Harry Potter: Magic Awakened

It is supposed to be a boy!

Overly pretty boy Itlandm lounging in his room at Hogwarts, waiting for the game’s time lock to open again so he can earn more cards.

I am vaguely sorry for not posting anything at a time when people my age die in droves from the ongoing pandemic. Or as I call it, the Longevity Nerf patch to Real Life. It seems the Developer has decided that human lifespan has become a bit too long, and has taken steps to adjust it. Anyway, my hour has not yet come, though it may draw nearer now that the Norwegian government has decided that Covid-19 Omicron is welcome and done away with all restrictions.

But on a more upbeat note, since most people out there are much younger than me and probably more playful as well, let’s talk about the newest game I have found. This is not something that happens often, but this is actually so new that it is still in beta. Well, actually it is already quite successful in China, but the English version is in beta during February 2022. If all goes well (for the game), the servers will be taken down at the end of February and new servers will be set up later this year. I may play it again then, if I’m still around.

***

Harry Potter: Magic Awakened is another Portkey game, but unfortunately it has no exercise component like my previous Harry Potter mobile game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, which unfortunately closed at the end of January. It was awesome and wholesome. This one is just awesome, I guess. It does not encourage exercise, quite the opposite. Well, except for your fingers I guess.

The game is set in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, starting around 10 years after the final book in the series. You play as a young and way too androgynous student getting a surprise letter of acceptance from the school, and working your way through a long storyline spanning years. Probably. I am still in the first year and there’s barely a week left of the beta. But there is supposedly a lot of story content in there, and what I have seen is pretty fun, at least if you can identify with teenagers.

During the introduction, you select some things about your character, like gender and dress code (within limits). You are led through the sorting hat ritual and get to know a few students: A female potential love interest with a dark past, a male potential love interest who probably also has some personality, a couple of helpful friends, and the haughty and naughty female antagonist and her twin lackeys. You can play as either gender, but both the looks and the choice of antagonist imply that girls are particularly welcome to play. Unsurprisingly, the game encourages socializing and making friends, although you can socialize without friends too, or bring your own.

The game has RPG elements, but is really a collectible-cards game. You get some cards through the storyline, but also you get cards and gold from daily activities like participating in class, friendly duels, or exploring the Forbidden Forest. Unfortunately, the Forbidden Forest is the only purely single-player activity (except the storyline) and then only at the lower difficulties. Luckily the game will just throw you in with random strangers for your class activities and there is no need to talk to them, yay! If you pick a time of day when there are too few volunteers for classes, your AI friends from the storyline will join you instead, which I find a lot more relaxing. Duels are always against other players, unfortunately.

Most classes are combat-oriented. Combat requires you to play cards from your deck. The deck is limited in size, so it is smart to make several small decks for different occasions. I mostly use the same deck all the time though, one focused on protection, healing, and summoning creatures to fight for me. So far it works well enough, but I am still early in the game and will probably always be.

The classes vary from day to day, but one common class is History of Magic, which is actually trivia from the books! No combat needed. You just pick the correct answer out of four, your two friends do the same, and you get rewarded based on the sum of your effort. How very Asian. Luckily I am doing surprisingly well, given that I stopped after the first book where one of the kids was killed. (I really hate it when people kill kids.) I picked up more than a little lore from the previous game I played, though, and from friends elsewhere gushing about characters.

Another fairly non-violent task you can do daily is dance in the ballroom! The worst that could happen is that you step on someone’s feet. You control the dance by pressing circles that briefly appear in various directions around your character, in time with the music. My sense of rhythm is horrible, so stepping on toes is sure to occur. And despite Ivy saying she wanted to dance with me again, there are always just strangers when I come there. (Ivy is the artificially intelligent puppy-love interest.) I hope our future AI overlords don’t take this badly, but I would rather step on artificial toes than those belonging to fellow humans.

Successful classes, duels, dances, and explorations reward you with baskets you can open. But you cannot do this all day long: It takes a couple of hours from you open a basket till you can open the next. However, if you don’t play for some hours (for instance while working or sleeping) the baskets will pile up. You still need to do your dailies to unlock the baskets, and then you can put the game aside and do other things. Thank you, Chinese dictatorship, for forcing kids to not play the same game from dawn till dusk (or worse yet, the other way around).

And on that note, time for my evening walk. Even without Harry Potter, I will walk while I still can.

Daggerfall: Tedious travel mod

Screenshot Daggerfall, wilderness of Tulune.

Roads would have helped, but who’s supposed to pay for them? I’ve been in Daggerfall for years and never paid a dime in taxes.

In classic Daggerfall, there are two ways to travel between locations on the province map: Fast travel, or traveling on your own.

You can literally walk or ride from one town or dungeon (or village or graveyard or farmstead) to another, simply look at the map to find the direction and use your compass to go in that direction. Eventually you will arrive, or else miss it and walk right past, since Daggerfall (unlike the other Elder Scrolls games) does not have roads outside of the habitation. (This is probably not realistic to make with a mod, given that Tamriel is the size of Great Britain or above, but that would have been ideal.)

Fast travel on the other hand is virtually instant for the player, but not for the character: You click on the destination and get an estimate of how long it will take given a couple different options. Then you confirm, and the new location loads. Time and date will have updated accordingly, but you the player don’t feel  like it has taken time. The time is only relevant if you are on a deadline. Most quests have very generous deadlines, but if you take on several at the same time you may need to factor in the time.

What if you could experience distance in the game without having to hold down the forward button the whole time? There is a mod for that.

