Further Into Overture

 So, I'll confess that I have not gone on the sort of deep-delves into lore for Lies of P as I have on, say, Elden Ring or Bloodborne. I'm now a couple chapters into Lies of P's DLC, Overture, currently making my way through a mine full of puppet-miners.

The exact point in the timeline of Krat's crises here is not entirely clear: it is snowy outside, so we're looking at, at the very least, a different time of year.

I actually just saw an article talking about how the difficulty is overtuned for the DLC, and while I've certainly hit some frustrating parts here and there, it hasn't felt much worse than par for the course on one's first run through a Souls-like level. That being said, I'm also still on my initial playthrough, having never gone into NG+ (my tendency is to start multiple playthroughs with different builds, rather than to keep going at it in NG+ runs - I have yet to send any of my Elden Ring characters into "Journey 2," for instance). But I certainly believe it if there are significant numbers of people who are well aware of how hard this genre tends to be but still feel like it's too much.

I am playing on "Legendary Stalker" difficulty, which is the default, hardest one. (I lowered it to the medium difficulty at one point but decided that as long as I had beaten the base game in the hard mode, I may as well try to get through the DLC on it as well). And I've certainly had some encounters that have required me to go back over and over to beat some tough enemy (most recently, I found an elite non-boss enemy that was like a bulldozer with a drill-arm, and after my initial encounter with it, I noticed a hidden path off the elevator that led down to it that turned out to lead to a hidden mini-boss (actually an earlier version of one of the primary bosses in the main game). Both of these were quite tough, though I started to get the hang of them and figure out the most important tricks (for the bulldozer, dodging around and hitting the fuel tank on its back, and for the actual mini boss with a health bar, learning to read when it was going to do an attack that would drain HP off of you to heal itself - which was really devastating when it landed because it meant that much more boss to fight).

Apparent balance issues aside, I am struck by how much Lies of P does to be more player-friendly than your typical FromSoft game of this genre. When you get an item for a quest, there's a marker that tells you which is the closest Stargazer you'll need to go to. And I think just generally, the characters don't speak so cryptically, and what is actually happening in the story is somewhat straightforward, even if I'm sure there are subtle hints and clues to underlying stories going on beneath the surface.

Don't get me wrong, I love the subtlety and ambiguity of FromSoft's approach. What I've always been less of a fan of is the manner in which you can fail quests by speaking to the wrong person at the wrong time, or wander too close to a building here or there.

I wrote in my previous post about the addition of difficulty levels. And I think there's this kind of back-and-forth that the gaming community and I, myself, have about having them. But I certainly think that it's good someone is doing it in this genre.

I remain a little frustrated with the weapon upgrades: When you come into the game with a +10 weapon (or +5 special weapon) it's very tough to get any of the new weapons up to speed. This isn't unique to this game, of course, but I appreciate at least that in Elden Ring, I can pretty easily get the smithing stones to get a new weapon up to +24 (or +9 for the Somber Stone weapons). Lies of P lets you find things that will unlock unlimited Hidden and Crescent Moonstones, but unless I've missed them, I don't think you can unlock the ability to purchase unlimited Half Moonstones or the Covenant ones.

To be frank, I think this style of weapon upgrade system is actually one of the bigger flaws in the Souls-like genre, because it discourages experimenting with new weapons. You're always scrounging for your highest-level upgrade materials, and so spending them on anything other than the weapon you're already comfortable using is very risky - but then, you miss out on the opportunity to actually get comfortable with those new weapons.

As far as I can tell, Lies of P has no re-spec option, and so, given that I sank a ton of levels into Technique, to the exclusion of Motivity and Advance, I do find myself kind of limited in what I can use. That said, the game's mix-and-match weapon system means that you can actually get by using the blades of any weapon (well, any weapon you can disassemble) and just sticking it on a handle that fits your stat-spread.

Still, I think all of this has made me wonder if I should (probably after I finish the DLC) start a new save file and focus on something else (Advance seems like it could be fun, potentially - I liked playing Arcane in Bloodborne, though I remember going to a Strength character and realizing it was so much easier to do high damage with a physical build because Bloodborne's elemental gems are so rare).

Stepping Into Lies of P Overture

 Not all that long ago, I played Lies of P, which I think is among the best, if not the best regarded non-FromSoft Souls-like game. It had been out for a couple years, but I picked it up recently. Recently, a DLC expansion to the game was announced, Overture, which became available not long after its announcement. I decided to check it out. I had enjoyed the game, though I hadn't spent a ton of time digesting it, as I got Expedition 33 right as I was hitting Lies of P's final boss.

With that game pretty thoroughly completed, though, I've returned to the city of Krat.

Lies of P's similarities to FromSoft's games is not a secret, and thus it's not really much of a surprise that its DLC has us traveling back in time to the past, prior to or perhaps right at the start of the Puppet Frenzy that threw the Belle Epoque metropolis into utter chaos. Much as Artorias of the Abyss, The Old Hunters, and Shadow of the Erdtree all find ways to illuminate past chapters of their stories, Overture promises to give us some new revelations about a shadowed past.

I've only scratched the surface of Overture, having only just gotten to the first proper boss (and only making one attempt on it). But I think what's really interesting to me is not so much the content as the new UX systems.

And the most exciting and thought-provoking one? A difficulty setting.

Now, difficulty settings have been a thing for probably all of gaming's history, and while many of the games I grew up on had no such thing, it's not exactly unprecedented.

