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+ <h3 class="blog-title">
+ It's 2025 and I am playing a D&D Game...
+ </h3>
+ <h3 class="datestamp">01/02/2025</h3>
+ </div>
+ <div class="content">
+ <p>
+ ... and it's not Baldurs Gate 3; it is, however, equally 7/10.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ OK, now I've got my hot take out the way, let's talk about a fun
+ game from 2013 called Call of Juarez: Gunslinger that is very
+ much not the game I have been playing. I promise I'll bring it
+ round though.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ The Call of Juarez series isn't particularly interesting outside
+ of this title. They're very average Western first-person
+ shooters from the late noughties and early 2010s. I imagine,
+ having not gone back to them, that they are also probably quite
+ racist. One of them is about two brothers fighting in the civil
+ war who desert as the 'war nears its end,' which sure sounds
+ like they were on the losing side.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Gunslinger, however, is different. It's actually a game about
+ storytelling. You're Silas, a cowboy sat in a saloon telling his
+ life story - the hook of the game being that Silas is an
+ unreliable narrator. As Silas tells the story, and the people
+ around him pick holes in his tale, the world you're playing in
+ changes rapidly. The launch trailer shows how that works, skip
+ to 1:12 for the relevant bit.
+ </p>
+ <iframe
+ class="video-embed"
+ src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U5_9M60crGs"
+ title="Call of Juarez Gunslinger Launch Trailer"
+ frameborder="0"
+ allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share"
+ referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin"
+ allowfullscreen
+ ></iframe>
+ <p>
+ And this is extremely cool, right? It feels futuristic, and
+ honestly it feels like kind of how the future of video games
+ should have been. But I don't think I ever saw this kinda thing
+ again? We have 'dynamic' worlds in some sense in that a building
+ will fall down, or a new route opens up somehow, but nothing on
+ the scale of the world shifting around the player.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ And I do understand why. This, as with anything, is down to
+ budget. if you have a scene that changes as the story changes,
+ that's expensive. But it feels kind of revolutionary in a way
+ that, frankly, I don't think video games have felt in a long,
+ long time.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ So yeah, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. Cool experiment, fun game,
+ weird vision into a future that never was.
+ </p>
+ <br />
+ <br />
+ <h3>
+ Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is a 2022 Borderlands spin-off that
+ <i>is</i> that imagined future.
+ </h3>
+ <p>
+ OK, preface, I know that one of the words in that sentence has
+ probably immediately turned off quite a lot of people reading
+ this. I am aware Borderlands is extremely marmite. I have played
+ most of the games and I would struggle to call any of them
+ "great" - they're competent shooters, they nail the
+ looter-shooter loop that so many games since have tried and
+ failed to imitate (Destiny has and will always suck, don't
+ start) and they are famously groan-worthy when it comes to
+ writing and story.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ I played quite a few games in January and towards the end I was
+ itching for a shooter, ideally one fit for the Steam Deck. I'd
+ tried Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel before and bounced off it, but
+ I picked it up for another go on Valve's miracle machine and had
+ a great time. I think that game is helped by it being developed
+ by 2K Australia, a studio with Bioshock pedigree, so it's a
+ really really solid shooter; but it's also honestly pretty funny
+ when it gets to be properly Australian. it also leans heavily on
+ Handsome Jack, the antagonist of Borderlands 2, and inarguably
+ the series' highpoint when it comes to character writing. it
+ still has its 'cringe' moments, but I think it's generally
+ better written than 2 (and certainly 3) and also it has lasers.
+ Which are fun.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ After finishing that, I remembered I'd tried Tiny Tina's
+ Wonderlands on deck sometime in 2023. it didn't run
+ <i>great,</i> muddy visuals and a very janky framerate making it
+ pretty painful to actually play. But hey, these things get
+ patched, and after a reinstall and some fussing in the settings
+ (specifically, turning FSR2 on and setting it to 'Balanced') I
+ ended up with a game that both looked pretty reasonable and ran
+ very well! It's 60fps most of the time, but does drop to
+ mid-forties when the vistas are big or there's an excessive
+ amount going on on-screen. But it's certainly playable.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ With those fixes in place, I rolled a new character and dove in.