“Tedious Travel” 

Thanks to a mod developer known as jedidia, you can replace the fast travel option with what he (?) calls ‘a convenient “autopilot” and adjustable time compression.’ The autopilot is extremely simple, it just points the nose against the target and off you go. If you start it in towns, you may get stuck in buildings; but overland it is quite effective. Unlike fast travel, but like traveling on your own, you may run into hostile encounters, but the mod thoughtfully pauses the game when this happens so you can take control of the situation: Kill or be killed, or try to run away, or – if you are a linguist – convince the rampaging orcs that you are on their side and they are obliged to guard you against wild animals while you take a nap.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, why would one want to do tedious things in a game? Well, not all have a super vivid imagination. When you are used to just clicking on a map, it can be hard to get a feel for how an actual character in a medium-tech, medium-magic world would feel about distance. For instance, I’ve found myself not bothering to look for bargain shops in an unfamiliar town, instead fast traveling to a town where I know I can get good prices for my loot. That would be a lot less likely to happen if I actually had to ride for several days to get there!

Luckily you don’t have to spend several days in the wilderness even with Tedious Travel. This is where the “adjustable time compression” comes in handy. By default you move 10 times faster than normal walking / riding speed (your choice of transportation matters for travel time, obviously). You see the terrain fly by like on a train. You can slow this down if you want to enjoy the scenery, or speed it up. I got to 45 before I gave up. At some point I guess it won’t be tedious anymore, although I assume the risk of wilderness encounters remains even at high speed. (Time compression is turned off for the duration of the encounters, so don’t worry about that. Also as mentioned, the game stops and wait for you to take the reins.)

Even if you go for higher speeds like 40x or even 50x, you should still get a good idea of the difference between local and regional travel. Visiting the next village over may be a short trip, but traveling from the west coast to the north-eastern mountains or the south-eastern jungle will still be an adventure. There are two reasons for this. The first is the random encounters, as mentioned – on a long journey there will be lots of them. Related to this, there is the matter of stamina.

Stamina is not a problem during the original fast travel. In fact, if you choose cautious travel, you will arrive at daytime with full health and stamina, no matter your starting condition. But with Tedious Travel, as with manual travel, you will eventually get tired. Traveling by cart or horse is less tiring than walking, but after a day in the saddle you will no longer be able to go on. Letting your stamina get too low is also a problem if you run into bandits or monsters: Fighting them takes stamina, and if you run out of energy during the fight, they are not going to show you any mercy. Also, the chance of unfriendly visits increase if you camp out at night rather than the day.

Luckily, rural Daggerfall has a decent number of hostel villages, typically named after a long gone tavern but now occupied by one to three inns and a few other buildings (presumably where the staff lives). They always have plenty of room these days, although if you explore them you will occasionally find NPCs in various states of undress in some rooms. If you’re not looking for more combat experience, for instance because you are a linguist traveling on some scholarly quest, you may prefer to set your course for the nearest such village in the general direction you are going, and get a good night’s sleep there before moving on. They are generally very affordable. Once you start approaching travel in Daggerfall more realistically, it becomes obvious why there are so many of them – in fact, the question is why there aren’t more.

***

Yes, I am easily amused, I guess. In the highly unlikely case you want to try out this or any of the innumerable recent mods for Daggerfall Unity, you should go to the Daggerfall Workshop Forums – Released Mods.

Daggerfall evolves

Screenshot Daggerfall (Grayidge, Tulune)

Screenshot from outside the Mercy of Stendarr, Charley, Daggerfall.

(Open the picture in a new window for more detail.) Not your grandpa’s Daggerfall: The sky is high-resolution, with birds flying in it. The temple sign is haindpainted in loving detail and does not devolve into blocks when seen fairly close. The house walls are in high resolution, with the house to the left in the background having a whole new texture. The snowy trees have a painted look. The wilderness beyond the village limit is rendered with vegetation and terrain rather than a standard background picture.

After yesterday’s update I downloaded around 3 GB of mods for Daggerfall Unity, most of them high-resolution graphics, but also a couple hundred new quests and the Archaeologist Guild. Yes, a whole new guild for the game, aimed at intelligent characters who don’t use magic or weapons much but prefer to talk their way out of things. Language skills and high intelligence are requisites for advancing in this guild. Unfortunately it is a rival of the Mages Guild, so I haven’t gotten to test it yet. It definitely looks like a guild Language Grrl would have loved, for those who remember her. (OK, that would be deeply disturbing if you did – it’s been around two decades. I barely remember her myself.)

Despite the massive graphics upgrades, the game looks very much like old Daggerfall, just less blocky. The artists are generally very faithful to the original look and atmosphere of the game, and have gone for a “painting” look rather than a “photo” look when adding detail. The result is that if you don’t replace every part of the graphics, the new high-resolution items blend very well with the machine-expanded original sprites.

That said, there are sure to be people who prefer the “old school” graphics. In that case, the graphic mods are not for you. And there are even various degree of “retro” settings in the game for those who want the blocky, low-resolution style. Me, I like it shiny.

I haven’t had time to test out the new quests and the new guild. Maybe I’ll never take the time for that. I know I said that I’d like to play this game for a thousand years, but as my actual years run out, I get a bit more picky. Still, as games go, Daggerfall holds a special place in my heart, so I take some pleasure in seeing people still playing it and expanding on it in 2019.

 

Daggerfall Unity Alpha

Balcroft Heath, Tulune province, High Rock

Still very much Daggerfall, just slightly better. And better and better with each passing month.

Those who have undertaken the arduous task of reading my early archives, will remember Daggerfall, the greatest single-player roleplaying game of all time. The game remains the largest single-player game ever in terms of sheer geography, with a game world roughly the size of Great Britain. It takes weeks of Real Life to cross the land on foot, although luckily fast travel is available in the game. There are hundreds of centers of habitation from cities to farmsteads, and many dozens of dungeons, each of them enormous in size. (You can and will get lost in them, even after years of playing. Or at least I did. Luckily a patch to the game gave a way to cheat yourself to the exit after completing a dungeon quest.)