However, the Souls-like genre of action RPGs is (in)famous for its crushing difficulty. Lies of P was probably not quite as hard as the games of FromSoft (judging only by the fact that I was able to beat it pretty quickly and didn't really get super-stuck on any boss, except maybe the Nameless Puppet). Still, there are ways in which I think the folks at Round8 Studio tried to make the game a little more player-friendly and straightforward. Lies of P has a much more linear layout, which makes progression somewhat obvious. The story, also, while still containing some subtle secrets, is also a bit more straightforward than FromSoft's (or perhaps more specifically, Hidetaka Miyazaki's) stuff. One of the small but really appreciated things about it is that you drop your Ergo outside of a boss room, meaning that you don't need to worry about grabbing it while also trying to start off a boss fight well.

The DLC (I think regardless of whether you actually buy it to unlock the new area) brings three difficulties - with the highest being the default difficulty, the one that was the only option before. However, there's a medium difficulty and an easy difficulty.

And boy: I've gone back and forth on the purpose of high difficulty in games. I think that you generally want your games to have some degree of challenge, both to make it satisfying to succeed but also to ensure that players engage with as many of the gameplay systems as they can. But I also think that this actually transforms Lies of P into something kind of remarkable as far as Souls-likes go: potentially the easy game for people to try out the genre.

I played a bit on the medium difficulty after dying over and over to regular enemies in the Krat zoo, and it's still a challenge, but certainly more manageable. That said, whether it's pride or just the desire to ensure that I don't get complacent with my skill and use of the game's mechanics, I'm intending to stick to the "Legendary Stalker" difficulty while I can stand to.

Another addition is the ability to have rematches with bosses. While I'd like to have the option to fight them with exactly the stats they initially had, it seems that they do scale them up a bit, because I actually struggled a bit on the Parade Master Puppet on the 3 difficulty, despite having beaten the main game and this guy being the first boss. In this boss rematch mode, you can actually unlock higher difficulties beyond "3," though I don't know what kind of reward you get for it.

Having gotten my video game start with games like Donkey Kong Country or Yoshi's Island, I prefer it when you can revisit any bosses you've already beaten, and feel a bit sad that most of my favorite games really favor this "you don't get to see this again until New Game Plus," auto-saving style. This isn't precisely that (and despite having unlocked the ability to understand the puppet language, that appears to truly only activate in NG+).

There are still some points of frustration: I really wish there were a means to unlock the ability to purchase half-moonstones so that you could, with enough Ergo, get any weapon you wanted to try at least one step shy of fully upgraded (frankly I'd be happy if you could purchase full moonstones). I want to try out the new weapons I've found in the DLC (and even some from the base game) but I'm always hesitant to commit to upgrading something if I have a finite number of upgrade materials. I guess DSIII and Elden Ring have spoiled me in eventually allowing you to purchase as many Titanite Chunks or Smithing Stones (8) and Somber Smithing Stones (9). I'll be very happy if a vendor item like that is available in the DLC, which I am, again, only in the first stage of.

Despite their similarities, the rhythm of Lies of P is very different from FromSoft's Soulsborne games - having been playing a bit of Bloodborne and Elden Ring in the wake of COE33 and finishing Final Fantasy XVI, it's definitely an adjustment that I need to make.

Hopefully I can get "gud" in this idiosyncratic way and update this blog with my progress.

And if I can't, I can always put it to Story Mode difficulty, I guess.

Miquella and the Maximialist Pursuit of Perfection

 What is it that Count Ymir sees in Miquella that condemns him to failure just as the latter's mother, Marika encountered?

One of the strange things about Elden Ring is that, years after my first journey into the Lands Between, I'm not entirely sure whether Marika is a villain or a hero. To be sure, great suffering and pain came from her actions. But I think her intentions were noble.

Death is the wellspring of suffering. Pain evolved to warn us about impending injury and death. Hunger is the fear that we will starve. More complex, emotional pains, such as seeing a friend drift away or breaking up with a romantic partner, is a pain of loss, the loss of what could potentially happen had the relationship remained intact, and the loss of the familiar joys experienced in that relationship.

I believe that one of the greatest philosophical efforts in human history has been reconciling with the existential terror of death. It has led some to believe that death is necessary, and good, even. That it gives a life meaning by constraining it within certain parameters.

To be frank, and not to get super-dark here in what is ultimately the discussion of a video game, I think that this is mainly a coping mechanism, that there is little reason to think of death in any positive way.

Instead, I would say, philosophically, I have two paths to help with this fear: one is the humanistic path, which acknowledges but does not focus on the eventuality of death, instead preferring to live in the here and now, to remain grounded, and to find the joys and value in the people one is surrounded by, and to appreciate all the nuances of human life. The other path is the agnostic path, which believes that our own ignorance as to what death might be like could allow for something wondrous, or at the very least, not an unending nothingness devoid of any meaning or consciousness.

This latter path, I think, is what appeals to me about the Age of Stars ending for the game. My interpretation is that what Ranni seeks to make of the world is one in which the grand ambitions of the divine and powerful are separated from the lives of the people. It will not have the comforts of a divine being presiding over all things, but will also lack a divine tyrant domineering all things. We go into darkness, fear, and loneliness, but these don't inherently mean that what lurks within that darkness is a bad thing.

Still, if Marika's initial plan was to create a world free of death, I don't think that's an ignoble goal.

The problem, I think, is one of perfection.

