack, this difficulty system is really exactly what is needed to make combat accessible to people who *aren't* experts in souls-like action combat systems. More "serious" gamers can easily turn the difficulty up and have a challenge, if they want to. Overall the combat system is pretty good, with tons of different options. There is a large variety of spells, but also other tools like potions, or aggressive vegetables you can use. And no, I'm not making that last part up. The only critique that I have about the combat system is that it doesn't always feel very "Harry Potter"-like. I don't think the source material ever had Harry dodge-rolling.

Whatever difficulty you are playing at, you can modify the power of your character a lot with gear, gear upgrades, gear traits, and talents. None of these systems have been designed by true hardcore gamers, because they are all rather easy to push into overpowered territory. Take some points in stealth talents, and the stealth system becomes ridiculously overpowered: Backstabs are insta-kills on most mobs, and relatively easy to land. I took out whole goblin fortresses by stealth, without ever getting into regular combat. If you have a favorite spell, let's say Incendio, you can turn that one into an AoE spell with a talent point, and then boost its power by putting the same trait into every piece of gear you wear. It all stacks, making that one single spell an absolute powerhouse. Is all of this balanced? Certainly not; but it is a whole lot of fun.

The one thing where a gamer will be annoyed with Hogwarts Legacy is that the talent system doesn't have any sort of reset mechanic. You can't try out different builds. You can only take whatever build you believe in, or whatever talents you feel like, and go with it. Theoretically you can take a different build in your next playthrough, but that brings me to Hogwarts Legacy's biggest problem: Replayability is low. If you play the game again, making all choices different than in the previous playthrough, the game changes very little. You will still have 95% of identical dialogues, cut-scenes, and events, in mostly the same order. Availability of many side-quests is linked to your main-quest progress. And you can't ignore the main quest, you need it to unlock various game systems. Yes, you could try to explore all of Hogwarts as soon as you get there, but then you won't have the spells you'll actually need to gather all the collectibles and treasures. It is a lot more efficient to postpone your full exploration of the castle until you have the unlock spell, and that doesn't happen before fall, after the first keeper trial in the main story.

If I compare Hogwarts Legacy with Breath of the Wild, which for me is the reference of open world games, Hogwarts Legacy feels a lot more linear. Breath of the Wild has a main story, but that part of the game is relatively short, while the open world exploration is rather long. Hogwarts Legacy feels more like the other way around. That is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on your preferences. The amount of content in Hogwarts Legacy is very large, so you can probably spend a hundred hours on your first playthrough before you have seen every quest and visited every interesting location. If I compare Hogwarts Legacy with Elden Ring instead, then Hogwarts Legacy is basically the Dark Souls game that everybody can play easily, basically the exact opposite design philosophy as the actual Dark Souls games.

I don't give review scores, but Hogwarts Legacy isn't a 10 out of 10 game. But it is a very good game, which offers quite a lot of entertainment for the 60 bucks price tag, and is very accessible. Recommended!

- posted by Tobold @ 12:17 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Monday, February 13, 2023
 
Gamergate 2nd edition

In 2014/2015 there was a huge online battle in the culture wars known under the name Gamergate. People usually don't remember what the fight was about, because any discussion of arguments was quickly overshadowed by the abysmal behavior of the right-wing side. The whole thing just became a huge harassment campaign, which in the eyes of most of the audience invalidated any argument the trolls might have had.

Now in the wake of Hogwarts Legacy the same battle in the same culture war is flaring up again. Only that in this second edition Gamergate, it is the left-wing side that is using harassment and mobbing tactics. Outraged that their boycott of Hogwarts Legacy failed completely, and the game is breaking all sorts of sales records, the left-wing activists have started a campaign to harass any streamer on YouTube and Twitch that is covering the game. The targets are mostly completely unpolitical, they are just typical videogame streamers who are playing the game on stream. The streamers aren't doing anything that could remotely be described as "right-wing", they are just streaming a game, which in itself is full of progressive content and a diverse cast. But because the game is remotely connected to the books of J.K. Rowling, and J.K. Rowling is politically active against trans rights in specific instances where those collide with women's rights, the activists feel justified to harass the streamers with very, very nasty comments. I've seen stuff like "I hope you see a loved one die this year" directed at one streamer, and in another stream one of the two streamers casting it broke down in tears as result from the harassment. Some left-wing activists designed a website where you could find "target" streamers that had dared to stream the game for harassment, although that site was later taken down.