I could go on and on about the skill system, the magic system, the item system, the crafting etc which were all far ahead of their time. But unfortunately the ambitions were too high for the computers of the time. In further bad luck, the game was developed for MS-DOS but released only after Windows had largely replaced MS-DOS as the dominant operating system. (Windows 95 made away with the need for MS-DOS, and Daggerfall came in 1996.) And of course, pushing the boundaries as it did, the game was buggy. Also of course, trying to make the most of the available hardware, it became unplayable not only on older PCs but also on newer. As such, only a few of us got to play it for years. Some of the most enthusiastic players formed an informal online community known as the “Daggerfools”. I have lost touch with them over the years, but clearly we were not alone.

The game got a second lease of life with the coming of DOSbox, a program that allowed MS-DOS games to run within Windows. It created an environment the game could not distinguish from a real MS-DOS machine with the specifications set by the program. The two games I used DOSbox for were Master of Magic, and Daggerfall.

But even with that, it was clear that time had run away from Daggerfall. The graphics were quite blocky by today’s standard, especially on modern screens. If you played it in its original resolution, it would just make up a small box on the screen. If you played it full-screen, it would be distorted on wide-screen monitors and the picture would consist of colored squares.

***

Daggerfall Unity uses the original resources from the game (which Bethesda has given away for free for years now, honor to them for that) but the game engine is replaced by the modern Unity game engine used in various multiplayer games. The game is still single-player, but it is improved in many other ways.

The graphics still use the old sprites, but with modern software that scales up the images to a wide range of screen resolutions without visible distortion, including the wide-screen formats that are common today. The game also allows modded resources, so you can replace the original sprites with new, more detailed ones. Some such mods already exist, as well as the first gameplay mods

In addition to less blocky graphics, view distance is greatly enhanced, letting you see things in the distance. Random terrain generating in the wilderness is fixed and the odd “dead zone” around towns is also gone.

The many bugs and instabilities in the game engine have been removed. (There are probably new ones but I haven’t seen them yet.) Controls are more like those in modern games (like mouse look and mouse click attacks instead of mouse swing attack – yes, you would swing your mouse side to side to swing your sword in the old game. You can still do this if it feels right for you.)

The game runs faster (which makes it harder) and the enemy AI has been improved (which makes it harder). Enemies of different types may now fight each other (which makes it easier). Luckily you can turn these off in the settings and also make various other changes if to make the game look and act more like the original, if you so prefer.

I was unhappy to find that Daggerfall Unity has removed the “donation piles” in temples. As a new member of the Mercy of Stendarr, I was used to rooting through the donation piles for money, potions and better items than I already had. Later when my fortunes had improved, I would drop my own gifts in the donation pile. Please bring back the donation piles! They are an essential expression of the spirit of the game.

The old game only had 6 savegame slots. Daggerfall Unity has the modern system where you can give each save a unique name, or re-use those that are no longer relevant. Savegame location has also been moved to a standard location for each operating system (the game runs under Windows, Linux and Mac) and at least in Windows, this is a hidden folder unless you change your settings in Windows. (I have done that long ago for other reasons.) I would assume that the old savegame editors like Daghex will not work with the new games, or at least those with a higher number than six, but I have not tried yet.

***

I mentioned that Unity is moddable. The first mods are already out, and a search for “daggerfall unity mods” should give you an up to date view of what is available. I expect new mods to trickle into the world for as long as the generation who played the original game is still alive. After that, I do not know. Maybe we, as Lord Stone once mused in alt.games.daggerfall, will go to Daggerfall when we die. If I have understood the author of Narnia correctly, this is not entirely impossible, but I don’t pray for this to be my eternal destination. Despite my claim long ago that I could play this game for a thousand year. Obviously I can’t in this body. But even if I could, I would probably not have explored all of Daggerfall’s towns and dungeons, or all of its magic and crafting options. The most ambitious single-player RPG of all time will most likely outlive me by a good many years, thanks in no small part to this project.

Link to Daggerfall Unity’s home: https://www.dfworkshop.net

Sims 4: Discover University, and its fatal flaw

Screenshot Sims 3, child hugging plush toy

Would you want to abandon your cute little sister to the random blows of fate, growing up without your guidance, knowing you at most as a dim memory? Then play this game as advertised. But I warn you: That way lies sorrow and loss.

***

The Sims 2: University was my first and favorite expansion for that game, and The Sims 3: University Life was one of my favorites too, albeit after Supernatural and perhaps tied with Into the Future. So it was with fairly high expectations (by Sims 4 standards) that I bought The Sims 4: Discover University. Unfortunately, after playing it for some days, my feelings are definitely more mixed.

Discover University has a wealth of content. In addition to the whole university experience, which is realized in more detail than ever before (as usual with Sims 4) there are three new careers, one of which actually looks interesting. (I have generally not bothered with careers in Sims 4, because they require a lot of micromanagement and you can live a simpler, happier life earning money from home: Painting, gardening, writing  and programming each can easily support a family that’s not bent on extreme luxury.) Engineering seems to allow the construction of a number of unique objects that just might justify the extra complexity. But before we get that far, a severe warning is in order.

***

At the heart of any University expansion is the campus experience itself. This time it is voluntary, as you can also live at home and just go to campus for classes (lectures) and to use the library which is open to the public. And a good thing too! Think twice before you  leave your home to move into a dorm. Not that living there is a horrible experience, although this depends a bit on your flatmates. But the whole flow of time is changed from the earlier games, and not for the better.