The antagonists of many a fantasy story are the villains who seek to ultimately fix things. Sauron, the most iconic fantasy villain (even though we never actually see him in the novels - Peter Jackson visualized him as the giant flaming eye, but if I recall the novels correctly, the eye was more metaphorical than something actually visible over the wastes of Mordor), has a surprisingly nuanced backstory. A Maia first drawn into rebellion under Morgoth, Sauron's defeat during that time eventually saw him genuinely penitent, seeking to redeem himself for his collusion with evil.

And yet, Sauron became convinced that he was the only one capable of fixing the world and bringing peace and order. The inability to let go, and to recognize that he was not the right person to do this fixing (fittingly, he was a Maia of crafting,) led him to view any opposition to him as opposition to the salvation of the world, and totally lost perspective, resorting to those old Morgoth tactics and threatening the world with darkness and tyranny.

It's debatable to what degree Radagon and Markia agreed or disagreed in their aims and methods. But I think it's interesting that, as many have pointed out elsewhere, the Rebis-like being that Mairka-Radagon is seems to be a successful (or seemingly successful) Magnum Opus - the ultimate goal of Alchemy, which is both a precursor to modern chemistry and physics but also an esoteric mystic practice. Mystical practices are generally concerned with discovering secret truths about the nature of reality and often using said practices to ascend in some way from the normal human state.

But even if these practices can be helpful as metaphors or frameworks in which to resolve, for example, psychological traumas and neuroses, or as alchemy did, give birth to modern science (I don't know who said it, but someone once said that Isaac Newton wasn't the first physicist, but the last alchemist), they do, by the very nature of seeking to ascend beyond humanity's current state, often tempt people to abandon that grounded, humanistic ethos.

History is rife with examples of people taking some complex philosophical worldview and, in putting it into practice, go on to wage wars and slaughter innocent people. Consider all the religious conflicts even within a given religion, where the basic principles of the faith remain the same, but subtle details give rise to violent conflict.

Ironically, the message of some of the world's most popular religious movements have often had at their cores a message that encourages a humble acceptance of the human condition, and a respect for all others who endure the same challenges - but even the most peace-and-love-oriented philosophy can, under the right circumstances, be used to justify war and hatred.

Which brings us to Miquella.

In the base game, before we got Shadow of the Erdtree, Miquella appeared in many ways to be the most benevolent of the demigods, and of the Empyreans, the one that seemed most fit to succeed Marika as the god of the next age. Was there reason to doubt this? Oh, for sure: chief amongst them being that I don't think any FromSoft game has ever given us anyone with any significant level of power and authority who can be fully trusted.

Still, Miquella seemed to be providing a home for the downtrodden of the Lands Between, such as the Albinaurics, and worked hard to restore Godwyn to true life.

Of course, what we've learned since Shadow of the Erdtree is that some of the assumptions we had were missing key elements: Yes, Mohg appears to have raided the Haligtree and captured Miquella in the midst of his cocoon/tree-womb transformation, taking him to his ruins underground. But it was only in SotE that we discovered that it was Miquella who had "captured" Mohg, laying his mind-control upon the omen and planting this notion of an omen as Elden Lord within Mohg's head, all to ultimately steal Mohg's body so that Radahn could have one free of the Scarlet Rot (well, either that and/or using his omen blood to get into the Lands of Shadow).

There are some strange ironies to Miquella's path to apotheosis - a path that he does actually seem to succeed on, though only briefly (though dear lord, I took my second character into that final boss fight of the DLC and I had forgotten just how brutally difficult it is. I'm a little ashamed that I used a cheese build to take down Simon in Expedition 33, as I wonder which boss would rank higher for me if I beat both the conventional way. At least I got Radahn and Miquella once, so I can stick that feather in my cap).

First off, his choice of consort is an interesting one - he picks the greatest warrior of his demigod siblings (though remember that there is art in the introduction to the game of Morgott evidently kicking Radahn's ass) to usher in his age of peace.

I don't really know what to make of the fact that Miquella is the only male empyrean and chooses a male consort/Elden Lord. While I don't think that gender is arbitrary for the demigods, I also don't know whether Miquella's intention is to actually try to reproduce (indeed, he might have seen his mother's choice to have children as a flaw in her plan). I'm also disinclined to read too much into the fact that his chosen consort is a relative, as this isn't exactly unheard of among gods (the Olympians were certainly in-bred).

But I think the stranger thing is this: Miquella removes elements of himself during his pilgrimage through the Lands of Shadow, discarding parts of his body, yes, but also parts of his personality, and even St. Trina, his own Radagon-like other self.

While we don't have a great timeline on how long Miquella has been in the Lands of Shadow by the time we get there (my usual bet is that if something happened, it happened long before we ever started our game) but there is some reason to believe that he's not right there up in Enir-Elim when we get to the Shadowlands, because it's not until we're approaching the Shadow Keep (which some have suggested might actually be Helphen's Steeple, the central keep of the land of the dead, re-branded and repurposed by Messmer during his campaign against the Hornsent) that we hear the resonating shattering of Miquella's Great Rune. Given that we find the remains of the rune below the Scadutree, and get it off of the Scadutree Avatar, we might guess that it was shattered either within that arena or that it was discarded there from above, at the Shadow Keep. At the moment of that shattering, was Miquella there to do the breaking of the rune?

