Origins to me struggled with dullness. I think the closest game to origins tonally is probably Pillars of Eternity, the first one, in part because it’s the only Obsidian game since Alpha Protocol to largely avoid the ‘zany Le CraZy 🤪’ “humor” that marred every other game they released from them onward. But like Pillars, I think Origins is flawed. The combat is MMO lite with limited strategic depth and very bad effects and animations, much of the dialogue is wooden and dull and feels more suited to a WoW quest text box than an interactive cutscene, and the voiceless protagonist (which I also felt fatally wounded BG3) works in a sandbox like Skyrim but not really in a BioWare game. I also thought the art style always came across as very cheap, like a “art assets pack - dark fantasy edition” you could pick up off the Unreal Store or something (I don’t know if it works like that, but I believe it does). The overall story, despite some good moments around Loghain, the excellent Deep Roads segment, and a couple of the companions, is also pretty generic and predictable.
2 really improves on every aspect of 1. The 10 (well, 7) year framing is grand and ambitious, and the game has a good sense of time passing given they didn’t even have the budget for different weather in each year. The story within a story bookend of Varric’s interrogation isn’t obtrusive but adds some intrigue. The companions are too the man and woman, with the possible exception of Fenris, great and have great stories and perspectives on the world in a way no other set of RPG companions in a AAA game have ever had. One might have more affection for the Normandy crew, but they’re not as interesting or multifaceted.
Kirkwall is magnificent. It’s a shame that putting the longtime franchise art director in charge of Veilguard allegedly ruined the creative direction of that game (according to Jason Schreier) because if he’d stuck to art he would have done great work. Byzantine-Brutalist Fantasy, heavy on the concrete and stone, hugely referential of 1840s gothic revival - you can see the Houses of Parliament and a solid part of Mayfair in the building design. It’s unlike anything else. The dull haze of the Wounded Coast, the brilliant mossy green of the mountain around the Dalish camp, the work in color alone is stunning, and each location is graded beautifully, such that the Deep Roads feel deeper and more mysterious in 2 than they do in any other game. Given the limitations of the age, I think a lot of the object work was also great, notably the Lyrium idol which of course became central to the franchise’s overall plot (and I love that, that ruining the world and causing the deaths of millions is arguably Hawke’s ultimate legacy). Hawke’s mansion is one of the coziest houses in RPGs, the hall, the decoration of the bedroom. With the exception of the “iconic” act 3 armor, the gear is dull but not mostly ugly, down to earth but not as unstylish as in Origins where you really have to mod to get anything not horrific.
The music in 2 is extraordinary. Inon Zur has a reputation as a workmanlike composer who churns out passable genre themes, but in 2 he’s at his most creative, he brings in new instruments, he’s inspired by Eastern Orthodox music, by middle eastern instruments. The sound of Kirkwall isn’t quite European but it’s not “Asiatic” or “African” or “Mayan” in the cringe way fantasy games are when they go to another biome. Rogue Heart, Mage Pride, the Wounded Coast theme (which had a brief play in Origins at the edge of the mage like), all timers.
I think 2’s dialogue is very good. There are cringe lines, but far fewer than anything by Larian or Obsidian in the last decade. And even widely praised Disco Elysium has mountains of unintentionally cringe dialogue where it’s like yes it’s nice you’ve read Baudrillard and yes it’s nice you’re commenting on what’s happened to European green parties since 1991 but also this just isn’t compelling or good writing. Anders is a really good depiction of an extremist, especially when you’re arguing with him (especially in a romance). Sebastian is an almost George W Bush type of figure tempered by a Presbyterian Scottishness and played magnificently. The regional accents are great. The acting is some of BioWare’s best across the board. The Qunari aren’t “reactionary” of course, they’re closer to communists. Unlike Disco Elysium they’re not a simple analogue for a faction at the second international or whatever. They’re not Islamists. They’re not China. They’re zealous egalitarians, central planners, ruled by a matriarchy, hate and afraid of magic, vaguely Buddhist maybe, but with a strong early church influence. They’re ideologically idiosyncratic in a fantastic way.