When you move to a dorm this time, you really move out. If you are part of a family, the rest of the family will now become non-played characters: They will age up, but they won’t do anything with their lives. (Unless you have a story progressing mod like MC Command Center, in which case they will progress like every other sim family out there.) You are basically leaving them to their fate.

In Sims 2 you also moved out from home, but time did not progress for households you did not play. So you could either move back in and nothing had changed, or you could (as I did) switch between them so your family aged up at a realistic speed. In Sims 3 you did not age up at university, and time did not move in your home neighborhood either. You could go home between semesters and take them at your own pace.

Now, everyone ages up, and they age a lot. Sims have always spent an unreasonably long time at university, but in the previous versions it did not matter. Now, it matters. You MUST change the lifespan from the default “Normal” to “Long” before you start using the University features, or tragicomedy will ensue.

The duration of a single career-oriented degree with the highest course load is 3 semesters, each of one week, so 21 days. In comparison, the entire young adult life phase is 24 days by default. That is, if you apply for University and scholarship when you become a young adult, and it takes three days before you have your acceptance papers (there is some processing time now, you can’t just call and move in) then you are halfway to elder  when you have your degree. Even here in Norway, we have a ways to go before that!

What is arguably worse is if your sim is part of a family. The entire teen life phase is 14 days and childhood is 13. So if your kid brother is halfway through grade school when you leave, he is an adult when you graduate! Siriusly? And in the final dagger strike to the heart of the family-oriented sim: Elder “guaranteed” lifespan is a measly 10 days, which means your student may leave his parents in their golden years near the top of their career and still with smallish children, and get a phone call at university that they have passed away from old age. Not cool.

Changing to long lifespan before you go to college mitigates all of this. But the fact remains that your family turns into non-playable characters that waste their lives in your absence, thanks to the artificial stupidity of the game. But at least you may be able to fix some of it when you rejoin the family.

Of course, if you are done with that family when your student moves out and you want to start a new chapter with the parents and siblings (if any) fading into the background, then the game works as intended. You still should change to long lifespan for the duration of the studies, though, because of the ridiculous length of the studies.

***

I have gone on about this at length because it can completely ruin your gameplay if you’re not aware of it and simply expect things to work similarly to the earlier games in the series. Also because I’ve seen rather a lot of reviews and playthrough videos, and none of them get this point across (in fact, almost none of them even hint at it). This makes sense because the first thing you do if you are a professional reviewer is create a new young adult sim and either apply for university right away or build up a few skills so you can get scholarship, then off to campus.

But in practice, almost all simmers will be playing families 90+% of the time, and it is here that the expansion is fatally flawed unless you take care. In that case, unless you are ready to switch to a brand new generational chapter (not to say a sequel) in your family dynasty, you should probably let your sims attend classes from home instead. And still at long lifespan until they graduate, if not longer.

Sims 4 Practical Magic is practical

Screenshot Sims 4 Realm of Magic

You shall not pass! No, actually the guy with the sigil over his head is one of the three Sages, and he is trying to teach her better spellcasting. Training with the Sages is the safest way to level up and builds friendship with them, so they will teach you a new spell and a new potion each, once a day. Do this early in your career, because one day they will have nothing more to teach you, and you will be the one mentoring other sims.

Despite the streaks of Harry Potter flavor here and there in the new Sims 4 expansion Realm of Magic, there is no overarching plot of good versus evil. The plot, such as it is, tells us that the Magical Realm is threatened by a metaphysical vortex and can only be defended by the cooperation of the three “Schools” of magic, represented by three Sages, who teach either Mischief Magic, Untamed Magic, or Practical Magic.

Given my previous entry about the excessive time spent on basic needs in Sims 4, it should surprise no one that I made a beeline for Practical Magic. Indeed, as I write this, I just had an elderly Simeon Silversweater, Sage of Practical Magic, teach me his ultimate spell, which allows me to bestow the power of magic upon a normal human. The disciple has not become quite like his master yet, though: He still has many alchemy recipes to teach me. But I know the most important one: Potion of Plentiful Needs.

***

Before we get too far ahead, let me explain the basics of sim magic, although it is fairly well explained in the game.

Spellcaster is the new life state in this expansion. As such, you can not access this magic if you are already an Alien, a Vampire or a Mermaid. You can either create your sim as Spellcaster, or find one of the three Sages in the Magic Realm and ask them to turn you into one. They will cast a temporary spell on you that lets you see “motes” (glowing orbs of magical energy) and collect a bunch of them. After having shown your magical aptitude, you get to join their ranks. As a Spellcaster, you have access to all three Schools of magic, and can mix and match them as you want, along with Alchemy.

A feature not well explained in the game (as far as I can see) is that magic accumulates over generations. A child of a Spellcaster will have more aptitude for magic than either of its parents.You go from Weak Bloodline to Strong Bloodline to Ancient Bloodline. The third generation of genetic Spellcaster will accumulate magical experience 30% faster and suffer less danger from overload.

In contrast to most role-playing magic, you don’t start your day with a supply of mana that is spent with each spell. On the contrary, each spell leaves a residue in your aura, called Charge. As you build Charge, your spells become more powerful, but the risk of backfire increases. If a spell backfires because you cast too many in too short a time, you will suffer an uncontrolled discharge of magic that burns you to death. To avoid this, you need to cast fewer spells, or have perks that let you discharge the residue or keep it from building up too fast in the first place.

Perks are bought with talent points, which you get when leveling up. You can eventually get them all if you keep at it long enough, but it may be smart to first pick those that let you gain more experience, and then those that let you control the aforementioned Charge. Hereditary Spellcasters also get more talent points, and having a familiar active supposedly gives more too. I have not tested this, as I try to always have a familiar around when casting spells.