Each demigod's Great Rune ties into their nature in some way, and we've always known that Miquella was capable of magically charming people. The many NPCs that we travel the Lands of Shadow with are all under this magical compulsion when we start, but when the rune shatters, the camaraderie immediately collapses - for some. Actually, it's interesting that some people remain loyal to Miquella, including Dain, Freyja, and of course Needle Knight Leda. It's after this point at which Sir Ansbach makes it clear: that Miquella's power of compulsion is the most terrifying weapon he's ever witnessed, and even fell to it after he tried to free his lord Mohg from the same.

But let's examine that irony:

Miquella's journey to godhood involves a casting-off of many of the things that make him who he is. The first several Miquella Crosses we find say things like "here I cast off a part of my flesh" or "here I cast off my arm sinister" (in this case, I think we should take this literally as his left arm - there's another that says he casts off his arm dexter, meaning right arm). This physical dismemberment is certainly strange, but in the context of someone ascending to godhood, it doesn't actually seem all that crazy to try to transcend his physical form.

But, particularly when we get to the southern reaches of the Cerulean Coast, we find that he has discarded his "doubt and vacillation." These, of course, are not physical elements (at least we don't think they are,) and suggests that he has fully committed to what he needs to do. That being said, it's interesting that there was such doubt and vacillation, and that he needed to make some effort to keep those feelings from preventing him from doing what he needs to do to achieve his goal.

Deeper, within the Stone Coffin Fissure, we find that he has discarded his love.

And here, I think we need to slam the brakes. How does Miquella expect to bring about an age of compassion if he has removed from himself the emotion most closely tied to compassion?

Well, we could read this not as his capacity for love, but "his love" as referring to a person, namely St. Trina, the way that one refers to someone special, such as a romantic partner or one's child (or pets) as "my love."

And yet, in this realm of gods and demigods and saints, the person of St. Trina could also represent, truly, his love in the broader sense.

The point is, there's an irony to the way that Miquella conducts himself. His Great Rune, which gave him the unassailable power to enchant others to adore him, is broken while we are in the Land of Shadows. I assume (though to be fair, it's possible that there's some other explanation) that he's the one who breaks it, as part of his divestment tour before entering the Divine Gate.

And yet, when we actually face Miquella, he has the ability to, much as he did to Ansbach in their initial battle, artfully steal the heart of the player, giving us an alternate loss condition to "You Died" that says "Heart Stolen." (Here, there might be a bit of gameplay/story separation, unless the light of grace also purges this enchantment upon us - in theory, this fate seems like it could give Miquella his permanent victory). But if his Great Rune is shattered, how can he do this anymore?

I don't really have an answer for that, other than that perhaps he rebuilt a new version of that rune as part of his apotheosis.

Again, though, his end goal might be a noble one - to create a world of peace and compassion. I wonder if his choice of Radahn as consort is even, perhaps, a test to that vision - that if he can make the greatest warrior of the demigods to serve the cause of eternal peace, it will show the ultimate feasibility of bringing peace to the world.

As is often the case, NPCs can play a mirror role to the demigods. Needle-Knight Leda is our first guide into the Land of Shadow, and takes on an unofficial leadership position within the Miquella fan club (aka most of the NPCs we meet in the Shadow Lands). But the moment that Miquella's rune is shattered, Leda reveals her true nature: that of a psychopathic zealot, obsessed with rooting out and slaying anyone who isn't sufficiently committed to Miquella's cause. Leda asks the Tarnished for accusations of disloyalty, but even if you don't suggest anyone, she'll eventually decide to go after people.

How is Leda, one who is so dedicated to this demigod that represent peace and compassion, so vindictive and bloodthirsty?

Well, it's because her zealotry is maximalist. When you're convinced your cause is perfectly good and that any other cause must therefore be evil, you seek further and further purification.

It's almost as if Leda is looking for someone to purge before she actually has any reason to believe that anyone has actually been disloyal to Miquella. And here, we see another pattern repeated in real-world religion. In less religiously-tolerant times, there were instances of people being put to death merely for raising the possibility that their faith was shaken. Extreme political movements will sometimes force members to repeat and propagate clear falsehoods in order to prove their loyalty to the movement, and the trajectory seems to be to ever-tighten the borders of acceptable deviation.

And this is the peril of a maximalist, perfectionist vision for the world. If the philosophy requires some flawless, perfected ideal, it will inevitably begin to exclude more and more people who cannot fit into that mold.

Both Marika and Miquella sought absolute victories. Marika wished for endless abundant life free from death. Miquella wished for endless peace and compassion without conflict.

Marika's order backfired - removing death, removing the ending of things, meant that the very things she wanted to end persisted, such as Those Who Live in Death. Miquella doesn't have much of a chance to actually rule over things, but one imagines that if he had succeeded, the endless pursuit of perfect virtue under his order would have wound up purging anyone left, perhaps leaving only Leda, who might get the idea that even her god had failed to live up to her standards.

Peace isn't so appealing when it's the peace of a lifeless world.

The solution, then, would seem to be one in which imperfection is embraced, where we accept that future conflicts might arise, that there will continue to be suffering and pain, but where we hold these things all loosely. Bizarrely, perhaps the Age of Fracture is actually the best ending to the game.

Ranni's Age of Stars could mean something very different and new, and I think that her intention to be a distant and non-interventionist god could give us something like that acceptance of all the imperfections of reality. On the other hand, if we take this too extremely far, we could run into the same issues. Direct domination by a divine sovereign does not seem like it has worked out very well in the world of Elden Ring. But total absence of any kind of guidance might also lead to problems, where others might attempt to replicate an idealized past of the Golden Order or other previous eras, forgetting the lessons that led to the Age of Stars.

