Greedfall

Legate of The Congregation

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This is one of those mornings where I am baring skirting by and don’t feel like I have much at all to talk about. I am fully enthralled by Greedfall at the moment and will be pushing forward until I have reached the ultimate conclusion of the game. The experience is far from perfect, but it does make me wonder what other gems in the rough are out there. Paradox for me at least has been a very hit and miss publisher and I guess this is just going to happen with the sheer number of titles they are willing to put out there. This is my first game developed by Spiders, and from what I can tell this is sort of their thing… releasing interesting but flawed game experiences. I do plan on poking my head into The Technomancer at some point which was their last release prior to Greedfall.

I guess I should at some point expand a bit on what I mean by a flawed game. It is just the little things that are not quite as well implemented as they could be. The camera and movement feels a little off in a way that is really hard to explain. Combat while enjoyable also feels a little less fluid than it maybe should be, and it gets real tiresome listening to your companions spout the exact same line over and over every time you engage anything and often times multiple times during that engagement. The character models and facial animations are maybe just a little stilted as well, nothing to the extreme of pre-patch andromeda but still not quite there. As a whole the game is extremely enjoyable and I am very impressed by the voice acting, which while not going to win anyone an award doesn’t drop me out of immersion into the world. What I mean by flawed is that everything feels just one or two degrees off what it should be and as a result it feels like an imperfect experience, but nonetheless one still worth experiencing.

I think more than anything what is keeping me tied into the game is the setting and its story, because I feel like this is someplace video games have not really successfully gone yet. The colonial era is a stain on the many countries who participated in this age of conquest and it isn’t often that you see this played out in any manner other than through a 4X/Strategy game. I choose to play the Legate of the Congregation of Merchants as anything but a neutral party. I side with the native population and have been doing my best to mend the way between the colonists and the original inhabitants of Teer Fradee. As a result I am more or less always running around with Siora the daughter of a tribal chief and Vasco the Naut that brought us here and seems to be a similarly inclined character.

On the opposite side of this… I have no interest at all in running around with Father Petrus a missionary of Theleme the faction of religious zealots. I am also not at all interested in running around with Aphra, who at face value seems fine… but is representative of the Bridge Alliance a group of scientists that seem to do all manner of nasty things to the native population in the name of progress. Kurt is more or less neutral and I am fine using him whenever I need to, but I am just way more comfortable with Vasco and Siora as my primary party. This is a thing that happens when I play these sort of games, is that I develop a group that I prefer to run with and then never really mess with other characters unless I am doing side quests that require them. I played Dragon Age Origins almost exclusively with Morrigan, Alistair and Leiliana.

While I feel like I have spent a lot of time dwelling on the imperfections, I feel like I need to drive home the point that I am extremely well engaged with this game. I am going to be playing it to a fault of pretty much everything else until I make my way through the story. It took me a bit to engage with it due to those flaws when it initially released and as a result it was placed on the shelf until I recently restarted it. However now that I am in the mix of the game play I am driving forward towards the eventual conclusion of the story arc. One bit of warning that I give for players however is to maybe look up some guides on the romance options, because I almost accidentally found my way into one without really knowing that was where I was heading. Unlike Dragon Age there will be no icon with a heart on it to tell you that you are heading in that direction. I legitimately look forward to seeing what the next game from Spiders looks like, because based on my reading each time they release a new title they improve and iterate slightly on the one that came before.

Josie the Pussycat

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Lets be truthful at this point. You are not coming here for my writing anymore, but instead updates tales of a tiny furry butt that now officially inhabits my household. Yesterday did not exactly go as planned, because when we went to visit on Monday they told us that it was within the realm of possibility that we might get a call yesterday to pick miss Josie up. We have officially named her Josie the Pussycat and I guess in my mind I didn’t want to finish the prep work for fear of jinxing it. Just shy of 4 pm I got a phone call from the vet that works with the Animal Shelter and by 4:30 I was jetting out of downtown to head over there to get her. We have kept the pet carrier in the car at the ready for the last several days as a sort of weird “go bag” for when the event finally happened.