The gameplay is a mixed bag. I love 2’s combat and think returning to aspects of its rock-paper-scissors dynamic is one of the only good creative decisions Veilguard made. Chaining together combos, freezing, smashing, disorienting, it’s one of the best pure tab-targeting implementations ever. It might be the best RTwP combat of all time. The ability to chain together IFTT statements in the AI page for companions is also great, you can program relatively complex behaviors yourself.
You’re right about Friendship/Rivalry. I do think the whole game sets up mages/templars well - the Qunari are part of that, too, it’s central to their ongoing war with the northern humans; the game is pretty nuanced. The other Dragon Ages overwhelmingly sympathize with mages, 2 has tons of examples of psycho rapist murderer mages abusing their power and treating the muggle population awfully. 2 has a certain briskness, David Gaider has said most of the game was written and edited in one pass, essentially, no real review, you’d write a line of dialogue and production was so fast that nobody was really looking at it. I think that gives it a confidence that’s so rare in AAA games outside of Rockstar where they think they are (and are) above the critics. Made in a year, thoroughly compelling, and one of very few games made about politics by committed progressives that limits its preachiness to some extent and has a real ideological depth. We’ll never see anything else like it, although if and when AI generation gets good enough I’ll generate another 250 hours.
2rafa
16hr ago
Most wealthy GOP donors didn’t want Trump. I think it had something to do with vulgarity but more to do with the fact that Trump was in an important business for a long time in a major market (commercial and to some extent residential real estate, casinos, hotels, TV, in and around NYC for 50+ years) and so encountered many rich people in many walks of life before becoming president. Many very rich people I know in NYC, which has by far the largest number of them in the country, had either met him or knew someone who had or had heard some kind of first/secondhand stories of him, and nobody liked doing business with him and he screwed over a lot of people.
Do markets love Trump? Traders love Trump because of volatility. Volatility is good for business because uncertainty widens spreads in every asset class. That is why trading floors on the sell side especially shrank so much after 2009 and have done so well since Covid, and especially over the last year and a half. As for other participants I don’t think Trump is responsible for the asset price boom of the last few years concentrated around tech and AI, which has been driven by a combination of earnings and hype but which also follows the general post-COVID boom that largely happened under Biden.
My guess is that if you look at actual Trump voting among rich people (in finance or generally), the demographics largely follow the overall pro-Trump vote in all classes.
2rafa
17hr ago
You reidentifying with your ancestral homeland (since I don’t think nukes have done much good for Britain) somehow reminds me of the fact that, perhaps moreso than anyone else (even the English! Even the Indians!) Pakistani elites really do have a deep, abiding contempt for their own domestic poor. I think the only time I encountered more was during a long conversation with an elderly Jamaican academic.
2rafa
1d ago
What is the point of having 60% enriched if not for weapons? I’m not arguing they don’t need them, or they shouldn’t be allowed to have them, or anything else, I’m just saying that they obviously want to retain the ability to create them very quickly if necessary at the least, and that counts as ‘wanting nuclear weapons’. Kent is saying they don’t want them, which is very different from admitting they do but justifying it. The unspoken ‘or else’ part of Obama’s Iran Deal (which I don’t think Trump should have broken) was implicitly an admission that the enrichment was ultimately for military purposes.
2rafa
1d ago
Sure, you can argue about why they might want them. But the idea they don’t want them is laughable.
Both the US and Russia very much were initially developing nuclear weapons from the outset, so they kind of prove my point here (the civilian sector was in some ways a byproduct) and in any case in the early days of the atomic age there was a lot of uncertainty about capability and the US was much more reliant on imported oil and it was theorized that nuclear might become far cheaper than it did (see the “it won’t even be metered” quotes from the ‘60s). The UAE’s nuclear power is largely about domestic politics because they’re governed in many ways semi-independently and 5/7 Emirates actually have no oil (almost all of it is in Abu Dhabi).
Lastly, the key developmental measure here isn’t “owning a nuclear power station”, it’s “enriching uranium allegedly for civilian nuclear power purposes”. The UAE doesn’t enrich its own uranium. The whole fuel rods are shipped from South Korea and then installed. So the situation is very, very different. And again, Iran is very poor compared to the UAE; there is no reason for the huge investment in its enrichment program if not for weapons.