Even the focus on the grounded, here-and-now humanity must not be pursued to a maximalist degree - to do so would be to deny the human impulse to wonder and imagine the possibilities of how things might be different. Cutting out that desire of ascension would be just as erroneous an exclusion as Marika's removal of the Rune of Death.

Wild Speculation on the Implications of Recent Unearthed Arcanas

 As a giant disclaimer at the outset: in the early days of 5E, there were a number of Unearthed Arcana posts made by WotC that never amounted to anything. Modern Magic (which, to be honest, felt a little more like "Cyberpunk Magic") and the Mystic were both pretty bold ideas that never went anywhere (unless you count the Psion as the evolution of the Mystic - though I wouldn't). There have, of course, always been examples of stuff that got changed significantly or just didn't make it through, like I believe a "Brute" Fighter that might have represented a subclass appropriate to the Gruul Clans prior to the announcement of Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, or its School of Inventions Wizard, which actually got re-imagined as a magic item (the Mizzium Apparatus).

So, we could see these recent UAs ultimately wind up not going anywhere.

We do know that the Forgotten Realms subclasses and the revised Artificer are going to be published - in fact, Eberron: Forge of the Artificer is coming out I believe next month, and the Forgotten Realms sourcebooks later this year.

But the two most recent UAs touched on themes and tropes that are not in any officially announced books. So... should we consider these low-key announcements?

As precedent, we can look to the Gothic Subclasses and Gothic Lineages, which were released before the announcement of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

So, let's consider the last couple UAs:

    Horror Subclasses:

The second-to-most-recent was a group of Horror-themed subclasses. Most of these would be reprints, but it was notable that they came together in such a specific theme.

Naturally, D&D and horror has an official setting: the nightmarish Domains of Dread.

In my mind, Van Richten's is very recent, but four years might seem to WotC like a reasonable interval between releases. This UA included both of the subclasses first printed in that book. So, to be frank, I think the most obvious implication here would be that they will release some kind of Ravenloft supplement.

What would be the nature of that supplement? Well, given that we have Van Richten's already - it's not out of print or anything - I doubt we would need a gigantic campaign setting book. Instead, I suspect we might get something like Forge of the Artificer, which is going to be at both a lower price point and a lower page count than your usual big book.

After the disappointment of Spelljammer and to a lesser but still substantial extent Planescape, I think they might be steering away from the box-set campaign settings (which both had a smaller page count than Van Richten's while costing more) but I also suspect that Forge of the Artificer might become a model for them moving forward that allows quicker production and might sell better because of its lower price.

I don't recall what the Forgotten Realms books are going to cost or what their page counts will be, but if we set that aside, we might look at these horror subclasses coming in something similar to Forge of the Artificer.

Both would be revisits to settings already given a big setting book in 5E, with just some supplementary material. Maybe a Ravenloft book would give us a couple more Domains of Dread, some new monsters, those subclasses, and a smattering of other stuff.

    Psion:

So, Psionics has, of course, been a thing in D&D since the earliest days. But as I understand it, if there's one setting that really foregrounds Psionics, it's Dark Sun.

Dark Sun was a very popular setting for D&D during 2nd Edition, and is all about living on a brutal world where even resources like metal are rare, and where magic will drain what little life is left in the land. Among Dark Sun's inspirations, I believe, was Dune (which modern audiences might be much more familiar with thanks to the fantastic Denis Villeneuve movies,) which includes a lot of mental powers that could be considered Psionics.

As I understand it (I've never played in a Dark Sun campaign, and couldn't tell you any of its proper nouns except I believe Athas, which is, if I recall correctly, the name of the world) Dark Sun as a setting has a lot of elements that could be tricky to package as an appealing product, though the extent of my knowledge about it is just that there's slavery and racism in it. I don't think such topics and themes need be stricken from a setting lest people think you're endorsing them, but I do think it behooves WotC to approach it with care and sensitivity.

Honestly, the thing I'd be more worried about for Dark Sun is how to keep things balanced when barely anyone has access to metal. 5E's approach to gear (and to be fair, I don't know much about other editions' approaches) really hinders certain classes if they can't get access to all the mundane gear on the equipment lists. A Paladin who only has access to Hide armor is going to have a much harder time than one that can start off with some chain mail, upgrade to splint around level 4 or 5, and then plate around level 8. By contrast, though, a Monk is going to have no problem at all.

I'd also say that you'd need to find a way to deal with the defiling nature of magic in it - is this all spellcasting, or just certain classes?

But generally speaking, I think we could use a setting that upends certain assumptions about the way that the rules work. I've always said that a campaign setting should present itself with something unique that makes you want to run a game in that world, rather than just doing the Forgotten Realms. Dark Sun sure feels like it accomplishes that.

All that being said: the Psion might not even come in a campaign setting book.

I think it would be perfectly reasonable for the Psion to be the headliner of its own book, much as the Artificer will be center-stage in Forge of the Artificer (ok, fine, it's still technically headlined by the Eberron setting).

Another, somewhat left-field option, would be that it comes in a monster book.

After Volo's and Mordenkainen's, the next two books we got that were truly focused on their bestiaries were Fizban's Treasury of Dragons and Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants (damn you, Bigby, for messing with the "fictional author's name, apostrophe, s" naming convention,) each of which took a creature type and delved deep into them and their lore.

I've liked these books, and I could imagine WotC following up with more creature-type-specific books. While I'd love for them to do a whole book expanding the smaller types, like Plants or Oozes, I think Aberrations would be a pretty reasonable option. And if such a book were to come out, it wouldn't be a terrible stretch to include the Psion within it.