+ About an hour in, after the tutorial has concluded and you enter
+ the main town to find it ransacked, the game's magic trick
+ begins. Fighting your way to the centre square and freeing 'Butt
+ Stallion,' the kingdom's ruler (yes, I know. Unfortunately this
+ one is a Gearbox in-house production, with all that entails),
+ Tiny Tina, the DM of the game, tells you about the city
+ repairing itself in typical lyrical DM fashion.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ And then the city changes around you. Fires extinguish, bricks
+ that had crashed to the ground float and repair into pristine
+ buildings. Rainbows sprout around the castle. It's honestly
+ pretty magnificent to watch.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ This isn't actually the first time the game has pulled this
+ trick, but it;'s the first time your focus isn't on the combat,
+ so it's hard to ignore. Earlier, as youre fighting towards the
+ town, Tina describes a siege happening around you, and in an
+ adjacent field, siege engines, vast armies, ramparts and
+ defences materialise, a battle suddenly taking place where
+ before there was green grass and tranquil hills. She details a
+ ship full of skeletons and it shores up next to you, a fresh
+ barrage of foes to fight.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ It's hard to overstate how magic this feels, and it's spread all
+ through the game. The grander changes to the world around you
+ are kept for story beats, of course, but this game being a tale
+ told at a D&D table is weaved throughout in other ways.
+ Borderlands isn't exactly a choice-heavy RPG, the main quest is
+ laid before you already written, and side quests can only really
+ go one way as well, with maybe a minor amount of variation. But
+ in that outwardly restricting framework is how the spirit of
+ TTRPGs thrives here. You can choose to seduce a character
+ instead of fighting them in one side quest; a D&D classic. Your
+ other friends at the table talk amongst themselves, arguing
+ rules or paths forward, making dice checks and complaining to
+ the DM.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ And honestly, I think it's an interesting way of adapting a D&D
+ session to a video game! Baldurs Gate and its ilk are
+ laser-focused on player choice in both the micro and macro, they
+ implement the rules and functions of a tabletop rpg as if
+ they're set in stone, the inarguable realities of these games.
+ But isn't the real magic of TTRPGs in the unexpected? Humans are
+ unpredictable; a video game is never able to expand the
+ possibility space in a way a human DM can.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ So instead, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands doesn't try to. You're the
+ player character, but the players themselves are the others at
+ the table, improvising and adapting. The result is a game that
+ <i>feels</i> closer to playing D&D than any CRPG ever could,
+ even if the choices are entirely out of your hands.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ It means that these wild storytelling swerves can be designed
+ for. Baldurs Gate 3 couldn't have an entire ocean evaporate,
+ entirely changing the world, because, well - what if the player
+ chooses not to do it? By being strictly linear, the world feels
+ strangely more real than Faerun ever did for me.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ That's not to say the spectre of budget constraints don't haunt
+ the game, mind. Unlike every other Borderlands game, the world
+ isn't contiguous, instead each 'adventuring area' is separated
+ by an overworld, which is designed to resemble a DM's map, with
+ miniatures dotting it. It acts kind of like a classic Final
+ Fantasy overworld. There's also the audiologs/comms of the game,
+ which appear on screen without even an ease-in fade - suddenly
+ there's a character's unanimated face in the top-right of your
+ screen as they speak.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ And I will admit it's distracting. It feels like the cuts taken
+ to accommodate the wild creativity elsewhere can be pretty
+ brutal and in many cases stick out like a sore thumb. But
+ personally? I think it's worth it.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ You don't get to take swings this big without sacrificing some
+ parts of the game that would usually have zero rough edges. But
+ I'd always rather a game be ambitious and occasionally cut you
+ with their rawness than be designed-by-committee, smoothed over
+ globs of nothing.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Despite ultimately being just another Borderlands, I will be
+ remembering beats in Wonderlands for far, far longer than
+ anything 2 or 3 offered up. And that's something that really
+ should be celebrated.
+ </p>
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