Luckily my wife was able to bail a little early and get home before me to finish putting litter in the litter box and setting out food and water and such. We were 98% there on setting up the isolation room we had planned, but the best laid plans often times go off the rails. Our upstairs bathroom is meant to be the master suite bathroom for the house and because of all of the extra space that is where we keep a row of litter boxes. Off of that room is a separate fully enclosed tub with a sitting bench and our master plan was to quarantine her off into that room. We had it all made up with a cat bed, a scratching post, a bunch of toys and of course a food and water dish. She did not like this room however and anytime we left it… she screamed her head off.

So that plan lasted all of five minutes and instead we regrouped and went with the ole tried and true. Every cat we have taken home has spent time in my wife’s office and as a result we now have another kitty suite set up in there. My wife of course spent the entire evening up there with her and she is already chill as hell. She does not seem to notice she had surgery because at one point she full leaped off of my shoulder before I could stop her. This morning she was curled up in the cat bed completely conked out and once I finish writing this post I am going to go in there and hang for a bit while my car warms up. I think she already realizes she is at home, and my hope is that we can introduce her into the wider house before very long. At the moment Kenzie is being a butt about it, but she is kinda a butt about everything. I am not getting to spend much time with Josie because I more or less need to be a stable force for Kenzie to rotate around out in the rest of the house. My wife will also be out of the country in a week or so and as a result probably needs to get in as much bonding time as possible in the short term.

My original plan for the evening was to hang out and play some TemTem, the not-Pokemon MMORPG. That however didn’t exactly go as planned. I was one of the backers of the game on Kickstarter and have played before when it was in stress test mode. I figured I would calmly slide in and start playing last night but when the login screen announced that I was in an over 9000 player queue, I figured it was probably not going to bode well. I did however manage to create a character and the only thing wrong with the character screen is the lack of beard options. Granted you are playing a child character… but I can dream of having a beard.

There were however opening day jitters as the game more or less was unplayable. During the time in the Tutorial area there were massive pauses between loading screens. Once I entered the open world however and encountered my first random TemTem… the game just straight up froze on me. Fifteen minutes later I abandoned hope and Alt+F4’d out of the game and went on with my night. They apparently posted about these issues, and were looking into resolving them. I am guessing they are using a peer to peer scheme and were blaming the issues on some players slow or unresponsive connections.

I have to give them credit because based on their Twitter feed it seems like they were furiously stomping bugs all night long and finally crashed out about 3 am my time. Considering that Tem Tem is developed by a Studio in Madrid Spain that means they signed off at 10 am after having spent all night trying to deal with launch issues. Hopefully tonight things will be more manageable.

What I did instead between trips into the other office to play with Josie was continue my adventures on Teer Fradee. The only real complaint I have with this game so far is that the encounters are not at all organic. As you travel along a path you know with pretty regularity that you will encounter groups of mobs at fixed points in the journey. Additionally there are large swaths of the game with absolutely nothing going on at all which feels a little weird. As I understand it this is sorta a general problem with games by this studio, but it is also the only thing that really stops it from feeling like a Dragon Age or Witcher game. I purchased the previous game by Spiders, and I think once I finish this one I will give it a shot as well. It is as a whole a little rough around the edges but the game itself is generally rather good.

Teer Fradee and Me

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Since this is the Monday of my week due to the holiday yesterday, I feel like doing a sort of general update post. I had previously been grinding away on my second playthrough of Witcher 2, in an attempt to see the other side of the story. I have more or less stalled out there because I am not a really big fan of the “humans” path thus far. It feels very much like I chose the correct path the first time. I am generally fine about hatred of high elves… but the dwarves and halflings are always my kinfolk. Witcher universe sets up a world where the elves are assholes, but also greatly abused assholes making me somehow care more about them. Dragon Age did the same thing to me with the Daelish, which I feel are probably at least inspired by the Scoia’tael. For now however I am probably setting this aside realizing that my first attempt was the best attempt.