You might faintly remember that in the original Gamergate there was a lot of talk about "game journalist integrity". This is the point where the second edition is starting to flare up, because, honestly, there are some pretty shameful examples of "game journalism" surrounding Hogwarts Legacy. Wired had the review for Hogwarts Legacy written by their sex toy reviewer, and gave the game a 1 out of 10, with the whole review being just about J.K. Rowling and not giving any information about the game. Aggregator sites like Metacritic then rightfully refused to add that "review" to the critics review scores. Still the user score is higher than the critic score, because a lot of other reviews deducted political points and added some anti-Rowling disclaimers to their review, in order to stave off the progressive trolls. Other game journalists just fan the flames, and are trying to convert the outrage into more views for their sites. It's all pretty pathetic.

In the end of course nobody will remember any argument about what exactly the role of game journalism is, how political games can or should be, and whether one should separate the opinions of the author from his work. All that will be remembered is the online harassment and bad behavior of the trolls. I believe that this is the sort of "political activism" that hurts your side more than it helps.


- posted by Tobold @ 7:41 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Saturday, February 11, 2023
 
It's running - for me

I have a 4 year old PC with a Geforce RTX 2070 graphics card. I am running at 2560 x 1440 resolution on a 27" screen. It isn't exactly high end, but I'd call it solid. And on that system Hogwarts Legacy is running well, with the benchmark-suggested "high" graphics settings. No raytracing. I have experienced some minor framerate drops, but nothing that would have gotten into the way of gameplay. The only thing that seems "slow" to me are the loading screens, which might have to do with the game being installed on my larger, regular hard disk, and not on the smaller SSD drive. That is only annoying when I try to "fast travel", which can feel as if walking would have been faster.

My graphics card is on the long list of most used graphics cards in the Steam survey. About 1% of Steam users have the same card, and a lot more of them have similar graphics cards, like the RTX 2060. It isn't really surprising if a triple-A game runs reasonably well on a rather common graphics card with settings that don't really push the limits. I can't tell where the stories about the game not running well on PC are coming from exactly. It could be that a lot of the people who are dissatisfied with the performance of Hogwarts Legacy on their rig have high-end cards like the RTX 4080 and are running ultra high settings with raytracing on. It is obviously annoying if you pay $1,500 for a graphics card and then your game is still stuttering somewhere. Or it is just a question of there being so many different possible configurations possible for a PC that a game running well on 90% of them is still getting a lot of negative feedback from the 10% on which it doesn't.

In the end, there simply isn't much information in the fact that the game runs well for me on my PC, because my PC is different from yours. And my expectations aren't all that high, I mostly play PC games that are less graphically demanding. I'm okay with the quality of the graphics and the performance of Hogwarts Legacy on my PC.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:46 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Friday, February 10, 2023
 
Bought at launch

Hogwarts Legacy was clearly a game I was on the fence about. But in the end I decided to buy it today, on launch day. At full price, because I don't trust cheap game keys on launch day. I read up some more about mouse and keyboard controls, and that is something that seems doable. I was also a bit worried about "souls-like" combat, which might not be very enjoyable to me, but then realized that unlike Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy has difficulty settings, and I can adjust the combat difficulty to my reaction time, which is slowing with age.

I watched that Hogwarts Legacy stream further, and about 10 hours into the game, the world opens up a lot more. Now Hogwarts Legacy for me will be the open world game I play between a replay of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and the upcoming Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I don't think it will stand the comparison very well. From all that I can see, it is a lot closer to the Ubisoft style of open world games than to the Zelda open world games. Pretty, but with less soul.