Aberrations, after all, are what I like to think of as science fiction pushing its way into fantasy. Psions, likewise, feel like a science-fiction class, the genre being what distinguishes them from Sorcerers and Wizards.

Anyway, we'll have to wait for some kind of announcement. And given that we've got quite a few announced books for this year, I wouldn't hold my breath for these books.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Stamina Meter

 I don't know which game it was where I first encountered a stamina meter. Magic meters, tracking how much you could cast spells before you ran out and were unable to, are pretty standard in nearly any game that involves spellcasting in any way.

I'm trying to remember of King's Quest: Mask of Eternity had one, which was a bizarre spin-off to the old-school point-and-click (and earlier, text-based-but-with-images) adventure game, transposing it into a super-dark first-person action-adventure game. Likely, instead, it was probably when I first played The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (which is of course getting a lot of attention now with its remake. Insane that we had so many Skyrim re-releases and that after all this time, they went back to do a re-release of the previous game rather than coming out with VI).

But I also remember as a lowly level 16 or 17 Tauren Shaman in World of Warcraft during Vanilla, long before there was any kind of automated group-finding for dungeons, and having a high-level Rogue (of all classes) run us through Ragefire Chasm. Looking at their yellow Energy Bar, I was baffled - I knew that Rogues were sneaky, so initially I thought it was like a "stealth meter."

Action-oriented video games, especially in those early arcade days, often rewarded button-mashing, hitting your attack button as fast as you possibly could. When I went to summer camp, there was a cabin with a few old arcade games, including Galaga, and I remember one of the counselors (I think the son-in-law of the camp's owners) demonstrated his prowess by firing far faster than I even thought possible in that game, and thus wiping out the incoming alien ships far more effectively.

So, my initial reaction to seeing this bar that could run out and force you to pause before acting again was negative. It was so limiting on what I could do?

Of course, knowing a lot more about the whys of game design, I've got a much greater appreciation for it.

It's probably documented on this blog somewhere (I'd guess around 2015) when I first tried out Dark Souls. While that game might not be the best example (I remember that bosses, at least, still took a lot of hits to take down) the thing that I think might surprise people who haven't played those games is how few hits you actually need to land to take down an enemy. Naturally, this depends a little on your build (if you're dual-wielding smaller weapons, probably more, for example) but these games are built around the idea that you really need to carefully time your attacks if you don't want to be punished for them.

However, because that is the case, it means that, to balance it, your attacks need to do a higher proportion of the enemy's HP. I was playing some Bloodborne earlier today, with a character that uses the Boom Hammer weapon (which is really fun,) and as I was traversing the Nightmare Frontier, I found that just a single charged L2 attack on a Winter Lantern (by far the scariest enemy in the game) I could take them down (full disclosure, this is an over-leveled character - I've beaten that game enough that I don't feel any qualms about using the "cummmfpk" chalice dungeon that hands you tens of thousands of blood echoes just for walking forward a few feet - but even when overleveled, most non-boss enemies go down in like 5 hits at maximum).

I think it's a key to what makes the combat feel so satisfying in those games. Just as the enemies take off a big chunk of your HP when they hit you, when you land your hit, it really feels like you've made progress. Landing a hit is a rarer (not super-rare, but rarer) event, and so each successful strike feels more important.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I just beat Final Fantasy XVI, and something I find a little frustrating about that game's combat is how my sword feels like it hits about as hard as a wooden ruler. My attacks feel like they're only there to fill time between the special "Eikon" abilities.

Souls-like combat doesn't feel like anything you do is filler. In fact, abilities don't actually have cooldowns, only resource costs and time required to get them off (with some spells, for example, you really need to get a moment of uninterrupted casting before you can cast them).

You could argue that a stamina bar effectively creates cooldowns to abilities, which is fine, but it's such a flexible resource that it feels a little more under your control.

Now, here's the thing: I do think that if you're going to build a game with this sort of resource limitation, the counterbalance is that you do need to make hits land harder. In an RPG-style game with stats and such, that's of course something that is partially under the player's control (as in, the better your build, the harder you'll hit,) but I think giving your enemies mountains of hit points (relative to a player's damage output) on top of making it hard to hit them can be kind of brutally crushing.

I remember that when I made many attempts on Promised Consort Radahn, the final boss of Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, I found myself kind of frustrated that my build, using two greatswords and jumping attacks to do massive damage on each one, was barely chipping away at his health bar. That fight was intended to be the hardest in the entire game, of course, but even FromSoft decided eventually that it was a little too hard, and gave it a nerf (and I very quickly took him down).

But anyway, it reminds me a bit of some of my commentary on the playtests for the Monk in D&D's 2024 rules revision. My argument was that they should nerf or get rid of the Monk's most powerful ability, Stunning Strike, in order to make room to buff the rest of the class. Ultimately, that's actually what happened, and while I have yet to play it (I haven't actually had a chance to play in a new campaign with 2024 rules yet, though I was able to convert my Wizard to the 2024 version) I get the sense that the Monk is way better off now.

The point is, by imposing a limitation (their Stunning Strike can only be used once per turn and ends a little bit earlier) they could then give the Monk a ton of buffs, much as the Stamina Meter, by limiting how frequently you can attack, allows the game's designers to let your attacks have greater impact.