Familiars have two functions: They give you bonuses to your advancement, and they protect you from death. If you accidentally set off a deadly discharge, the familiar will absorb part of the blast and you will both survive, although the familiar will not be able to do so again in a while (I am told a week). Luckily you can have more than one familiar, although only one can be active at any one time. But definitely prudent to have a backup familiar in case of accident. You may want to get one for each of your children too, as familiars protect from all causes of death, not just from magic.

Familiars can be bought, found, received as a gift, or won through duels. Magical duels are a big part of the game. You can challenge other sims or they can challenge you. Most duels are friendly and may even improve your relationship, in addition to giving magical experience and building Charge (don’t accept one when you are supercharged please). But you can also have more competitive duels for knowledge, ingredients and artifacts. Familiars are artifacts. Ingredients are needed for potions, but you can buy those in a shop or find at least many of them in the wild. Knowledge gives you a new spell or recipe, but there are other ways to get those.

The easiest way is to befriend a Sage. The Practical Sage is probably the easiest to befriend. The Mischief Sage (at least the one the game starts with) is on the evil side so can be harder to befriend. The Untamed Sage is also fairly personable. Once you’re a bit more than strangers, you can start asking them for training. This is a way to gain experience fairly quickly without building Charge, so don’t be shy to use it early on when you don’t have Charge-reducing perks. While improving your skills, you also improve your relationship with your teacher. Once you are friends, you can stop by and ask them for a new spell each day until you know them all. You can also ask them for potion recipes, but only one of the recipes is really worth knowing early on: Potion of Plentiful Needs.

***

Practical magic is useful from the start. Your first spell should be one that lets you repair broken things. Home reparations are time-consuming and sometimes dangerous, but on the flip side non-magical repairs builds mechanical skill and gives you spare parts you can use to upgrade your household items. Mechanical skill may also be required in some jobs. So there is a downside to using this spell, but it saves a lot of time when you need it.

The next spell cleans things, including sims, including you. No more scrubbing toilets, no more showers unless you need a specific type of shower to put you in the right mood.

The third spell creates a random item of food, either a single portion or a family-sized quantity depending on your choice. This saves time and there is no risk of burning down the house (only the Spellcaster – save early, save often, keep your familiar out).

The fourth spell weeds, waters and removes pests on a garden plant. Another time-consuming but skill-building activity avoided.

The fifth spell lets you teleport to any point of your choosing in the neighborhood. Faster than using your broomstick, let alone anything else. Broomsticks don’t make you explode, though, and they also build wizard experience, like the spell.

The sixth spell is kind of game-breaking: It lets you make an instant copy of small objects. This happens to include the rare and expensive ingredients that limited alchemy. Now you only need to buy one of each, and you can multiply them beyond necessity. This is a good time to take up alchemy. Before that, it is kind of expensive.

Next comes another gardening spell, which lets you grow a plant to full size instantly.

The penultimate spell is rather trivial: It lets you teleport to the Magic Realm from anywhere without going through the portal at the top of the waterfall in Glimmerbrook. But there is also a crystal (Glimmerstone) that does the same thing, although it has a cooldown.

The ultimate spell, as mentioned, lets you convert a normie to a Spellcaster. It is not really something you need since the Sages have it already and besides, your kids will inherit your magic and surpass it.

***

I’ve mentioned potions. Some of them are for very specific situations and require rare ingredients. One of them (Potion of the Nimble Mind) is quite useful but not game-breaking, letting you learn skill faster but not instantly. And one is probably the main reason why professional reviewers recoil in horror. The “Potion of Plentiful Needs” resets all the need bars to full, as if you had just fulfilled all your physical and mental needs at once. If you have a stack of these, you could basically stop eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, playing or socializing. I agree that this would destroy the tenuous link between the game an real life. And that is not how I use them. I have a stack of them around for emergencies.

Say you’re about to go to bed and a friend you like invites you to an impromptu party. In real life you would probably be able to stay up a few hours even though you would regret it, but in the game you quickly grind to a halt and fall asleep on a bench. This is where I whip out my extra strong energy drink, Potion of Plentiful Needs, and dance the night away before going to work.

Or you’re coming home from work, hungry and dirty, and you get a message that the spirit of an old friend is about to pass from this realm. You don’t spend an hour making an egg on toast, another hour eating it, and an hour and a half in the shower before you go see them. In the Sims 4, there was no way to not do things slooowly, that I am aware of at least, until now. So that’s how I use the potion: To do the things I should do or would do rather than the things I must do.

There is also a Potion of Rejuvenation, but you can get that from fulfilling whims and living up to your aspirations as well. I believe it still only resets you to the beginning of your current life phase (so you can’t go from old to young, for instance). The new part is that you can mass produce it, not that this should be needed. The Potion of Immortality, harking back to an old fable, does not make you eternally young. It just keeps you from dying from old age. You are still old. Or that’s how the text presents it, I have not tried it yet. There is also a Potion of Prompt Resurrection. If you die while this is active, you return to life soon after. Probably nice to have if you are planning to do something remarkably risky, but as a Spellcaster you can get a familiar and skip the whole dying part. Maybe you can use it on other sims or something?

***

The Untamed Magic has a spell to let you summon a ghost and another that lets you restore a ghost to life, which of course is not realistic. (Nor are ghosts realistic in the first place.) I have not used it yet, but I can see it being valuable for those cases where things went more wrong than expected. The drawback with this is that another sim must cast the spell, so it is mostly useful in a family situation, I guess, or a friend that passes away unexpectedly. You could also use an ice spell to put out a fire instead of a fire extinguisher. Finally there is a spell to remove curses (or you could use the corresponding potion.) The rest of the spells, and the whole School of Mischief, seem useless to me. Which is good, because this is already too long.