So why did I still buy it? Part of it has to do with the complete failure of the boycott. I fully expected there to be some version of something we have seen often before: High critic ratings contrasted by low user ratings, with the low user ratings being motivated by something other than the actual quality of the product. Instead it turns out that the user ratings on Metacritic for Hogwarts Legacy are actually *higher* than the critic ratings. Hundreds and hundreds of positive ratings from people who really like the game are completely drowning out the protests by the boycotters. And while a few woke trolls are harassing streamers of the game, on Twitch Hogwarts Legacy is the most watched single-player game at launch ever. Hogwarts Legacy is the biggest game release of 2023 up to now, and certainly already a contender for various Game of the Year awards. So the game felt both like something I shouldn't miss, and like something where me buying the game makes a political statement against harassment and trolls. Of course that is as weak a political statement as the failed boycott is, but I want to put my money where my mouth is and be on the right side of history here. Gamers should sometimes stand up against political activists from both sides and tell them to fuck off and leave us alone to our fun.

Personally I don't expect this to be my game of the year. But while the Ubisoft style of open worlds are sometimes a bit formulaic with too many collectibles and checklists of things to do, they can still be fun if you aren't a completionist. I had fun with several Assassin's Creed games, although I think the only one I ever finished was Black Flag. I think I can spend a few weeks in the Wizarding World and enjoy myself, without taking the game too seriously. I mean, even Elden Ring was a decent enough experience for me, once I decided to visit it more like a tourist than with any idea to "git gud" and beat it. Hogwarts Legacy sure is a lot more accessible and there are so many different sub-activities and mini games that I'm likely to find something that is fun to me.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:52 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments
 
Steam Next Fest

I am old enough to remember a time when people used to get information about video games from printed magazines. And even back then I was annoyed by those print magazine spending the majority of their coverage on games that weren't out yet. So I have to say that I am not a huge fan of the currently ongoing Steam Next Fest. I am all in favor of there being demos for games, or developer live streams. But at the Next Fest, all of these games aren't even out in early access yet.

I understand the use of early access, and I do play early access games. I don't mind terribly that for example in early access Baldur's Gate 3, you can't get further than level 5, or past the events of the first act of the game, that act being really large enough to try a lot of different things. And I really enjoy Against the Storm, which has major additions to the game every two weeks; but while the game is constantly changing, it is at any stage a complete game. There are bad early access experiences where the game not only isn't finished, it isn't even a complete playable game at the early access stage.

So I looked at some of the Steam Next Fest demos, and some of them basically are the version of the game *before* you could even describe them as early access. Proof of concepts, so to say. The poor man's version of a game trailer. For example I looked at Plan B: Terraform, which is a city builder / logistics game at a planetary scale, with deliberate global warming to make the poles melt and create a habitable world out of a desert. At least that is what it says on the label, you can't actually get near anything resembling terraforming in the demo. The demo is more like a much simplified version of Factorio. Which isn't a bad concept, but obviously still very far from content promised by the title of the game.

I don't usually buy videogames on Kickstarter. The failure rate of that category is high. So I definitively don't want Steam to turn into a Kickstarter-like platform for proof of concept videogames. There are enough games that are already finished, or at least early access playable. We don't need a promotion for a step still before early access.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:15 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Wednesday, February 08, 2023
 
Cinematic games

Still deciding whether Hogwarts Legacy is a game I want to play, so I am watching a YouTuber I follow play the first 4 hours of the game. Now I only recently started another playthrough of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which uses the same "open world" "adventure" "RPG" keywords to describe itself as a game. But looking at Hogwarts Legacy actual gameplay for a few hours it is already blindingly obvious: This is no Breath of the Wild.

Unsurprisingly for a game published by Warner Brothers, Hogwarts Legacy is very much a cinematic experience. There is more animated dialogue and other cinematic scenes in the first 4 hours of Hogwarts Legacy than in the first 40 hours of Breath of the Wild. That is nice if you *want* a cinematic experience, but obviously comes at the expense of player agency. At least the first hours of Hogwarts Legacy feel a lot more linear, with a lot less freedom, than the first hours of Breath of the Wild.

Personally, I am not a fan of too much exposition. It is one of the first things you learn if you become a dungeon master in D&D or similar pen & paper roleplaying games: Players want to do things, not listen to the DM drone on for hours. If you just follow the script of the game, then why would you want to pay $60 for the privilege to do so, if you can get 90% of that experience by watching a stream for free?

