Or 8 words per wink, for those of you keeping score.
Having one of my sleepy days. No big whup. The first one is always easy.
It’s when it drags on day after day that I lose the ability to treat it philosophically and end up feeling miserable about the whole thing.
Hopefully that will not happen this time. If tomorrow I am bitching about how I don’t want to sleep, I want to do stuff, I want to have fun, you know it’s lingered on.
Right now, it’s the nice kind of sleepy. The kind that makes me feel warm and relaxed and soft and cozy.
Here’s hoping it goes no further than that.
On the video game front, I finally caved in and downloaded a mod for Divinity : Original Sin 2 that resurrects all my characters if we win the fight.
That’s how every other game in the genre works. DOS2 makes you buy very expensive resurrection scrolls and if you run out of those and don’t have enough gold or gear to trade for one, the character just stays dead.
And that makes the stakes just too damned high. I don’t want to have to reload my saved game every time a character dies because I have no scrolls and I don’t feel like having my fighting strength down by a quarter until I get enough gold for a scroll.
The game is hard enough when I have 4 characters fighting. With only three, it would be damned near impossible. So how would I earn the gold I needed?
To me, that’s a violation of the number one golden rule of video games : the player is never, ever totally fucked. It’s a soft violation, because in theory you could come back from it, but realistically speaking, fat fucking chance.
I haven’t had a chance to actual test the mod yet because I am currently stuck on a fight where I have to defeat not just some human baddies (fucking White Magisters) but a metric butt-ton of sentient blobs of crude oil. [1]
It’s not that difficult a fight, but it is a very long fight, and that has a tendency to lead to my making stupid mistakes late in the fight and getting myself killed.
Hopefully I will have some kind of strategic inspiration that will make the fight a bit less wearying and manage to get past it.
I could skip it, of course, and go elsewhere in the game’s open world in search of adventure. But everywhere else seems to have fights so tough the game actually straight up tells me I should run away.
Which is another mark against it, honestly. If your supposedly “open world” game can only be done in a certain order and there’s no way to figure out what that order is except by traveling around and getting your ass kicked by everything until you finally find something you can beat, that’s like…. bad.
If I wasn’t such a stubborn son of a bitch, and if the game wasn’t so damned good, I might have given up by now.
Games should not be actively trying to kill your motivation.
More after the break.
Quick update : finally beat that long fight I mentioned above. But when I finally won, the mod that was supposed to resurrect all my dudes did not do so.
And I was down to just one character left. So that was like…. bad.
So I used up my last three resurrect scrolls to get back into fighting shape, because there was no way I was going to go through all that shit again.
Hopefully I will get the mod working and it won’t matter. I got it through the Steam Workshop, and I haven’t modded anything that way in a while, so maybe I was supposed to activate the mod somewhere.
Otherwise, well, I just hope there’s some easier meat n’ potatoes type adventuring out there for my poor crew, because these big fights are hard enough to survive, let alone survive without losing anybody.
Another thing : at the beginning of the fight, the bad guy, White Magister, is tormenting this other dude.
I forget the other dude’s name, so we’ll call him Slim.
In the intro to the battle, you can distract Jonathan long enough for Slim to untie himself, and then Jonathan notices Slim is untied and the fight begins.
So far so good. But the thing is, Slim is not very smart. All he cares about is killing Jonathan. So in the ensuing fracas, he inevitably dies.
But I have a quest to talk to him. So now what?
Well, in a normal game, he’d have a letter or a book or some other object that substitutes for actually talking to him by giving us the same information.
But that’s sissy stuff by DOS2’s standards. Slim died, therefore I can’t talk to him, therefore I came away from this fight no further ahead than when I started it.
The quest listing just says “Slim is dead. ”
Now, if it turns out that I can’t beat the game without Slim being alive at the end of the fight so I can talk to him, I am going to scream.
Keeping him alive through that fight would be damned near impossible, as the fight inevitably ends up with fire everywhere due to all that oil, sentient and not, going everywhere. And fire does damage to you when you walk through it, and Slim is waaay too stupid to just sit still.
I suppose I could use my wizard’s teleport spell to teleport Slim to safety, but of course he would not stay there.
So I dunno. Might be that the only way to keep that dumb motherfucker alive is to stay right next to him and heal him constantly.
That would truly, deeply, and irrevocably suck.
I will see if i can get the mod working. And I will see whether or not saving Slim is mandatory. I sincerely hope it is not.
Because if it is…. I may have to start over in “tourist” mode (the lowest difficulty level) because the game has me beat.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.