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  16       content="... and it's not Baldurs Gate 3; it is, however, equally 7/10."
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  36               <h3 class="blog-title">
  37                 It's 2025 and I am playing a D&D Game...
  38               </h3>
  39               <h3 class="datestamp">01/02/2025</h3>
  40             </div>
  41             <div class="content">
  42               <p>
  43                 ... and it's not Baldurs Gate 3; it is, however, equally 7/10.
  44               </p>
  45               <p>
  46                 OK, now I've got my hot take out the way, let's talk about a fun
  47                 game from 2013 called Call of Juarez: Gunslinger that is very
  48                 much not the game I have been playing. I promise I'll bring it
  49                 round though.
  50               </p>
  51               <p>
  52                 The Call of Juarez series isn't particularly interesting outside
  53                 of this title. They're very average Western first-person
  54                 shooters from the late noughties and early 2010s. I imagine,
  55                 having not gone back to them, that they are also probably quite
  56                 racist. One of them is about two brothers fighting in the civil
  57                 war who desert as the 'war nears its end,' which sure sounds
  58                 like they were on the losing side.
  59               </p>
  60               <p>
  61                 Gunslinger, however, is different. It's actually a game about
  62                 storytelling. You're Silas, a cowboy sat in a saloon telling his
  63                 life story - the hook of the game being that Silas is an
  64                 unreliable narrator. As Silas tells the story, and the people
  65                 around him pick holes in his tale, the world you're playing in
  66                 changes rapidly. The launch trailer shows how that works, skip
  67                 to 1:12 for the relevant bit.
  68               </p>
  69               <iframe
  70                 width="672"
  71                 height="378"
  72                 class="video-embed"
  73                 src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U5_9M60crGs"
  74                 title="Call of Juarez Gunslinger Launch Trailer"
  75                 frameborder="0"
  76                 allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share"
  77                 referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin"
  78                 allowfullscreen
  79               ></iframe>
  80               <p>
  81                 And this is extremely cool, right? It feels futuristic, and
  82                 honestly it feels like kind of how the future of video games
  83                 should have been. But I don't think I ever saw this kinda thing
  84                 again? We have 'dynamic' worlds in some sense in that a building
  85                 will fall down, or a new route opens up somehow, but nothing on
  86                 the scale of the world shifting around the player.
  87               </p>
  88               <p>
  89                 And I do understand why. This, as with anything, is down to
  90                 budget. if you have a scene that changes as the story changes,
  91                 that's expensive. But it feels kind of revolutionary in a way
  92                 that, frankly, I don't think video games have felt in a long,
  93                 long time.
  94               </p>
  95               <p>
  96                 So yeah, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. Cool experiment, fun game,
  97                 weird vision into a future that never was.
  98               </p>
  99               <br />
 100               <br />
 101               <h3>
 102                 Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is a 2022 Borderlands spin-off that
 103                 <i>is</i> that imagined future.
 104               </h3>
 105               <p>
 106                 OK, preface, I know that one of the words in that sentence has
 107                 probably immediately turned off quite a lot of people reading
 108                 this. I am aware Borderlands is extremely marmite. I have played
 109                 most of the games and I would struggle to call any of them
 110                 "great" - they're competent shooters, they nail the
 111                 looter-shooter loop that so many games since have tried and
 112                 failed to imitate (Destiny has and will always suck, don't
 113                 start) and they are famously groan-worthy when it comes to
 114                 writing and story.
 115               </p>
 116               <p>
 117                 I played quite a few games in January and towards the end I was
 118                 itching for a shooter, ideally one fit for the Steam Deck. I'd
 119                 tried Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel before and bounced off it, but
 120                 I picked it up for another go on Valve's miracle machine and had
 121                 a great time. I think that game is helped by it being developed
 122                 by 2K Australia, a studio with Bioshock pedigree, so it's a
 123                 really really solid shooter; but it's also honestly pretty funny
 124                 when it gets to be properly Australian. it also leans heavily on
 125                 Handsome Jack, the antagonist of Borderlands 2, and inarguably
 126                 the series' highpoint when it comes to character writing. it
 127                 still has its 'cringe' moments, but I think it's generally
 128                 better written than 2 (and certainly 3) and also it has lasers.
 129                 Which are fun.
 130               </p>
 131               <p>
 132                 After finishing that, I remembered I'd tried Tiny Tina's
 133                 Wonderlands on deck sometime in 2023. it didn't run
 134                 <i>great,</i> muddy visuals and a very janky framerate making it
 135                 pretty painful to actually play. But hey, these things get
 136                 patched, and after a reinstall and some fussing in the settings
 137                 (specifically, turning FSR2 on and setting it to 'Balanced') I
 138                 ended up with a game that both looked pretty reasonable and ran
 139                 very well! It's 60fps most of the time, but does drop to
 140                 mid-forties when the vistas are big or there's an excessive
 141                 amount going on on-screen. But it's certainly playable.
