entries/danddgames.html

   1 <!DOCTYPE html>
   2 <html>
   3   <head>
   4     <meta charset="UTF-8" />
   5     <title>It's 2025 and I am playing a D&D Game...</title>
   6     <meta
   7       property="og:title"
   8       content="It's 2025 and I am playing a D&D Game..."
   9     />
  10     <meta
  11       property="twitter:title"
  12       content="It's 2025 and I am playing a D&D Game..."
  13     />
  14     <meta
  15       name="description"
  16       content="... and it's not Baldurs Gate 3; it is, however, equally 7/10."
  17     />
  18     <meta
  19       property="og:description"
  20       content="... and it's not Baldurs Gate 3; it is, however, equally 7/10."
  21     />
  22     <meta
  23       name="twitter:description"
  24       content="... and it's not Baldurs Gate 3; it is, however, equally 7/10."
  25     />
  26     <meta
  27       property="article:published_time"
  28       content="2025-02-01T00:00:00+00:00"
  29     />
  30     <link rel="stylesheet" href="../main.css" />
  31   </head>
  32   <body class="whole-site">
  33     <div>
  34       <iframe class="embed-title" src="../shared/title.html"> </iframe>
  35       <div class="main-container">
  36         <div class="main">
  37           <div class="entry">
  38             <a href="../index.html">Home</a>
  39             <div class="title-block">
  40               <h3 class="blog-title">
  41                 It's 2025 and I am playing a D&D Game...
  42               </h3>
  43               <h3 class="datestamp">01/02/2025</h3>
  44             </div>
  45             <div class="content">
  46               <p>
  47                 ... and it's not Baldurs Gate 3; it is, however, equally 7/10.
  48               </p>
  49               <p>
  50                 OK, now I've got my hot take out the way, let's talk about a fun
  51                 game from 2013 called Call of Juarez: Gunslinger that is very
  52                 much not the game I have been playing. I promise I'll bring it
  53                 round though.
  54               </p>
  55               <p>
  56                 The Call of Juarez series isn't particularly interesting outside
  57                 of this title. They're very average Western first-person
  58                 shooters from the late noughties and early 2010s. I imagine,
  59                 having not gone back to them, that they are also probably quite
  60                 racist. One of them is about two brothers fighting in the civil
  61                 war who desert as the 'war nears its end,' which sure sounds
  62                 like they were on the losing side.
  63               </p>
  64               <p>
  65                 Gunslinger, however, is different. It's actually a game about
  66                 storytelling. You're Silas, a cowboy sat in a saloon telling his
  67                 life story - the hook of the game being that Silas is an
  68                 unreliable narrator. As Silas tells the story, and the people
  69                 around him pick holes in his tale, the world you're playing in
  70                 changes rapidly. The launch trailer shows how that works, skip
  71                 to 1:12 for the relevant bit.
  72               </p>
  73               <iframe
  74                 width="672"
  75                 height="378"
  76                 class="video-embed"
  77                 src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U5_9M60crGs"
  78                 title="Call of Juarez Gunslinger Launch Trailer"
  79                 frameborder="0"
  80                 allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share"
  81                 referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin"
  82                 allowfullscreen
  83               ></iframe>
  84               <p>
  85                 And this is extremely cool, right? It feels futuristic, and
  86                 honestly it feels like kind of how the future of video games
  87                 should have been. But I don't think I ever saw this kinda thing
  88                 again? We have 'dynamic' worlds in some sense in that a building
  89                 will fall down, or a new route opens up somehow, but nothing on
  90                 the scale of the world shifting around the player.
  91               </p>
  92               <p>
  93                 And I do understand why. This, as with anything, is down to
  94                 budget. if you have a scene that changes as the story changes,
  95                 that's expensive. But it feels kind of revolutionary in a way
  96                 that, frankly, I don't think video games have felt in a long,
  97                 long time.
  98               </p>
  99               <p>
 100                 So yeah, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. Cool experiment, fun game,
 101                 weird vision into a future that never was.
 102               </p>
 103               <br />
 104               <br />
 105               <h3>
 106                 Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is a 2022 Borderlands spin-off that
 107                 <i>is</i> that imagined future.
 108               </h3>
 109               <p>
 110                 OK, preface, I know that one of the words in that sentence has
 111                 probably immediately turned off quite a lot of people reading
 112                 this. I am aware Borderlands is extremely marmite. I have played
 113                 most of the games and I would struggle to call any of them
 114                 "great" - they're competent shooters, they nail the
 115                 looter-shooter loop that so many games since have tried and
 116                 failed to imitate (Destiny has and will always suck, don't
 117                 start) and they are famously groan-worthy when it comes to
 118                 writing and story.
 119               </p>
 120               <p>
 121                 I played quite a few games in January and towards the end I was
 122                 itching for a shooter, ideally one fit for the Steam Deck. I'd
 123                 tried Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel before and bounced off it, but
 124                 I picked it up for another go on Valve's miracle machine and had
 125                 a great time. I think that game is helped by it being developed
 126                 by 2K Australia, a studio with Bioshock pedigree, so it's a
 127                 really really solid shooter; but it's also honestly pretty funny
 128                 when it gets to be properly Australian. it also leans heavily on
 129                 Handsome Jack, the antagonist of Borderlands 2, and inarguably
 130                 the series' highpoint when it comes to character writing. it
 131                 still has its 'cringe' moments, but I think it's generally
 132                 better written than 2 (and certainly 3) and also it has lasers.