The main domain of player agency in Hogwarts Legacy at the start is combat. After seeing more of that, I would describe it as "souls-like". If you liked combat in Elden Ring, but found the world and lore in that game thoroughly confusing and weird, Hogwarts Legacy might be the game for you. But again, Elden Ring offers a lot more freedom to the player than Hogwarts Legacy.

Of course I expect Hogwarts Legacy to open up a bit later. But it sure takes its bloody time to get to the bit where one would describe it as an "open world" game. And I also expect it to remain "cinematic", which necessarily limits player freedom.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:09 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Tuesday, February 07, 2023
 
Deciding based on controls

If you pre-purchased the Deluxe Edition of Hogwarts Legacy on the Epic Games Store or Steam, you can play it on PC today. Early reports tell of some graphics problems on PC, but otherwise most reviewers are quite positive about the game. Me, I still don't know. After seeing more of the game, I have a concern: Do I really want to play this on a PC?

I do have an XBox controller on my PC that allows me to play games that require a controller. But that is not my preferred way of playing. I like keyboard and mouse controls, which are "lean forward" control schemes, where you sit upright in an office or gaming chair. Controllers work better "lean backward", you slouch on a couch or armchair in front of a console. When I look at Hogwarts Legacy, it very much seems as if it requires a controller. Even the user interface on the screen shows the spells you can use in combat arranged like the buttons on your controller. As there are only 4 buttons, if you want to cast any spell not mapped to the 4 current buttons, you need to switch to a different set of buttons, there being 4 sets of 4 buttons. Typical controller scheme, quite annoying if you play on a keyboard that happens to have more than 4 keys.

Yesterday I played Against the Storm again, a game which I still enjoy from time to time, although playing it less intensive now. Against the Storm is a typical keyboard and mouse controls game. I really wouldn't want to play this using a controller (and I don't even think the option exists). And I bought the controller for the PC because there are games that don't work very well with keyboard and mouse. Still, I prefer controller games on consoles, not on PC. I have no problem playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on my docked Switch console. But sitting upright in my office chair with a controller in hand in front of the PC somehow isn't really comfortable, and doesn't feel right.

Related to that is that I am not a huge fan of combat systems that involve button mashing on a controller. Even for Breath of the Wild that is the part I like least and am worst at. From what I can see, Hogwarts Legacy is a lot more combat-heavy than the books and movies were. I would have hoped that they would have adapted open-world game design to the world of Hogwarts, instead of the other way around. I love Breath of the Wild because you can do a lot of things without constantly fighting, and had hoped that Hogwarts Legacy would be more like that. "Let me grind a few more goblins, so that I make another level" somehow doesn't feel like Harry Potter to me.

So, for the moment I am not buying the game yet. I need to wait for more people to play it, and hopefully get some feedback on the viability of keyboard / mouse controls. If I had a PS5, I'd buy that version, but the only current generation console I have is the Switch. The Switch release is on July 25, and I have some serious doubts about how well the game runs on that console, which is a bit underpowered compared to other consoles or a PC. So waiting for the Switch version might not be the best option either.

- posted by Tobold @ 4:44 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Saturday, February 04, 2023
 
Archeology 2222

Imagine you are an archeologist in the year 2222, and you have come across an absolute treasure: A buried server farm containing all the YouTube videos of 2022. This should give you a brilliant opportunity to find out how people lived 200 years ago. Does it?

The first problem with that idea is that YouTube is obviously not geographically representative of the real world. The 40 million inhabitants of California produced a lot more YouTube videos in 2022 than the 1.4 billion inhabitants of Africa. To get an idea about China, you'd need to look a WeChat and Weibo, not YouTube. And even within the USA, YouTube demographics aren't representative: The average YouTuber is younger, whiter, more likely to be male, and richer than the average American.

The second problem with using YouTube to find out about the lives of real people is that the large majority of YouTube videos don't have the lives of real people as the subject. A huge number of YouTube videos are about fiction: Video games, movies, TV series, books, and so on. That would give an archeologist an idea what the entertainment in 2022 was about, but not much more.

