Got some total war cravings and bough total Warhammer III on a sale. It has a very strong “just one more turn” factor and it’s been eating up a good chunk of my free time the past week, but I’ve finally got it out of my system. Warhammer II still has the best factions, but the mechanical improvements in particular how allies work are really nice. If you own all three games you can play the “immortal empires” campaign including the whole old Warhammer fantasy world and all races. This is an absolutely massive game world, at the start of the game there are 280 factions, although this count decreases quickly

One of my most controversial gaming takes is that I like the first witcher game the most of the trilogy. There is a lot of jank and some cringeworthy parts but overall it feels like a much tighter experience than the later games, notwithstanding some clearly undercooked parts. It takes a lot more cues from older rpgs in how it’s structured and I suppose I might just have a weak spot for that.

To be fair, I’ve never gotten that far in the third witcher so maybe I’d like more it if I played it enough to properly get in to it. I just got kinda bored after a dozen or so hours which is not a problem I had with the first witcher.

Pathologic (2005). Been wanting to play it for years but been a bit too intimidated because of the reputation it has, but finally gave it a try and am about halfway through the Bachelors’ route.

It’s actually not as bad as I had made it out to be. The core loop of resource management isn’t too difficult and pretty engaging. You famously spend a large portion of the game walking between places but because of the stakes imposed by the resource management and the constant potential for sweet deals in the hobo economy, you’re always engaged. The game isn’t afraid to throw unfair feeling scenarios at you, but if you’re not above reloading and retrying a couple of times they are very possible to deal with, at least so far. I have a decent stock pile at the moment, so I might actually fuck around and not reload next time I catch the plague.

The game does a lot of things with the medium that very few other games have even attempted and is absolutely worth a play. It also has a very unique and compelling setting, Morrowind is probably the closest example I can think of in terms of world building even if the setting in Pathologic is relatively speaking more grounded.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Quinns article in rock paper shotgun is a good introduction and what first made me interested in the game when I first read it maybe a decade ago. Since it was written, Ice Pick Lodge (the studio behind the game), has released a remastered version of the first game with better translation, released a sequel and announced a second sequel, both of which are retelling of the story in the first game from the point of view of one of the three available protagonists in the first game.

Based on the games you listed, Morrowind! One of my absolute favorite old RPGs. Out of the elder scrolls games it’s the one with the strongest world building, which paints a nuanced picture of a very strange and compelling world. Compared to Skyrim in particular it’s more like a pen-and-paper rpg and less like an action game which gives it a higher barrier to entry. In particular, a lot of people find the combat frustrating at the start.

The modding community for the game is very active to this day. To begin with, there’s OpenMW which is a re-implementation of the engine that runs natively on Linux and contains various bug fixes and quality of life features. There’s also a fork of it, tes3mp, which allows you to play Morrowind in multiplayer!

There’s also Tamriel Rebuilt which is a modding project that adds the mainland of Morrowind (the base game just takes place on an island called Vvardenfell) and adds maybe another game worth of content. Theres also Project Tamriel which has one project that recreates Skyrim based on Morrowind-era lore and one that recreates Cyrodiil based on Morrowind-era lore.

I’ve interpreted the “I want smaller games with less graphics and I’m not kidding” meme as saying that we need AA games rather than indies. Games with large-ish teams but less crunch and less complicated asset creation pipelines and more space to fix bugs and iterate on the core game.

The first game is a bit different from the rest and it’s greatest strength is the world building of the universe, where it is the strongest title of the trilogy. People mostly like the mass effect series for the companions though, and they are at their best in the second game.

The first game suffers a bit from being an awkward hybrid between an infinity engine game and a more action-oriented game. It was a rough time for RPGs in general in that respect. ME2 and 3 lean more in to the action game play for better and worse (mostly better).

Unless you are in hurry to get on to the next game, I’d encourage you to do some of the optional and very easy to miss sidequests that you can get from exploring planets. Its worth checking the wiki for these if you don’t feel like doing enough exploring to stumble across them organically, I can in particular recommend the Cerberus quest chain and Talis geth quest chain.

Yeah the way I got out was a bit cryptic, although I think there are multiple ways. I’m shameless enough to use a walkthrough when I’ve been stuck for a while, otherwise I’d be having an even harder time.

Planescape: Torment

I haven’t played a lot infinity engine games and I’ve struggled with understanding what the game expects of me in terms of gameplay. Hopefully I’ll internalize that eventually but I’ve been enjoying the writing and vibes so far even if the gameplay feel a bit frustrating and a bit like a chore at the moment.

I heart vanilla is a good modlist which has some basic bugfixes and minor but faithful graphical improvements. If you wanna make the game look even better, then Volumetric Clouds, Remiros Groundcover (or some other groundcover mod) and Normal Maps for Everything are some of my top recommendations. If you wanna go crazy then there is also a modlist on the same site called graphical overhaul, but I think that it’s worth sticking to a more vanilla aesthetic for a bit just so you have that as a frame of reference.

OpenMW (or, alternatively MGE XE if you want to use the original engine for whatever reason) already have some nice graphical improvements baked into them though.

I don’t think that the driving the empire from Morrowind ever happens in game, but maybe it technically comes true as a concequence of the Red Year which in turn is a concequence of the Tribunal losing their power because of the ending of the main quest. It’s interesting that Uriel Septim sets the prophecy in motion knowing that this is part of it.

The Tribunal where losing their power anyway, but I suppose that Dagoth Ur could have kept Bar Dau in its place if he’d won, but then everyone would have been transformed into a corpus zombie instead.

The Red Year isn’t part of Morrowind lore, but “what is going to happen with Bar Dau now?” is kind of an open question at the end of the game so it is an event that absolutely builds on things set up in Morrowind

I thought fo4 was underwhelming, but I’m exited to play the fallout 4: london mod which is supposed to drop as soon as possible after the patch, depending on how quickly the script extender gets updated to work with the new version.

It’s set before fallout 1 I think and it won’t have a lot of fallout staples like the pip boy, super mutants or the brotherhood of steel which I think will be a nice change since it feels like Bethesda have overused them a lot. A lot of the promotional material looks fantastic and they seem to have a lot of cool ideas and a professional approach to modding.

The new vegas modding community has kind of a bad track record when it comes to large modding projects but I feel optimistic about folon, but it might be good to temper that optimism with a little bit of caution anyway.