Magic comes to Sims 4 (finally)

Screenshot Sims 4 Realm of Magic - floating glowing book

One of the first magic perks I took was of course “Knowledge is magic”, which speeds up reading and research as well as gaining a small amount of wizardry experience points from these activities. (The magical anti-gravity boobies were none of my doing though – she was like this when I found her.)

This is not so much a traditional review as a reaction. I’ve only had the Sims 4 expansion Realm of Magic for a couple days. I accidentally learned of it the day it came out, and the two first reviews I saw agreed that magic made the game too easy. And I was like “YES PLEASE! Let it be so!”

***

I wanted to like Sims 4. After all, I loved the three previous games in the series, each more than the last. Sims 3 remained my go-to game during my limited play time up until City of Heroes: Homecoming happened this April. And Sims 4 was technologically superior to them all. I don’t think this was obvious to people who haven’t made software (or at least been educated to do so) but it did not take me long to be impressed by the design of this game. The game still runs smoothly on my 7 year old laptop, where it is installed on an external hard disk. Now if only it was fun! But unfortunately it is not. Or wasn’t until three days ago.

A big part of why I quickly went back to Sims 3 was that the newer game went back to the roots of the series with excessive focus on basic needs. Those were always present, but somehow it feels like they make up more of the game now than in Sims 3 and even Sims 2. I know this is a bit exaggerated, but this is how I remember my sims’ day:

Wake up. Pee. Eat. Briefly do something that puts you in the right mood before going to work. (This depends on the work, but could be playing chess, playing an instrument, or taking a shower.) Work. Eat. Pee. Shower (if you didn’t in the morning.) Scramble to fill fun and social needs before going to bed. Sleep.

What really adds insult to injury, is that jobs now require you to do very specific things to advance. Typically your work-related skills must reach a certain value, but also you are expected to do certain time-consuming work things on your spare time. If you are a programmer, for instance, you need high logic skills, but you also need to do X hours of coding on your spare time. If you are a writer, you have to write X number of books of a certain quality on your free time; but you still have to go to work, and whatever you do there, it neither produces books nor increases your skills. (Meetings, perhaps?)

Compare this to Sims 3, where the relevant skills decided your speed of advancement. If they were high, you added work experience faster. If they were horrifyingly low, you actually got negative work experience. In between was this large area where you might get a raise faster if you improved your skills, but it was a matter of degree. And many jobs had an option to spend part of your work hours improving the leading skill for your work (cooking for the culinary career, a musical instrument for the music career etc). It is hard to see Sims 4 as anything but a big leap backward both in realism and fun.

***

So when I learned that the new expansion had a potion that would reset all the needs to max, I whipped out my credit card right quick. It is not like there aren’t many fun things to do in Sims 4, especially if you have a couple expansions already. The problem is finding time to do any of them when your sim takes 40 minutes to drink a glass of water. (I timed it. In all fairness, a sim hour is more like 1 minute real time, but then again they only live like 80 sim days or something. So no more water unless your life depends on it.)

Even with Realm of Magic installed, it is not like you can just fire up the game and cast spells and drink potions. There is an uphill road to power, glory, and death by fiery explosion. Still, if you take the right path from the start, you should see useful results pretty quickly. I can tell you a couple helpful things about that! But we should probably come back to that in another entry. This was more of an opinion piece. Let me just say that in my opinion after two days of play, this expansion goes a long way toward redeeming the game. I won’t say it is better than Sims 3 yet, but it’s starting to become a serious contender.

Unless you like spending your weekends working, sleeping and peeing, and hate all things magical as well as goth clothes and stained-glass windows. In that case, stay away.

City of Heroes returns – sort of

Screenshot City of Heroes

The Were-Porcupine lives! (Willpower/Spines Tank.) 

During Easter week, the news broke that the online game City of Heroes  had not died at the end of November 2012, as most of us had been told. A secret cabal of reverse engineers had been able to set up a private server (possibly with the help of a former employee at Paragon Studios). For about six years, the cabal and their trusted friends had played the game that the rest of us could only watch in old YouTube videos (many of them in low resolution, as was common back then).

The source code went public during Easter, and a privately run server went public shortly after. Almost 20 000 players had signed up before a fake cease & desist warning caused the server and the forums to be wiped to protect the not entirely innocent.

A couple days later, a new server appeared, and thousands of people have once again signed up. It is kind of bizarre that this game was shut down when other games keep sputtering along with only a few hundred players. It is clear that City of Heroes  was dearly loved by many of its players, not only me. So I have conferred with the voices in my head and learned what made this game so special.

The secret ingredient

The thing people remember above all is the game’s community, the positive and inclusive and helpful atmosphere. Indeed that is a thing that stands out, but did this happen just because it was a superhero game? There have been others after it, that failed to create the same community.

And then, observing the game anew in 2019, I realized. Forming a party is an essential part of a multiplayer game, whether you are playing with dice at home or online with thousands of strangers. Parties / teams / groups / felllowships make or break the game. And only one game has a structure that makes virtually every class a welcome addition to virtually any team. That is City of Heroes, and the reason is its archetypes.

Archetypes

Instead of traditional classes like Warrior, Priest and Mage, CoH had a handful of archetypes. On the face of it they were just classes by another name, but there was one difference: Each archetype had a primary and secondary power set, with different functions.

Tankers can withstand massive damage, survive and bounce back. But they can also deal a more modest amount of damage to nearby enemies. With Scrappers it is the other way around, they do massive local damage and can withstand some. Blasters can do massive damage even at a distance and also have some modest crowd control (rendering opponents helpless or at least partly disabled for a while). Controllers can do massive crowd control and have modest team support abilities (healing, damage reduction, efficiency boosts). And Defenders have massive team support while doing modest damage at a distance, thus concluding the little triangle of behind-the-frontlines archetypes.