It's a balance to be sure - you don't want someone getting totally winded after a single attack (which is kind of how Secret of Mana, my first ever action-RPG, worked) but you can help make things feel more deliberate and less spammy when there's some limitation.

Finally Finishing Final Fantasy XVI

 I got Final Fantasy XVI I think the day it came out, and played through most of the game in that initial burst. However, after getting just one main questline quest from the end (actually two, but the first of them was a "talk with a bunch of NPCs in your home base") I set it aside.

Part of what reignited the game for me was looking up some builds online. Even being, I think, a bit overleveled (I think you're meant to be at or a little above level 40 when you beat the game, and I was 48 - though I did no grinding, only side quests, and honestly avoided a lot of fights out in the wilderness,) it's hard to actually get enough skill points to unlock all the cool abilities. But you can refund spent points easily, so I just went for a singular build and stuck to it. Basically, I had four abilities that built up Stagger very quickly and then a couple of high-damage abilities, and that made most fights fairly easy to beat.

While focusing on a stagger-and-punish build gave my actions a layer of strategy, it's still certainly not as deep as your typical (or perhaps I should say older) Final Fantasy games, where a mix of buffs, elemental damage types, and healing spells, spread across multiple party members, is what you need to understand to deal with the deadly monsters.

It seems a little reductive and also certainly a little late in the game to make this a "review" of the game, but I do think it might be good to talk about it in various categories:

Story:

FFXVI has a complex narrative of warring factions, where the villains aren't all playing on the same side. The complexity of the game's political landscape was for sure inspired by Game of Thrones, as was its mostly straight-up medieval aesthetic.

XVI's world is one of the most brutal seen in this series, where the exploitation of "Bearers" (those gifted by magical power) has created an underclass, the persecution of which seems to be the main unifying aspect of culture across the many kingdoms, empires, and such. Ironically, magic is also granted to Dominants, who possess the ability to transform into the mighty Eikons, Kaiju-sized versions of our familiar Final Fantasy summons. In these cases, most of these figures are exalted in their societies, serving as princes, kings, and other positions of leadership.

The strongest elements of XVI's story, though, are the personal ones. The game has a single player character (with a few very rare scenes in which you control another, though never in combat, if I remember correctly,) and Clive Rosefield is a compelling protagonist who undergoes a lengthy hero's journey. I will say, as well, the tendency to skew Final Fantasy characters extremely young is avoided here - while Clive's story begins in his mid teens, by the end of the game, he's in his 30s, which these games often treat as old age (as someone with only a year and a week left in his 30s, I've started seeing 30-year-olds as young whippersnappers).

And the epic timeframe of this story lends it an epic scale. The true villain of the story is profoundly mysterious for a fairly large chunk of it. It's a little on the messy side, but I think the default mode for Japanese video games is to shoot for big and complex rather than tight and clean, and I'm ok with that.

One of the elements of the story I wish was stronger was Jill, the primary love interest and Dominant of Shiva. While she does accompany you and fight alongside you sometimes, she still feels like she's playing the part of the passive love interest back home. Granted, it's hard for any of the characters to feel non-passive when you can't control them, and maybe I'm being unfair here, but I wish she were a little more active.

Gameplay:

I think I sort of covered this, but XVI disappointed me in truly ditching RPG mechanics (apart from, like, stats and levels) in favor of becoming fully an action game. But I think playing it has also given me an appreciation for action games that employ a stamina meter. Attacks with Clive's sword feel light and weak, because you can make so many strikes so quickly. While a stamina meter is a limiter, it allows the game to balance things so that a single weapon strike lands with greater force, and I'd have liked that. After getting the game's best (I assume) weapon, Gotterdamerung, I still felt like my regular attacks were pretty pitiful. The Eikonic skills, which do have cooldowns, felt much more impactful (and were).

When Clive transforms into Ifrit for the game's climactic kaiju battles, it feels very exciting, but (wisely,) the mechanics are very similar to how Clive controls. And while Ifrit is, like, 40 feet tall, usually the things he's fighting are just as large or larger. Unfortunately, this means that the scale of the fight is sometimes lost. A few such fights take place in the air (or space) and in these cases especially, scale totally disappears.

There are also a number of "Cinematic Clash" and "Cinematic Evasions" where a cutscene begins mid-battle, and you have a kind of Quicktime Event (hey, remember Quicktime?) that, I've got to honest, doesn't feel as cool as if they just let the thing happen in the cutscene without my interaction.

I'd have liked a bit more depth to the combat and to the way that you build up your stats. Weapons just have a single damage stat, and so there's never any real choice to be made between weapons. Armor might have higher physical or higher magical defense, but in most cases they're the same value, making upgrades obvious.

I've also complained before about the design of sidequests. The stories of the sidequests are often good, even if I think the dialogue with the NPCs often goes on about twice or four times as long as it needs to (and for some godforsaken reason, every time they cut to a new scene, and sometimes even in the middle of a scene, there's like a three-second establishing shot where the camera tilts down to look at Clive talking to someone, and it just makes these dialogue scenes that much more tedious) the story of the sidequests is often compelling. But there are other problems: one is that there are too many of them, and two is that they have like, Vanilla-WoW-level quest design, often sending you to some location to pick up "three of this one thing" off the ground. It feels like padding on a game that really doesn't need it.

Music:

Holy crap, though, the music is freaking amazing. My favorite is Find the Flame, and it's fun to see a kind of reprise in All as One, which plays in the last phase of the final boss. While I haven't played the DLC with it, Cascade, the Leviathan theme (which also plays in the game's early trailer) is great.