 133                 Which are fun.
 134               </p>
 135               <p>
 136                 After finishing that, I remembered I'd tried Tiny Tina's
 137                 Wonderlands on deck sometime in 2023. it didn't run
 138                 <i>great,</i> muddy visuals and a very janky framerate making it
 139                 pretty painful to actually play. But hey, these things get
 140                 patched, and after a reinstall and some fussing in the settings
 141                 (specifically, turning FSR2 on and setting it to 'Balanced') I
 142                 ended up with a game that both looked pretty reasonable and ran
 143                 very well! It's 60fps most of the time, but does drop to
 144                 mid-forties when the vistas are big or there's an excessive
 145                 amount going on on-screen. But it's certainly playable.
 146               </p>
 147               <p>
 148                 With those fixes in place, I rolled a new character and dove in.
 149                 About an hour in, after the tutorial has concluded and you enter
 150                 the main town to find it ransacked, the game's magic trick
 151                 begins. Fighting your way to the centre square and freeing 'Butt
 152                 Stallion,' the kingdom's ruler (yes, I know. Unfortunately this
 153                 one is a Gearbox in-house production, with all that entails),
 154                 Tiny Tina, the DM of the game, tells you about the city
 155                 repairing itself in typical lyrical DM fashion.
 156               </p>
 157               <p>
 158                 And then the city changes around you. Fires extinguish, bricks
 159                 that had crashed to the ground float and repair into pristine
 160                 buildings. Rainbows sprout around the castle. It's honestly
 161                 pretty magnificent to watch.
 162               </p>
 163               <p>
 164                 This isn't actually the first time the game has pulled this
 165                 trick, but it;'s the first time your focus isn't on the combat,
 166                 so it's hard to ignore. Earlier, as youre fighting towards the
 167                 town, Tina describes a siege happening around you, and in an
 168                 adjacent field, siege engines, vast armies, ramparts and
 169                 defences materialise, a battle suddenly taking place where
 170                 before there was green grass and tranquil hills. She details a
 171                 ship full of skeletons and it shores up next to you, a fresh
 172                 barrage of foes to fight.
 173               </p>
 174               <p>
 175                 It's hard to overstate how magic this feels, and it's spread all
 176                 through the game. The grander changes to the world around you
 177                 are kept for story beats, of course, but this game being a tale
 178                 told at a D&D table is weaved throughout in other ways.
 179                 Borderlands isn't exactly a choice-heavy RPG, the main quest is
 180                 laid before you already written, and side quests can only really
 181                 go one way as well, with maybe a minor amount of variation. But
 182                 in that outwardly restricting framework is how the spirit of
 183                 TTRPGs thrives here. You can choose to seduce a character
 184                 instead of fighting them in one side quest; a D&D classic. Your
 185                 other friends at the table talk amongst themselves, arguing
 186                 rules or paths forward, making dice checks and complaining to
 187                 the DM.
 188               </p>
 189               <p>
 190                 And honestly, I think it's an interesting way of adapting a D&D
 191                 session to a video game! Baldurs Gate and its ilk are
 192                 laser-focused on player choice in both the micro and macro, they
 193                 implement the rules and functions of a tabletop rpg as if
 194                 they're set in stone, the inarguable realities of these games.
 195                 But isn't the real magic of TTRPGs in the unexpected? Humans are
 196                 unpredictable; a video game is never able to expand the
 197                 possibility space in a way a human DM can.
 198               </p>
 199               <p>
 200                 So instead, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands doesn't try to. You're the
 201                 player character, but the players themselves are the others at
 202                 the table, improvising and adapting. The result is a game that
 203                 <i>feels</i> closer to playing D&D than any CRPG ever could,
 204                 even if the choices are entirely out of your hands.
 205               </p>
 206               <p>
 207                 It means that these wild storytelling swerves can be designed
 208                 for. Baldurs Gate 3 couldn't have an entire ocean evaporate,
 209                 entirely changing the world, because, well - what if the player
 210                 chooses not to do it? By being strictly linear, the world feels
 211                 strangely more real than Faerun ever did for me.
 212               </p>
 213               <p>
 214                 That's not to say the spectre of budget constraints don't haunt
 215                 the game, mind. Unlike every other Borderlands game, the world
 216                 isn't contiguous, instead each 'adventuring area' is separated
 217                 by an overworld, which is designed to resemble a DM's map, with
 218                 miniatures dotting it. It acts kind of like a classic Final
 219                 Fantasy overworld. There's also the audiologs/comms of the game,
 220                 which appear on screen without even an ease-in fade - suddenly
 221                 there's a character's unanimated face in the top-right of your
 222                 screen as they speak.
 223               </p>
 224               <p>
 225                 And I will admit it's distracting. It feels like the cuts taken
 226                 to accommodate the wild creativity elsewhere can be pretty
 227                 brutal and in many cases stick out like a sore thumb. But
 228                 personally? I think it's worth it.
 229               </p>
 230               <p>
 231                 You don't get to take swings this big without sacrificing some
 232                 parts of the game that would usually have zero rough edges. But
 233                 I'd always rather a game be ambitious and occasionally cut you
 234                 with their rawness than be designed-by-committee, smoothed over
 235                 globs of nothing.
 236               </p>
 237               <p>
 238                 Despite ultimately being just another Borderlands, I will be
 239                 remembering beats in Wonderlands for far, far longer than
 240                 anything 2 or 3 offered up. And that's something that really
 241                 should be celebrated.
 242               </p>
 243             </div>
 244           </div>
 245         </div>
 246       </div>
 247       <iframe class="embed-links" src="../shared/links.html"> </iframe>
 248       <iframe class="embed-footer" src="../shared/footer.html"> </iframe>
 249     </div>
 250   </body>
 251 </html>