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  16               <h3 class="blog-title">
  17                 It's 2025 and I am playing a D&D Game...
  18               </h3>
  19               <h3 class="datestamp">01/02/2025</h3>
  20             </div>
  21             <div class="content">
  22               <p>
  23                 ... and it's not Baldurs Gate 3; it is, however, equally 7/10.
  24               </p>
  25               <p>
  26                 OK, now I've got my hot take out the way, let's talk about a fun
  27                 game from 2013 called Call of Juarez: Gunslinger that is very
  28                 much not the game I have been playing. I promise I'll bring it
  29                 round though.
  30               </p>
  31               <p>
  32                 The Call of Juarez series isn't particularly interesting outside
  33                 of this title. They're very average Western first-person
  34                 shooters from the late noughties and early 2010s. I imagine,
  35                 having not gone back to them, that they are also probably quite
  36                 racist. One of them is about two brothers fighting in the civil
  37                 war who desert as the 'war nears its end,' which sure sounds
  38                 like they were on the losing side.
  39               </p>
  40               <p>
  41                 Gunslinger, however, is different. It's actually a game about
  42                 storytelling. You're Silas, a cowboy sat in a saloon telling his
  43                 life story - the hook of the game being that Silas is an
  44                 unreliable narrator. As Silas tells the story, and the people
  45                 around him pick holes in his tale, the world you're playing in
  46                 changes rapidly. The launch trailer shows how that works, skip
  47                 to 1:12 for the relevant bit.
  48               </p>
  49               <iframe
  50                 width="768"
  51                 height="432"
  52                 class="video-embed"
  53                 src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U5_9M60crGs"
  54                 title="Call of Juarez Gunslinger Launch Trailer"
  55                 frameborder="0"
  56                 allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share"
  57                 referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin"
  58                 allowfullscreen
  59               ></iframe>
  60               <p>
  61                 And this is extremely cool, right? It feels futuristic, and
  62                 honestly it feels like kind of how the future of video games
  63                 should have been. But I don't think I ever saw this kinda thing
  64                 again? We have 'dynamic' worlds in some sense in that a building
  65                 will fall down, or a new route opens up somehow, but nothing on
  66                 the scale of the world shifting around the player.
  67               </p>
  68               <p>
  69                 And I do understand why. This, as with anything, is down to
  70                 budget. if you have a scene that changes as the story changes,
  71                 that's expensive. But it feels kind of revolutionary in a way
  72                 that, frankly, I don't think video games have felt in a long,
  73                 long time.
  74               </p>
  75               <p>
  76                 So yeah, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. Cool experiment, fun game,
  77                 weird vision into a future that never was.
  78               </p>
  79               <br />
  80               <br />
  81               <h3>
  82                 Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is a 2022 Borderlands spin-off that
  83                 <i>is</i> that imagined future.
  84               </h3>
  85               <p>
  86                 OK, preface, I know that one of the words in that sentence has
  87                 probably immediately turned off quite a lot of people reading
  88                 this. I am aware Borderlands is extremely marmite. I have played
  89                 most of the games and I would struggle to call any of them
  90                 "great" - they're competent shooters, they nail the
  91                 looter-shooter loop that so many games since have tried and
  92                 failed to imitate (Destiny has and will always suck, don't
  93                 start) and they are famously groan-worthy when it comes to
  94                 writing and story.
  95               </p>
  96               <p>
  97                 I played quite a few games in January and towards the end I was
  98                 itching for a shooter, ideally one fit for the Steam Deck. I'd
  99                 tried Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel before and bounced off it, but
 100                 I picked it up for another go on Valve's miracle machine and had
 101                 a great time. I think that game is helped by it being developed
 102                 by 2K Australia, a studio with Bioshock pedigree, so it's a
 103                 really really solid shooter; but it's also honestly pretty funny
 104                 when it gets to be properly Australian. it also leans heavily on
 105                 Handsome Jack, the antagonist of Borderlands 2, and inarguably
 106                 the series' highpoint when it comes to character writing. it
 107                 still has its 'cringe' moments, but I think it's generally
 108                 better written than 2 (and certainly 3) and also it has lasers.
 109                 Which are fun.
 110               </p>
 111               <p>
 112                 After finishing that, I remembered I'd tried Tiny Tina's
 113                 Wonderlands on deck sometime in 2023. it didn't run
 114                 <i>great,</i> muddy visuals and a very janky framerate making it
 115                 pretty painful to actually play. But hey, these things get
 116                 patched, and after a reinstall and some fussing in the settings
 117                 (specifically, turning FSR2 on and setting it to 'Balanced') I
 118                 ended up with a game that both looked pretty reasonable and ran
 119                 very well! It's 60fps most of the time, but does drop to
 120                 mid-forties when the vistas are big or there's an excessive
 121                 amount going on on-screen. But it's certainly playable.