2rafa
1d ago
Dragon Age 2 really is BioWare’s best ever game. Even while playing recent highly rated RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk I come back to it as a far better written and interesting story, with better and more meaningful choices (the levels are copy-pasted, but the game is reactive in a way the others either aren’t or play for laughs). The decline in writing afterwards (and it really was many of the same people who wrote Inquisition and Veilguard, so it can’t be explained away by staffing changes) beggars belief. The final conversation with Gamlen in Act 3, where you’re both trying to somehow find a little meaning in this extraordinary tragedy (which I like to think ends, in Inquisition, with the final extinguishing of the Hawke line), and really in life itself, and it all feels so pathetic, is just extraordinary. I could probably quote half the game from memory. Other games have their moments; if you play Witcher 3 with the Yennefer relationship there is something of the world-weary love story of two people who have known each other for a long time that I love, and I think the epilogue in the DLC is sweet without being saccharine. But yeah, Dragon Age 2, man, makes me want to drop everything and play it again right now.
Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon
Start with two simple facts:
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Iran has some of the world’s largest petroleum reserves. Easily extracted, light crude, no fracking, no complex processes or tech required, almost (but not quite) Saudi level cheap to extract at well below $15 /bbl
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Iran also has the world’s second largest natural gas reserves, huge solar capability which has been successfully tested, and plentiful hydroelectric power which also provides ~15% of supply.
So why is this a country that needs “peaceful nuclear power”? Even if you disregard all the extensive reporting, everything said by every western government or Israel, every leak, all of the scientific resources poured in, the underlying hostility of the Islamic Revolution towards Israel and some other countries and so on - Iran needs peaceful nuclear power less than almost any other country on earth. There is no domestic / energy supply problem in Iran that nuclear power could possibly solve. Even if Iran wanted a nuclear power station, they could import fuel rods wholesale rather than enrich themselves (like many nations with nuclear power but no nuclear programs).
You would have to be unfathomably credulous to believe that Iran has any reason to spend (waste) large amounts of money on enrichment for civilian nuclear power generation for no reason. It is obvious that the program is for weapons, and Joe Kent is a liar. There is no logical counterargument and there cannot be, the only reason for Iran to have a nuclear program is for weapon purposes.
2rafa
2d ago
The problem is say you’re a young artist looking to make your mark. If you’re classically trained (which many are) you can churn out classical landscapes and portraits but there is literally nothing to distinguish them from what countless very technically skilled Chinese, Viet and other artists are putting out for $250 online. In addition, say you’re a critic. What is there to say about that? You can say things about ugly art, or wacky art that supposedly means some bullshit, for better or worse.
What can you say about another very nice alpine landscape that captures the Matterhorn at dawn, or a view of the Empire State Building for example? “Very technically proficient, captures the scene well.” Yes, the very very best classical art has enough mystery for books of analysis. But you’re probably not going to paint the Mona Lisa.
2rafa
2d ago
The SNP lost a few seats but mainly to the Greens who are just the SNP but more left (and are also pro-independence). I don’t think it says much about the cause really.
2rafa
2d ago
Local government has very little power in Britain, which is an extremely centralized state. Garbage collection, potholes, community centers. Even education, policing, healthcare etc are directly or indirectly controlled by the national government, something that is especially true in England.
Is it a realignment? A lot can happen in 3 years. I think after Kemi goes some kind of Reform - Tory merger is likely. Reform aren’t very right wing, really, they’re closer to the GOP or maybe the centrist wing of Meloni’s faction than they are to, say, the French National Rally, who are themselves moderates compared to the AfD, who are themselves….
2rafa
2d ago
MKUltra failed and COINTELPRO targeted people who CIA types would naturally oppose for underlying social / political reasons, since at that time the agency was largely right leaning WASPs and some conservative Ellis Islanders who wouldn’t sympathize with targeted organizations. Likewise an organization consisting of, say, committed Zionist Jews could probably quite easily keep a secret mission against some infamous antisemitic group quite secret.
The reason why “someone would have said something” is compelling for 9/11 stuff isn’t that it would be impossible for that kind of conspiracy to be kept secret in a technical sense, it’s that a large number of people in the security establishment would have ideologically disagreed with killing thousands of American civilians including in some cases people they knew and loved personally.