The third, and probably most deceptive problem for the future archeologist is one that has plagued historians since the profession exists: Average people are boring, which is why they don't appear much in historical records. We know a lot more about the histories of kings and queens than we know about their subjects, in spite of there obviously being a lot more subjects than kings. YouTube has the same problem: It is easy to find videos about people driving Lamborghinis, although only 9,233 of these cars were sold in 2022. And you can probably find a lot of documentaries of people queuing up at food banks, or other cost-of-living crisis reporting. But good luck finding anything about a US household making around the median income of $70k per year. We know how the average person lives, because this is us, but we aren't leaving a lot of records about our lives, because even we think our lives are boring.

Now, the problems of future archeologists are probably not very important. But the lack of YouTube to show real lives of average people does have consequences today. All those videos with the Lambos have the driver get out of his car and try to sell you a get-rich-quick scheme or course. The glamorous lives of influencers cause depression and anxiety in the viewers, because it makes them think that they are doing a lot worse than they actually do. On the other side of the spectrum, people are making political capital by exaggerating the problems. This is the century in which people decided that they can't trust the press, so they instead turned to social media, which turns out to be significantly less trustworthy still. This is how we got into the post-truth society. Half of the people on social media deliberately lie, and the other half misrepresents because the misrepresentation gets more attention than the boring reality. The old motto of Google was "don't be evil", but I think they underestimated the evil that their search algorithms on the search engine, and the recommendation algorithms on YouTube would ultimately bring us.


- posted by Tobold @ 10:32 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Friday, February 03, 2023
 
A technological dead end

The 3D printer I still have is a so-called FDM printer, fused deposition modeling, that uses a thermoplastic filament, like PLA, melts it, and controls its deposition through a nozzle with the help of step motors. The resolution of that is given by the quality of the step motors, and typically reaches 0.1 mm. That is still quite visible, so if you 3D print a miniature, you will see the layers. The more modern 3D printing technology is SLA, stereolithography, which uses a beam of light hardening a liquid resin. The resolution of that is typically much better, at 0.03 mm, and as a result a miniature printed in resin looks a lot better.

And there lies the trap: 3D printing technology has developed away from FDM printing and towards SLA printing, because the results of SLA are better. But FDM printing with PLA is essentially harmless, and is something you can do without many safety precautions; a simple HEPA filter on the printer, and not touching the hot nozzle is enough. SLA printing is significantly more dangerous, as it involves handling a rather toxic acrylic resin liquid; you will want to have very good ventilation, preferably a fume hood, and you need to wear gloves. You will also need to handle the flammable isopropanol used for washing, although most of us have gotten quite used to handling that, given that it is the main component of most hand sanitizers. I really, really wouldn't recommend a SLA printer for kids. And personally, although I am trained to handle chemical substances safely, I don't use a SLA printer in my home, because of safety concerns.

In other words, a SLA printer is not really a mass-market consumer product. 3D printing technology has evolved *away* from consumer-friendliness. Which in part explains why earlier forecasts of a 3D printer in every home have not come true. The other half of the problem is that even with a SLA printer it is extremely difficult to use a 3D printer to replace some broken plastic piece in your household. The emblematic model of FDM printing, the hairy lion, sure looks cool, but has no practical use. 3D printing is a rather complicated and expensive way to produce cheap plastic objects and toys. Still, I believe that a technology development towards more user-friendly and easier to use FDM printers would have led to a wider spread of the technology than going down the high-quality SLA route.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:10 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Thursday, February 02, 2023
 
On the difficulties of stopping climate change

As this post will contain some news that aren't flattering about some climate activists, I think I should start with a series of statements, which I believe are true:
  1. Climate change is real, and is caused by human activity, mainly the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2).
  2. At the current pace of action against climate change, we will not be able to limit the temperature rise to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
  3. While this will not exterminate humanity, climate change at this level will cause a series of very hard to predict meteorological events, which will cause immense economic damage and kill a large number of people.
Given these statements, I have a certain sympathy for climate activists. While I will be dead before the worst consequences of climate change happen, younger people and people with children don't have that easy way out, and need to think about limiting climate change for a less catastrophic future. Having said that, it appears to me that a lot of climate activism is based on solutions that are overly simplistic, and won't work. A typical slogan is "End Oil", and while that is certainly a long-term goal, it isn't as if we could just stop using fossil fuels as easy as we could stop smoking.