So basically if you have any one archetype and you add another, you will get some serious benefits to both, no matter which it is. If you add someone with the same archetype, you will still get a modest benefit, because of the dual nature of the archetype. It also lets one archetype substitute for another in a pinch, then revert to its strongest role if another player joins that is better suited.

While certain combinations of heroes work best together and lets you go through more challenging missions faster, you will always get a major boost from teaming up with another archetype and at least a minor boost from the same archetype. This means that instead of the “Team needs Healer” and “Team needs Tank” that you see in other online games, CoH will have a lot of “Team looking for more”, plain and simple. Because everyone is welcome. And that, gentle reader, makes a huge difference to how you perceive a game. The feeling of being welcome everywhere, being appreciated, being able to pull your weight and help anyone you meet? That is what creates a POSITIVE atmosphere that persists for years after the game itself is gone.

Or is it? With thousands of players gathering on the privately owned server as we approach the game’s 15th anniversary on April 27, it seems that NCSoft’s snap decision has been undone … at least for now.

To be continued…?

God still reads my journal

Screenshot anime

I sure am hung up on myself. You don’t need to tell me…

Not sure how many others are still reading, what with updates being such a rare event (especially in Februaries) but clearly someone up there is watching over me. I mean, how else do you explain that Kritika Online is being closed down after I review it in my previous entry? ^_^

Don’t worry, I have already moved on to Lord of the Rings Online. It is an old MMORPG with lots of contents and lots of features added over the years, and lots of deep lore. But knowing me, it should surprise no one that the feature that interests me the most at the moment is the “skirmishes”, which are… repeatable instances! At the outset there are three of them, and you can tweak them a lot like missions in City of Heroes or even more: You can have different group sizes from 1 to 12 heroes, you can choose from 3 difficulty levels, and you can pick a character level from 20 upward. So you can tailor the difficulty to your liking, especially upward. And you can repeat them over and over till you die. Or the game dies. About that…

I got my first character to the minimum Skirmish level, 20, before bedtime. The next day after work I eagerly fired up my gaming computer, and it started to load LOTRO. And stuck on the first loading screen. I went to their website, it was also down. Eventually I found their Twitter account where they said they had “extended downtime” but would be up next morning. It’s been two days now of the downtime being extended by a few hours every few hours. I feel slightly guilty since, me being such a Very Important Person, obviously this happens for my sake. ^_^

Actually, if it happened for my sake, I would presumably be a Main Character, and that’s a bit too much even for me! What I mean is that I am a  Viewpoint Character: I am in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time to see things happen. It is a term from literature, in which the viewpoint character of a scene – or a chapter, or a whole book – is the person who sees and feels and experiences the content of the book. And if written correctly, the personality of the Viewpoint Character filters everything that he or she reports and adds meaning and narrative to it. But the Viewpoint Character is not necessarily the Main Character, let alone the Creator of the story. Still, being a Viewpoint Character is a privilege, as you get to be where things happen, when they happen.

So basically, while it looks to me (as the Viewpoint Character) like a higher power is shutting down the games that take too much of my interest, a more realistic take on it is that I (as the Viewpoint Character but not the Main Character) am being subtly placed by the Author in a position to notice when they get shut down.

Obviously I am not being told “You are the Viewpoint Character for a certain event, so I need you to go there and do this or that.” As far as I perceive things, I do them mostly entirely on my own, or as a reaction to things that happen to me from outside. It is only when I witness some unlikely string of coincidences that I start to suspect that I am placed there as a Viewpoint Character, to make sure it is seen. Coincidences like one game getting shut down and another put on hold after I start writing about them. (Yes, I have been writing on a review of Lord of the Rings Online, I just haven’t uploaded it yet.)

The Author of the world is, in my belief, the “Christian God”. (This is an artifact of the English language, obviously God is not a Christian! Rather it is a shorthand for “God as imagined by Christians”.) This God is believed to take an active interest in what goes on in the created world. So in that perspective, it makes sense to draw connections between my journal and the closing of games. But does this connection exist outside of my head? Does it matter if it does, or only that it seems like it?

There are a lot more important things going on in the world than computer games. I basically write about them to appear more normal than I am, since it is something I have in common with many normal humans. A friend of mine lost her father, her pets, and almost her life in a house fire last month. Computer games shutting down is not likely to be a big thing in her life right now. I am well aware of how tiny, petty and pointless my earthly interests are. But somehow, oddly, I am still able to see connections between my petty little life and events on a larger scale. And that is the joy of being a Viewpoint Character, seeing what would otherwise have passed unnoticed. I get to feel important, even though I am not. Because my role is to observe. ^_^

I love repetitive games

Censored screenshot from Kritika Online

.Can I interest you in a repetitive game with ridiculously inflated human udders? Probably not, unless you really like helium-filled breasts or repetitive games. Luckily for Enmasse Entertainment, I am squarely in the second  category. I was instantly attracted to this game, Kritika Online,  when I heard that it required you to do the same instances over and over again. The humongous and imperfectly dressed breastesses don’t make much of an impression on me either way, me having grown up on a dairy farm after all. (Not diary farm – that would be the first decade of my journal archives.)

As you may have guessed, when a reviewer mentions the repetitive gameplay, it is generally not meant as a compliment. Most people are easily bored. In fact, that would normally be why we play games in the first place, instead of working overtime or reading books by geniuses like Charlie Munger and Ray Dalio who generously (for a small fee) share the principles that have made them successful by the American definition of success. Objectively speaking, moving pixels around on a computer screen to simulate combat against imaginary enemies is a lot less productive, so it seems unlikely we would do it unless it just felt good. And most people don’t feel good doing the same things over and over. But I do, within reason.