For secret aliens at Area 51, the compelling ideological scenario to maintain secrecy isn’t really there. Announcing aliens exist doesn’t give their technology, if any exists, to the Soviet Union. And of course there are questions about why no other country is announcing that presence, too. Lastly, the incentive to reveal is much stronger than with MKUltra or COINTELPRO - the CIA doing underhanded or shady stuff isn’t a surprise. Aliens, especially intelligent, technologically advanced ones, would be a world historical unveiling of unfathomable proportions that would change our culture and trajectory forever.
2rafa
3d ago
True, but I think in general the experience of really big galleries / museums is bad here. Your eyes will glaze over at a hundred paintings at the Vatican galleries or the Met that you could stare at for hours and get much out of if you saw them independently for twenty minutes on a random day, something like the Uffizi is best experienced as a search for a few pieces of particular personal interest rather than a general browse, at least in my opinion. The jarring nature of a lot of contemporary art only exacerbates it.
2rafa
3d ago
Right, I think we’re mostly in agreement. In terms of public funding I think it’s now widely acknowledged that these are jobs programs for the children of the upper middle class, which as far as welfare goes doesn’t seem obviously worse than the far larger numbers spent on the underclass, migrants, asylum seekers, prisoners, pensioners who spent a lifetime on minimum wage and so contributed nothing and so on.
Re Yahtzee video game critics are a great example. I don’t even think a video game critic can fairly evaluate a yearly shooter or a Ubisoft open world or something like that because these games are so inherently boring to people who play video games all day that they really can’t see them the way the intended audience does. The only exceptions are things like Grand Theft Auto that have a built-in exemption due to the hype and developer’s legacy.
2rafa
3d ago
Not at all. I enjoy a lot of modern and contemporary art. But I recognize that it emerged in part because technical issues were solved. Movie CGI is approaching this level now (even without AI), where it’s no longer impressive by itself so there needs to be a stylized or sometimes even incongruent element to be visually interesting.
To be fair to contemporary artists and even moreso to art critics (much maligned), traditional landscapes really are beautiful, and if you (like most even well educated people) visit an art gallery once a year at most then they’re attractive and stimulating. But if you visit a gallery or see new art every day? They’re obviously going to start boring you. The clashing, sometimes (often) overtly ugly nature of a lot of visual art produced over the last century is often more interesting. And contemporary art especially isn’t made for the general public (with the sole exception of architecture and sometimes a particularly ugly logo for a public event or something), it’s made for a relatively small community of people who consume it all the time.
2rafa
3d ago
Essentially some point in the last 500 years, but probably 200-350 years ago (being deliberately broad) classical art was “solved”. Developments in perspective, the teaching of art, color, etc etc meant that certainly by the early 19th century you couldn’t really, as an artist, make a more beautiful painting of a subject in a naturalistic (ie beautiful, realistic, aesthetically congruent style) in an innovative way. There are still many classically trained artists and for a couple of hundred dollars you can buy a beautiful painting from a really good Chinese artist in a naturalistic style of whatever you want.
At that point, what does the artist do? The field has been solved, so once you spend a few years developing the fine motor skills, technique and so on in a classroom you just spend another 50 years doing the artistic version of churning out the same table 10,000 times. Many, probably most working artists did this and still do this. There are still portrait artists and video game concept artists and classical landscape artists and so on who follow these rules to the letter and just paint ‘thing, following rules’ with some technical skill.
But for the artist who wants to be innovative in terms of technique, what is there to paint or draw? You can draw something new, be the guy who does portraits of SpaceX rockets or NVIDIA GPUs or something and maybe solves some minor challenge of framing or perspective involved. Kind of a niche, and limited demand. Or you can experiment with technique in a way that violates the classical laws of beauty, perspective, framing, etc that are ‘solved’. That largely describes the last 150 years of modern and then contemporary art. It isn’t a grand conspiracy but it’s not necessarily the most flattering way of viewing the profession either.
2rafa
3d ago
Indians are MDMs in Africa just like Lebanese and Palestinians are MDMs in Central America (and parts of West Africa, too). But that doesn’t say much about overall performance, just about potential differences with majority populations in those lands. ‘In the land of the blind’…, as that line goes.