In Germany, a climate activist group calling themselves "Last Generation" has been in the news with some actions that were downright dangerous, like trying to cause a huge oil spill by sabotaging safety valves on oil pipelines. Causing a catastrophe to limit a bigger catastrophe is a dubious method at best, and downright terrorist at worst; which is why these climate activists have been targeted by German anti-terrorist police.

The latest story about the "Last Generation" is funnier, because it involves hypocrisy. But I want to tell it not for a cheap laugh, but to highlight some of the difficulties involved in stopping climate change. Two activists of the "Last Generation", a couple, missed a court date for their involvement in a blockade event. The judge, as judges do, wasn't amused, and demanded an explanation. They replied to that request for an explanation, which thus got into court records, and by that way was found by journalists: They missed the court date because they had been on holiday, flying to Bali. A return flight from Germany to Bali emits about 4 tons of CO2 per person, while for comparison going vegan saves only 1 ton of CO2 per year, and a typical car emits about 4.6 tons of CO2 per year. Flying is about the worst thing an individual can do regarding greenhouse gas emissions, which is why for example Greta Thunberg used a sailing boat to get to a climate conference in New York in 2019. I haven't taken a flight since 2019, but of course I don't claim that is possible for everybody.

Smaller planes flying shorter distances have been shown to be able to use more climate friendly fuels, like electricity or hydrogen. However, for a typical holiday flight, it is physically impossible to get a jumbo jet from Germany to Bali on anything other than liquid hydrocarbon fuels. You can make that "climate neutral" on paper, by offsetting it with "negative emissions", or reducing the carbon footprint by using fuel that has been made out of biomass or even recycled CO2. But currently "carbon offsetting" is often a scam, especially if they don't fulfill the criterion of additionality. Scam carbon offsetting is a lot cheaper than actual carbon offsetting. And if you look up the discussion of what a working "carbon tax" would need to be, or how much carbon capture and storage would cost, you end up with a cost per ton of carbon dioxide of around $100. With the cheapest ticket for a return flight from Bali to Germany being around $1,000, offsetting the carbon emissions realistically would increase the cost of the flight by 40%. And because take-off and landing consume more fuel than high-altitude flights, carbon offsetting for shorter flights can up to double the cost of the ticket.

Obviously cheap holiday flights are not actually a human right, but many people treat it that way. And the carbon offsetting solution would quickly be perceived as socially unjust, with only the richer half of the population still being able to afford it. The same is true for ground transport: The technology exists to make climate-friendly or even climate-neutral cars (climate neutrality always involves "negative emissions", even going on horseback isn't strictly "climate neutral"), but they will be a lot more expensive than cars running on fossil fuels. Which means that a smaller percentage of the population could still afford a car than today, which will be controversial.

Furthermore, if you had a magic wand and could in an instant replace every single car on earth by a climate friendly electric car, these cars wouldn't go anywhere. There simply wouldn't be enough electricity to run them all. For example the USA in 2021 produced 4.11 trillion kWh of electricity. But they consumed also 7.26 billion barrels of petroleum, which is about 12.3 trillion kWh. Yes, some of the petroleum produced went into electricity production, so the numbers aren't strictly comparable. But it is obvious that we would need not only make all our electricity production carbon neutral, but also increase it by several hundred percents in order to switch to electric cars.

There are other areas where we can make real progress relatively fast. For example I am currently building a house in the near-zero emission building standard (NZEB). Home isolation is a one-time investment that can save around 3 tons per year of CO2 on heating (rough estimate for Europe, but this very much depends on where you live, and how bad the current building standards are where you live today). Unfortunately isolating older buildings isn't quite as easy, and in some situations the incentives are badly aligned, with for example the landlord paying for isolation, but the heating cost being paid by the renter.