This is a game that really tries to hit you on an emotional level, and I tend to find music is the most surefire way to do so. This one nails it. (I mean, that's kind of a Final Fantasy tradition. Even if I think Nobuo Uematsu has stepped away from the series for the past... couple decades, they're still putting out some bangers.

Art Design:

I know that a lot of people were excited to see Final Fantasy "return" to a classic medieval fantasy look. Personally, I found it a little bit limiting. Character design is very strong, though, and for what it is, they do a good job. I might have liked a little more environmental variety. While we get a desert area in Dalmekia, the other regions are largely kind of standard Northern European-style climates.

    Looking Forward:

Ok, there are some spoilers ahead:

Grrrrr.... Maybe I Might Try Nightreign (I Haven't Yet)

 The games industry has had it in for single-player games for a while now. If you'll permit this nearly-40-year-old (one year and one week, baby!) to talk about "back in my day" for a second, the very notion of having a video game console connected to the internet was something that only came about in the third generation of consoles that I actually played (which I think is typically called the fifth generation? I'm talking about the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era). The video games that I cut my teeth on, like Super Mario World, Ocarina of Time, and even games famed for their multiplayer like GoldenEye and Super Smash Bros, were built assuming no connection to that grand network of information that sits at the center of modern society.

Gamers did have "LAN Parties," where they'd connect computers to what I think stood for Local Area Network, and could play things like Quake together. But I didn't really do that much, and so for me, a multiplayer game was one that I typically played on a split-screen. Yes, those old boxy CRT TVs where what would now be considered a rather standard-sized TV would be considered an enormous big-screen, would be divided into two or even four segments for different players to occupy.

The thing is, in this era, you knew the people you were playing with. Oh, sure, you could go to a friend's house and meet someone new, obviously, but it wasn't the kind of purely random people that you get on the internet.

There is a tension in multiplayer: if you want to play with friends, you need to schedule and coordinate. You also need to calibrate varying levels of enthusiasm. You might want to play for four hours, but your friend might find their enthusiasm flagging after one. Or vice versa, you have to feel bad that you're bringing the fun to an end when you're not really feeling it anymore.

The solution of online matchmaking, then, allows for you to play when you feel like it - if you drop out, the people you were playing with can just find someone else. Or, if the people you're playing with drop out, you can find someone else.

But it's not going to be as fun as playing with people you know.

This blog started as an exclusively World of Warcraft-focused one. I had been playing WoW for a couple years before, during Wrath of the Lich King, I had a really good dungeon group and the party leader invited me to their guild. During Wrath, for the first time (having started in late Vanilla, but late enough that I didn't hit the level cap until Burning Crusade, so I wouldn't have had the chance to do any raiding in vanilla anyway) I had a guild that did weekly raid nights (actually, I think for a time we'd do two nights a week). It was great, and I gradually became one of the raid leaders (my main being a tank helped push me into a leadership role). It was great, though when Cataclysm came out and the difficulty of raiding went up quite precipitously, our momentum stalled out. Off and on, we'd have periods where we got back together to run raids, even downing the first boss of Antorus during Legion in the first week (a big accomplishment for our very casual guild). But as younger players in the guild went off to join more progression-minded raiding guilds and players sort of drifted away, the guild is a shell of its former self, rarely having more than two or three members on at a time.

Today, I still play WoW, but as the game has developed more solo-content, I've found myself focused more and more on that. Honestly, I don't really do much raiding even in LFR (the match-made lowest raiding difficulty) and primarily do Delves, a new feature that is like a dungeon that can be for 1-5 players. I could probably play WoW offline if that were an option and not change much about my playstyle.

And that's fine in some ways: as I discovered D&D, my weekly "get together with people for some fantasy game stuff" became that instead of raiding, and I find it more exciting because of how much creativity is involved.

But it comes back to the weird thing: In a lot of ways, the online nature of WoW can often be the worst part of it. It isn't always - sometimes it's really exciting to be there with other players working toward some shared goal.

So, what about Nightreign?

Well, I adore Elden Ring. It and Bloodborne both are probably in my top 10 favorite video games (I haven't made a list or anything, but that feels right). And, having thought Shadow of the Erdtree might be the last we ever see of that universe (given its success, I could imagine a direct sequel, but I also suspect that they might choose instead to develop a new IP for their next spiritual sequel to Demon's Souls - I read Dark Souls III as being a cautionary tale about the very notion of prolonging a story past its natural ending). But I can't deny the allure of discovering new things about the world of Elden Ring, even if there's a general consensus that this game is extra-canonical, in a separate timeline or something.

Like how many fans have rejected much of Dark Souls II because it wasn't directed by series creator/auteur Hidetaka Miyazaki (it's insane to me that they released DSII, Bloodborne, and DSIII as annual releases back to back,) I wonder if people will find that the ideas and lore of Nightreign doesn't truly sit as a piece with the broader ideas of Elden Ring.

But is that such a crime? After all, the auteur theory is kind of bullshit (another game I adore, Alan Wake II, is all about rejecting the idea of the auteur theory, and the man who is often treated as the auteur of Remedy Studios, Sam Lake, has emphasized how important collaboration is).

Visually, the game looks stunning, and I'm very curious about the stories it wishes to tell.

The question, though, is how effectively a game can tell a story when it is built around the short-term gameplay loop of a co-op and somewhat roguelike system.

I'm on the fence, but this is arguably movement toward Nightreign, as I had been largely convinced I was staying away from it.