 142               </p>
 143               <p>
 144                 With those fixes in place, I rolled a new character and dove in.
 145                 About an hour in, after the tutorial has concluded and you enter
 146                 the main town to find it ransacked, the game's magic trick
 147                 begins. Fighting your way to the centre square and freeing 'Butt
 148                 Stallion,' the kingdom's ruler (yes, I know. Unfortunately this
 149                 one is a Gearbox in-house production, with all that entails),
 150                 Tiny Tina, the DM of the game, tells you about the city
 151                 repairing itself in typical lyrical DM fashion.
 152               </p>
 153               <p>
 154                 And then the city changes around you. Fires extinguish, bricks
 155                 that had crashed to the ground float and repair into pristine
 156                 buildings. Rainbows sprout around the castle. It's honestly
 157                 pretty magnificent to watch.
 158               </p>
 159               <p>
 160                 This isn't actually the first time the game has pulled this
 161                 trick, but it;'s the first time your focus isn't on the combat,
 162                 so it's hard to ignore. Earlier, as youre fighting towards the
 163                 town, Tina describes a siege happening around you, and in an
 164                 adjacent field, siege engines, vast armies, ramparts and
 165                 defences materialise, a battle suddenly taking place where
 166                 before there was green grass and tranquil hills. She details a
 167                 ship full of skeletons and it shores up next to you, a fresh
 168                 barrage of foes to fight.
 169               </p>
 170               <p>
 171                 It's hard to overstate how magic this feels, and it's spread all
 172                 through the game. The grander changes to the world around you
 173                 are kept for story beats, of course, but this game being a tale
 174                 told at a D&D table is weaved throughout in other ways.
 175                 Borderlands isn't exactly a choice-heavy RPG, the main quest is
 176                 laid before you already written, and side quests can only really
 177                 go one way as well, with maybe a minor amount of variation. But
 178                 in that outwardly restricting framework is how the spirit of
 179                 TTRPGs thrives here. You can choose to seduce a character
 180                 instead of fighting them in one side quest; a D&D classic. Your
 181                 other friends at the table talk amongst themselves, arguing
 182                 rules or paths forward, making dice checks and complaining to
 183                 the DM.
 184               </p>
 185               <p>
 186                 And honestly, I think it's an interesting way of adapting a D&D
 187                 session to a video game! Baldurs Gate and its ilk are
 188                 laser-focused on player choice in both the micro and macro, they
 189                 implement the rules and functions of a tabletop rpg as if
 190                 they're set in stone, the inarguable realities of these games.
 191                 But isn't the real magic of TTRPGs in the unexpected? Humans are
 192                 unpredictable; a video game is never able to expand the
 193                 possibility space in a way a human DM can.
 194               </p>
 195               <p>
 196                 So instead, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands doesn't try to. You're the
 197                 player character, but the players themselves are the others at
 198                 the table, improvising and adapting. The result is a game that
 199                 <i>feels</i> closer to playing D&D than any CRPG ever could,
 200                 even if the choices are entirely out of your hands.
 201               </p>
 202               <p>
 203                 It means that these wild storytelling swerves can be designed
 204                 for. Baldurs Gate 3 couldn't have an entire ocean evaporate,
 205                 entirely changing the world, because, well - what if the player
 206                 chooses not to do it? By being strictly linear, the world feels
 207                 strangely more real than Faerun ever did for me.
 208               </p>
 209               <p>
 210                 That's not to say the spectre of budget constraints don't haunt
 211                 the game, mind. Unlike every other Borderlands game, the world
 212                 isn't contiguous, instead each 'adventuring area' is separated
 213                 by an overworld, which is designed to resemble a DM's map, with
 214                 miniatures dotting it. It acts kind of like a classic Final
 215                 Fantasy overworld. There's also the audiologs/comms of the game,
 216                 which appear on screen without even an ease-in fade - suddenly
 217                 there's a character's unanimated face in the top-right of your
 218                 screen as they speak.
 219               </p>
 220               <p>
 221                 And I will admit it's distracting. It feels like the cuts taken
 222                 to accommodate the wild creativity elsewhere can be pretty
 223                 brutal and in many cases stick out like a sore thumb. But
 224                 personally? I think it's worth it.
 225               </p>
 226               <p>
 227                 You don't get to take swings this big without sacrificing some
 228                 parts of the game that would usually have zero rough edges. But
 229                 I'd always rather a game be ambitious and occasionally cut you
 230                 with their rawness than be designed-by-committee, smoothed over
 231                 globs of nothing.
 232               </p>
 233               <p>
 234                 Despite ultimately being just another Borderlands, I will be
 235                 remembering beats in Wonderlands for far, far longer than
 236                 anything 2 or 3 offered up. And that's something that really
 237                 should be celebrated.
 238               </p>
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