 122               </p>
 123               <p>
 124                 With those fixes in place, I rolled a new character and dove in.
 125                 About an hour in, after the tutorial has concluded and you enter
 126                 the main town to find it ransacked, the game's magic trick
 127                 begins. Fighting your way to the centre square and freeing 'Butt
 128                 Stallion,' the kingdom's ruler (yes, I know. Unfortunately this
 129                 one is a Gearbox in-house production, with all that entails),
 130                 Tiny Tina, the DM of the game, tells you about the city
 131                 repairing itself in typical lyrical DM fashion.
 132               </p>
 133               <p>
 134                 And then the city changes around you. Fires extinguish, bricks
 135                 that had crashed to the ground float and repair into pristine
 136                 buildings. Rainbows sprout around the castle. It's honestly
 137                 pretty magnificent to watch.
 138               </p>
 139               <p>
 140                 This isn't actually the first time the game has pulled this
 141                 trick, but it;'s the first time your focus isn't on the combat,
 142                 so it's hard to ignore. Earlier, as youre fighting towards the
 143                 town, Tina describes a siege happening around you, and in an
 144                 adjacent field, siege engines, vast armies, ramparts and
 145                 defences materialise, a battle suddenly taking place where
 146                 before there was green grass and tranquil hills. She details a
 147                 ship full of skeletons and it shores up next to you, a fresh
 148                 barrage of foes to fight.
 149               </p>
 150               <p>
 151                 It's hard to overstate how magic this feels, and it's spread all
 152                 through the game. The grander changes to the world around you
 153                 are kept for story beats, of course, but this game being a tale
 154                 told at a D&D table is weaved throughout in other ways.
 155                 Borderlands isn't exactly a choice-heavy RPG, the main quest is
 156                 laid before you already written, and side quests can only really
 157                 go one way as well, with maybe a minor amount of variation. But
 158                 in that outwardly restricting framework is how the spirit of
 159                 TTRPGs thrives here. You can choose to seduce a character
 160                 instead of fighting them in one side quest; a D&D classic. Your
 161                 other friends at the table talk amongst themselves, arguing
 162                 rules or paths forward, making dice checks and complaining to
 163                 the DM.
 164               </p>
 165               <p>
 166                 And honestly, I think it's an interesting way of adapting a D&D
 167                 session to a video game! Baldurs Gate and its ilk are
 168                 laser-focused on player choice in both the micro and macro, they
 169                 implement the rules and functions of a tabletop rpg as if
 170                 they're set in stone, the inarguable realities of these games.
 171                 But isn't the real magic of TTRPGs in the unexpected? Humans are
 172                 unpredictable; a video game is never able to expand the
 173                 possibility space in a way a human DM can.
 174               </p>
 175               <p>
 176                 So instead, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands doesn't try to. You're the
 177                 player character, but the players themselves are the others at
 178                 the table, improvising and adapting. The result is a game that
 179                 <i>feels</i> closer to playing D&D than any CRPG ever could,
 180                 even if the choices are entirely out of your hands.
 181               </p>
 182               <p>
 183                 It means that these wild storytelling swerves can be designed
 184                 for. Baldurs Gate 3 couldn't have an entire ocean evaporate,
 185                 entirely changing the world, because, well - what if the player
 186                 chooses not to do it? By being strictly linear, the world feels
 187                 strangely more real than Faerun ever did for me.
 188               </p>
 189               <p>
 190                 That's not to say the spectre of budget constraints don't haunt
 191                 the game, mind. Unlike every other Borderlands game, the world
 192                 isn't contiguous, instead each 'adventuring area' is separated
 193                 by an overworld, which is designed to resemble a DM's map, with
 194                 miniatures dotting it. It acts kind of like a classic Final
 195                 Fantasy overworld. There's also the audiologs/comms of the game,
 196                 which appear on screen without even an ease-in fade - suddenly
 197                 there's a character's unanimated face in the top-right of your
 198                 screen as they speak.
 199               </p>
 200               <p>
 201                 And I will admit it's distracting. It feels like the cuts taken
 202                 to accommodate the wild creativity elsewhere can be pretty
 203                 brutal and in many cases stick out like a sore thumb. But
 204                 personally? I think it's worth it.
 205               </p>
 206               <p>
 207                 You don't get to take swings this big without sacrificing some
 208                 parts of the game that would usually have zero rough edges. But
 209                 I'd always rather a game be ambitious and occasionally cut you
 210                 with their rawness than be designed-by-committee, smoothed over
 211                 globs of nothing.
 212               </p>
 213               <p>
 214                 Despite ultimately being just another Borderlands, I will be
 215                 remembering beats in Wonderlands for far, far longer than
 216                 anything 2 or 3 offered up. And that's something that really
 217                 should be celebrated.
 218               </p>
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