2rafa
4d ago
The German system is a hybrid of the Anglo and French systems. The husband cannot unilaterally perform a legally valid paternity test, but he can challenge his wife’s (or the child’s mother’s) refusal of one in court. The court can then order a test, and if he isn’t the father, if he wasn’t married he’s largely off the hook and if he was he has a strong legal case.
This is in contrast to the French system which makes it difficult if not impossible at every point without maternal consent. France is actually quite unique in this regard, a product of a long culture of acceptance of affairs by both sexes.
2rafa
4d ago
If you’re in upper middle class circles men getting fat payouts from wealthier ex wives is pretty common and has been for probably 20 years now. Society has largely adapted to it.
2rafa
5d ago
Sure, but it’s not a good point of comparison because the reason that behavior was less common under communism wasn’t because it was wealthier or more developed but because people were banned from leaving (or coming to do business, except in very limited cases), it wasn’t some inherent achievement of socialist prosperity.
2rafa
5d ago
In East Berlin pretty young women were known to throw themselves at any travelling West German or Western foreign men at hotel bars, just to have a small hope of escape. There was no mail order bride industry behind the Iron Curtain because gaining an exit visa to a Western country was close to impossible unless you were very well connected and therefore doing well under the system (and therefore had less of an incentive to leave).
2rafa
5d ago
I meant the Baltics but am extremely dumb and mistyped.
As for the Balkans…
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Since Yugoslavia was not in the USSR or Warsaw Pact and probably had at least half the population of the communist Balkans, I didn’t include it.
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There was a huge series of nationalist wars that delayed economic recovery by a decade, destroyed much infrastructure and dislocated a lot of people, all of which is bad for business.
That isn’t an inherent issue with shock therapy or capitalism. What happened in the Balkans was the final outcome of the Ottoman Collapse, which led to the first Balkan wars in the 1910s and which was frozen in stasis by the grand events of the 20th century until the collapse of communism caused them to resume in the 1990s.
People in much of Eastern Europe including Poland, Czechia and large parts of East Germany had higher quality of life by the mid-late 1990s than they did under communism. The Baltics saw the same effect with a large collapse in 1991-1993 and then recovery starting by 94-95, with ‘full’ recovery arguably by 1999-2001. Russia had the big crash in 98 and yet even there there was near enough ‘full’ recovery arguably by 2003 latest. And this ignores that in some ways capitalism brought improved product quality and some improvements to life even at the nadir of the economic collapse.
So at worst, after 50-80 years of communism, you’re looking at 7-10 years for a full recovery, which is extremely reasonable.
2rafa
6d ago
Irreligion, no, but nowhere near the level of devotion required by the masses in a communist society. Weekly attendance at church was at maybe 40% at the height of Franco’s rule. A lot of that was residual, even then, the product of long habits.
Fascist Germany and Italy made more serious efforts at societal rituals, mass events, regular rallies but you were still far, far less ‘immersed’ in the ideology of Nazism as a random building inspector in a large town in German in 1937 as you were immersed in the ideology of Stalinism as a building inspector in a large town in Russia was in 1949 (assuming you weren’t a member of either party, which describes most people).
Interesting. I enjoy New Vegas but think it overrelies on zaniness and a certain kind of 1990s Mad Magazine humor, maybe almost Jim Goadesque, that has had its day and had had it long before that game was written. Knights 2 is good but so compromised by the development cycle, lack of voiced protagonist etc that it’s hard to evaluate. I like it as the most cogent criticism of Star Wars that is still, officially, Star Wars, but beyond that it’s more of a showcase that games Can Say Things than a great game, in my opinion. Maybe I just hate turn based games, which I do.
I like the dialogue wheel, or rather I like what the dialogue wheel enabled, which is a fully voiced protagonist. Here is the hidden subtext of the unvoiced protagonist - you too often play yourself. Commander Shepard, Hawke, Geralt, V, they have to sound like someone else for you to be ripped out of the isekai thing. If Mask of the Betrayer had had a voiced protagonist with a good backstory it would probably be one of the best RPGs of all time but of course it couldn’t - it was too tied to the ‘choose your own adventure’ format pioneered in the 70s that I find deeply uncompelling. Give me a woman, a man, a story, an identity. The Witcher and Cyberpunk lack a wheel, but I don’t think it makes those games better.
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