Weekly Update - 180

Woo! Let's get colorful! Or "colourful" depending on where you're from. You're wrong, but I don't judge too harshly. :P

Comic this week? Yes!

Drawing: Back to Kiva's story, continuing with Page 167

Playing: Baulder's Gate 3

Volume #1: Undergoing content review! (Week 2)

Ramble:

Hoo boy if Baulder's Gate 3 isn't the topic of the year. Seems like literally everyone has something to say about it. I can barely even open Youtube without being drowned with videos about "Karlach does this (spoiler)" or "How to Romance Shadowheart" or "BG3 breaks new records" or "AAA studios are scared about BG3," it goes on and on. I promise not to spoil anything here, but I do want to talk about some game design thoughts I've had while playing BG3.

A big complaint of mine lies with games that rely a bit too much on random numbers to determine outcomes. I used to think that people who complained about RNG in gaming were focusing too much on just the negative outcomes. After all, the positive outcomes are easy to ignore, since they are what happens when the game is meeting your expectations. You expect your attack to land, and it does, so onto the next! A successful roll is barely worth thinking about after the fact. It's when you rely on your character to deal damage in order to progress, and your character MISSES, that is when gamers rage.

However, there is a fine balance between what the player can choose to do and the RNG that determines how effective that choice is, and there are times when the RNG controls a bit too much of the outcome, which takes all of the power away from the player. The first game that comes to mind for most people is X-COM, but I think it's a bad example, personally. I really LIKE X-COM and I feel the use of randomness is done quite well there. Yes, it is a meme for your soldier to miss a crucial 95% shot that you were relying on and then get critically murdered behind full cover from across the map by a lowly Sectoid, but honestly I discourage reloading saves in situations like that because in X-COM, your game is not lost even if you end up losing one whole squad or failing a whole mission. You can recover, you can pull through. It might be harder to crawl back on top without your strongest squad, sure, but the player has tools they can use to react to, adapt to, and mitigate such situations if and when they occur. And they WILL occur. That's part of the beauty of random numbers, when you roll that dice enough, eventually you will come across the unlikely scenarios, the ones that are so statistically rare that often times many game designers seem to forget they are even possible. Video games streamline a lot of the dice rolling process, so that dice can potentially be rolled two dozen or more than a hundred times in a single turn, depending on the game. In X-COM, however, it's a wonderful feeling to suffer through a handful of devastating losses, but then still pull through a come-from-behind victory with all of your fallen soldiers memorialized on your wall.

Which brings me to the problems (that is to say, one problem) I have with BG3. Now, it's a great game, don't get me wrong. Great games are all about giving the player interesting choices, and BG3 has NO SHORTAGE of interesting choices. Indeed even failing random skill checks in dialogue is super fun sometimes, because often times you are rewarded for doing so in the dialogue itself.

But the combat. It's the combat that is a real problem. And it's a problem not only because it relies too heavily on D&D's d20 system, which removes much of the influence the player might have on the outcome in favor of a single high variance random roll, but due to its very nature of being a video game, it's missing a lot of the alternative options that players might have in a D&D game. Larian did their best, yes, and it is an absolute joy to throw one goblin off a cliff at a bugbear down below, and have that be resolved in game. But combat is primarily a problem because WHEN those rare outlier situations inevitably occur, leading to the party's inability to squeak out any form of victory, (or indeed if you are facing enemies that are higher level and those rare outlier situations where you miss every shot and get crit every turn are significantly less rare) the penalty is often a Game Over that the player could not have prevented with the tools available to them.

A Game Over should not be the penalty when the power to avoid it lies more on the outcomes of random rolls than anything the player has control over, and that INCLUDES when the player repeats the same roll over and over again because the game tells them it has a 60% chance to hit, and despite having "Karmic Dice" turned on, their character still ends up missing five times in a row while the enemy crits them every turn. Game Over should not be the penalty if you, say, wander unknowingly into the den of a Spectator with your level 3 heroes. Game Over should not be the penalty if YOUR COMPANION fails a deception check, causing a large pack of level five enemies to become hostile in an encounter you didn't know you should avoid until you are at least equipped with 3rd level spells. Game Over shouldn't be the penalty if you rescue someone, who turns out to be a GIANT PRICK and orders you to punish his army for their failures, and you suddenly find yourself trapped between the choice of fighting his army with his aid, which leads to your death, or declining and fighting both him and his army at once. I can go on. I won't, you get the point.

Game Overs... are dumb! I'm just going to take a strong stand and die on that hill right now. They made sense once for simple games when the point of the game was to see how far you could get before suffering ultimate defeat. That's about it. But when you are at the end of a long day, and you're settling down to enjoy a tall glass of your favorite libation, and you just want to sit and play an epic and involved game for a few hours until you go to bed, to have that experience interrupted by something that takes you out of the game as abruptly as a Game Over is super frustrating. At that point, do you just set the game aside and go to bed early with a, "welp, guess I'm done playing games for the night!" No! Nobody does that. We reload an earlier save. We all WANT to keep playing. We don't want the game to be over. We also don't want to be forced to manually reload saves when we're suddenly hit with an unavoidable Game Over we weren't expecting.

Game Overs are lazy game design. That's the long and the short of it. It is not that much work to put in a simple reusable function that skips the Game Over part and puts you right back into the game without you needing to back out to the main menu and check out the loading screen. It simply skips the thing we're all going to do anyway. It doesn't even require a hugely deep lore explanation. We're all gamers. We get it. Nobody raises their hand when your Dark Souls character is magically resurrected at the start of the area after they've died for the thousandth time. Dark Souls, from what I understand, DOES explain that in lore, but my point is that they don't HAVE to. No one will ask questions if your defeated party wakes up again in your camp, having been saved by some mysterious force. Respawning is a natural part of gaming. It always has been.

Anyway, I've spent way too much time rambling on this today. What do you think? Are Game Overs lazy? Do they serve an important purpose? Am I a moron? Does anyone even care?

Thanks for reading.