***

We are not talking about the kind of repetition where you just stand there and press the same button over and over. There is some element of tactics. Each sequence of the game consists of a hub (a small village with services and where you can meet other players, it is an online game after all) with four “instances”. Each instance is a limited area, or in this case several smaller areas one after another, where enemies are waiting to fight you. The number and type of enemies do not vary. Occasionally during the fight, and always after defeating the final boss, you get dropped items like a weapon, a piece of armor, or a potion.

The first time you are sent into an instance, it is usually to perform one or more quests: Defeat [number] of [enemy type], pick up [object]. Then you return and are sent back into the exact same instance to do something similar. The same enemies are waiting in the same places and behaving the same way. So that already makes the second time easier. In addition, you may have leveled up or found better equipment, which would also help. Just in case it gets too easy, you can adjust the difficulty level. There are four of them, from easy to insane. On harder levels, the same enemies are harder to kill and do more damage, especially the end boss. But you also get more rewards.

Even if you don’t have a quest, you can still go back and do the same instance over and over again, leveling up and finding gold and new weapons and armor. You can basically do this as long as you want, I think. I have not seen a limit yet. And in fact, sometimes the only quest you have is to level up, if you’ve been “too effective” like doing several quests during the same run though an instance.

***

“No man ever steps into the same river twice,” said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, “for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

This is a classic trope in a certain type of time travel stories, where the protagonist’s mind goes back in time and is installed in his or her younger body, allowing them to live their life over again. I am sure many of us have thought of this at one time or another. I have been writing stories about this for many years, hundreds of thousands of words, but if you want to read a sure to be classic in this genre I would recommend getting The first 13 lives of Harry August by “Claire North”. I believe this is so far the best in the subgenre, but I may be wrong – be sure to shoot a comment if you have found any better.

This type of story is basically the literary equivalent of the much simpler scenario in Kritika Online (and a handful of similar games) where you are sent back into the same instance you just struggled your way through. But unlike in the game, in a more complex scenario the enemies may no longer be standing in the same place doing the same thing – your changed behavior will send ripples out from you and gradually things will change and you will find new challenges. So the game is more like the daydreams in which you think “if only I had said this instead of that, then everything would have been better”. In reality, you don’t know that, because then you would experience a different life. “All else being the same” is always a hypothetical phrase, because all else is never the same. Except in games, which is one of the more likable things about them, I think.

***

Another way to experience the same game content repeatedly is to create “alts”, alternative characters. These could be of different classes or archetypes, allowing you to experience the same content from a different angle. For instance maybe your first character was wielding a sword and fought up close with the enemies, but your second character has a bow and fights from a distance but has to run away if they get too close. That makes for a different experience, even if you know where the enemies are, because they behave differently. Unsurprisingly, I make alts in games as well. For instance, I have started Skyrim several times with a new character. Notably I had a Khajiit (cat-person) who would kill bandits and carry them all the way back to the entrance to Whiterun to lay them outside the main gate. MEOW!

I had somewhere around 110 different characters in City of Heroes before the game folded after 8 years. I have no idea how many I made in Daggerfall. But Daggerfall has a fantastic concept that I would dearly love to see in other games: You can add benefits (like more health per level, more resistances, expertise with certain weapons or against certain enemy types) at the price of leveling up more slowly. Conversely, you can add disadvantages to level up faster. So I load my characters to the gills to level up as slowly as possible (1/3 of normal speed, and I seriously wish you could go much further) and then go through quest after quest while slowly leveling up and randomly finding useful weapons, armor, magical items etc to make my character more powerful. The dungeons in Daggerfall do not always have exactly the same monsters in exactly the same place, but for the most part they do on the same level. (It changes once you level up.) Some of them vary though, adding some variation you don’t get in Kritika. Also, the dungeons are enormous, unlike the small quick instances in Kritika. But the principle is the same. And then I go back and start over again.

***

This past fall there was an anime series called Goblin Slayer, which was set in a typical fantasy world (inspired by Dungeons & Dragons with a dash of Lord of the Rings). I found this story particularly interesting because the main character seemed very clearly inspired by an “Aspie”, someone on the Autism Spectrum (until recently called Asperger Syndrome). I am not sure if the author is basing this on himself or someone he knows, but there are a lot of similarities. Goblin Slayer is a man who slays goblins. While other adventurers move on to more powerful monsters as they level up, Goblin Slayer just gets better and better at killing goblins. If it is not a goblin, he is not interested. He knows them inside and out, can predict what they will do, and has plans to counter them. If it has anything to do with goblins, he’s your man. In one memorable scene, he has a conversation with a heroine who was trapped and raped by goblins earlier in her career, and who had a phobia of them years later after she had become a famous heroine. “If you have a problem with goblins, I will kill them for you.” “Even in my dreams?” “Yes. Because I am the Goblin Slayer.”

I resonated with this character for several reasons, like how he had trouble talking with other people about other things than his special interest (but would know everything about that), how he would fail at common politeness like small talk (“Is this about goblins?” “No, but…” “Goodbye.”)  and did not meet people’s eyes (he actually wore a full helmet all the time when not asleep.) But I also realized that his approach to the fantasy world was very similar to mine. He was not interested in reaching the top level and fighting dragons and demon lords, as long as there were still new ways to fight goblins.

Although the Goblin Slayer’s reasons were different from mine, I also have the tendency to prefer the low-level part of fantasy games, doing them over and over until I feel that I have complete mastery before I move on to other things. This is not just a game thing, I guess, looking at my employment career. It doesn’t pay particularly well, but to someone like me it is still oddly satisfying.