In summary, the difficulties of stopping climate change are the ones I mentioned above: We need a large amount of green energy to replace fossil fuels before we can "end oil". Barring a technological miracle in fusion technology, that green energy will be significantly more expensive than fossil energy, so we also need solutions for social problems in order to make heating and transport affordable for everybody. And all of this will take decades, and trillions of dollars in investment, which is why we will overshoot the 2°C target. Lifestyle changes should be a part of the solution, but they are difficult, and they won't be enough to solve the problem.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:22 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Wednesday, February 01, 2023
 
Sequels and replayability

In May, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes out, the successor of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. So I am currently playing Breath of the Wild again on my Switch, not sure if it is my third or fourth playthrough overall. And while Breath of the Wild is certainly a game you can replay and enjoy after not playing it for a year or two, I quickly realized a flaw in my reasoning: Playing Breath of the Wild doesn't really do much to prepare me for Tears of the Kingdom. Well, it would if I would concentrate on getting better at combat, learning how to reliably flurry rush or do similar moves that are likely to be present in the next game as well. But I don't fight more than absolutely necessary in Breath of the Wild; and pressing three buttons simultaneously on a controller and at exactly the right moment is not something I will ever be good at.

Breath of the Wild is a game about exploring a large open world. Finding everything, knowing where everything is, being able to use that knowledge to your advantage for example to upgrade your armor, that is the essence of mastering the game. If Tears of the Kingdom uses the exact game mechanics, but a completely new world, the mastery of Breath of the Wild simply doesn't transfer. Which in a way is good, because the exploration and finding out where everything is, is a major part of the fun of the game.

In the world of board games, people all over the world are currently receiving Frosthaven, the sequel to Gloomhaven, and the highest funded gaming project on Kickstarter at 13 million dollars, not counting late pledges. I didn't back it, and I don't plan on buying it, except if it comes out as a digital version (Gloomhaven Digital is my preferred version of the game). And conceptually it is the exact opposite of a sequel than Tears of the Kingdom is: If you are very good at playing Gloomhaven, that will very much translate to you having an easier time in Frosthaven. Yes, you will play with new characters in new scenarios; but most of the people who bought Frosthaven haven't played all the characters and played through all the scenarios in Gloomhaven.

Gloomhaven is more of a puzzle, the challenge is to learn how to use your cards in the most efficient way, so that your dwindling supply of cards lasts until the end of the scenario. Once you have understood the long-term consequences of burning cards, you have understood that the only good way to play is to start softly, and keep your big burn combos for the end of the scenario. And that doesn't change, regardless of whether you are playing Gloomhaven or Frosthaven, and regardless of which character you play in which scenario. Once you are good at Gloomhaven card management, another -haven game is just more of the same. My wife and me never finished Gloomhaven, because we got to the point where we had mastered the game after 20 or so scenarios, and applying that mastery over and over to different scenarios and different characters wasn't all that much fun to us. At least not in the board game version, where the fun of playing a scenario is paid for very dearly with the extremely high effort of setting up the game and putting it back into the box afterwards.

Besides playing with my wife, I have been playing board games once or twice per month with a group of 4 players overall. Besides a few games of Scythe and Return to Dark Tower, we mostly played legacy games: We finished Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated, and are currently halfway through Charterstone, another legacy game. And while I actually bought a Charterstone recharge pack, which would allow me to reset the game and play it again, chances are that I won't. Both Clank!: Legacy and Charterstone seem to be reasonably well designed in that the length of the full campaign corresponds about to how much you'll want to play a game before wanting to play something completely different. So while putting stickers on your game, or tearing up cards, or other ways of permanently changing your game might feel weird to some boardgamers, I very much like legacy games. I have far too many games that I haven't played often enough to be bored of them. Reaching the end of a legacy game is a nice point of closure, and the fact that you *can't* replay it (unless you buy a recharge pack or second copy, or play the final version without legacy elements) is a feature, not a flaw.

For me, that is the ideal situation: I arrive at the end of a campaign, regardless of whether it is a board game or a video game, and the length of the campaign corresponds to the length of time the game was fun for. Unfortunately that rarely happens. There are both games in which the fun ran out before I reached the end, and I stopped playing because the final part seemed like just too much of a grind to me; and games where I finished the campaign and then started over with different options and choices, and only stopped playing somewhere in the middle of the second or third playthrough. What games did you play where you reached the end of the campaign and said "that was just the right length, I liked playing this much, but don't want to play more than that!"?

- posted by Tobold @ 9:34 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
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