Instead I managed to find traction finally in Greedfall, which is an RPG that came out last year. The control scheme is a little wonky with mouse and keyboard, but after my extensive playing of Witcher 2 it feels pretty solid compared to that mess. The game as a whole is Tolkien meets the evils of Conquest and Colonization as you set forth to the “new world” represented in this game by the Isle of Teer Fradee. The main continent is effectively divided by a central conflict of Science over Religion with its proxy factions of The Bridge Alliance representing Science and Theleme representing Relgion. You make up a third and attemptedly neutral faction called the Congregation of Merchants, which along with the Coin Guard attempts to make sure that commerce flows between the various warring groups. Lastly there are the factions of the Nauts which make up a group that controls the over ocean shipping lanes and the only route to Teer Fradee and then the Yecht Fradi which represent the native populace of the island being subjugated by these invaders.

You are thrust into a game world where the only group with potentially clean hands are those who originally inhabited the isle. I am doing my best to be a good man when presented with this central conflict and to the right and just thing… but truthfully right now that is more or less having me focus on nothing but the side missions of which there are plentiful. The Theleme are of course the faction of religious zealots dead set on conversion of the natives. The Bridge Alliance are unchecked scientific progress who wants to capture and experiment on all manner of creatures and peoples from the island. The Coin Guard and Congregation in theory are attempting to be neutral but in doing so have many of their own skeletons in their closet and a seemingly dark past that will need be accounted for. The Nauts have their own issues in the form that they demand children or “sea-born” as payment for trade contracts and any child born on one of their vessels becomes theirs as well.

You would think with all of those morally compromised positions, that the game-play experience would feel rather fraught. These things serve to set the texture of the world you are inhabiting, and the game gives you plentiful options to do the right thing and also plentiful options to abuse the powers bestowed upon you as the Legate of the Congregation. I’ve not spent a lot of time working on the main story because the game thrusts you into all of these deeply personal character arcs for your makeshift crew and I am finding myself enjoying that way more than any of the larger beats. I figure at the end of the day I will probably wind up at war with both of the major factions because I find them thoroughly distasteful. Ultimately I am spending most of my time running around with Vasco the captain of the ship that brought us to Teer Fradee and Siora the daughter of the Queen of a faction of natives at war with the Bridge Alliance who sought your assistance. I care about both of them as characters and more or less the joy of this game is running around with them doing stuff, thought Vasco’s “a bit of poison on my blade” combat line gets a little old.

I did not make it through yesterday without paying another visit to the animal shelter and seeing our kiddo. Right now we are leaning towards Josie… as in Josie the Pussycat. I am hoping all of these visits are doing a little bit of bonding along the way, in at least showing here that there are humans out there waiting on her. We still have to wait for final approval that comes after surgery… however we were given a bit of hope. There was talk that maybe just maybe they would be doing a number of surgeries today, and if she is in that batch we might get a call tonight. We have the isolation room set up and ready for her with a brand new fresh litter box, bed and some toys. However during the time when we are here we are likely going to be grabbing her and either shutting off my office, my wife’s office or the bedroom to let her roam around while we do our thing and get used to the world. You never really know how long you need before you can introduce her to the other cats.

I will close things out with another photo. While I was trying to take a photo, she kept trying to climb across my wife and come over to visit me which was adorable. She pretty much started purring as soon as she saw us, but our visit was a little truncated. By policy they have to have a staff member back with us while we interact with the animals, and in the middle of our visit they called the person up to the front to help another family. We didn’t have to leave but we opted to do the right thing and free up the resource, and I am glad we did because they had a family who had lost their animal trying to check to see if it had been captured as a stray. Right now I am hoping beyond hope to get a call, but I will I guess also be okay if I have to wait until Friday.

In the meantime however we are continuing to spend as much time as possible with Kenzie and Mollie because I am sure very soon they will be grumpy with us.