It's not a circle

I have not been writing much this year, to the point that I didn't talk about the second part of Alan Wake, which came out a year ago. 

The first game, I remember it with mixed opinions. The story was spectacular, but the gameplay was not very fun, up until you reached the dark place where strange things started happening and was very interesting. But the previous sections, which comprise most of the game, felt....long. You were traversing woods at night and enemies came at you, the same enemies always, and you had to beat them to get to the next point, another wood section. 

 Also, for some reason, you tended to travel by night, when the enemies were more powerful. I kept wondering why not take a good night's sleep and continue in the morning when it was sunny and safe....in moments when you were stranded it's ok, but every time to go out at night seemed unnecessary...

Nevertheless, the story was very good. It was very smart to connect an evil entity with the power of stories, and to indicate that you could modify the story but had to beat it in a way that made sense, if you gave yourself superpowers in writing the evil entity could do the same with itself, so you had to respect the story. 

Since the first game, these people had made Control though. And I'm a big fan of Control and know these people can make great stories, so I was for sure very interested in this second part, even if I'm more interested in Control 2. So, of course I had to play this. 

And I have to say that Alan Wake 2 is so much better than the first game. Still not as fun as Control, but Control is about action, and Alan Wake 2 is about horror, and it does it quite well. Horror is based on making you fear for your safety, for what will be next after the corner, for thinking you're running out of bullets. And Alan Wake 2 manages this extremely well, much better than the first part.

First, let's talk graphics. This game is gorgeous, detailed and realistic. It's amazing how good it looks, it feels like you're playing a movie. The scenarios are very detailed and unique, and feel asphyxiating somehow, in a good way for a horror game. How light work and influences the environment is also very well done. And it's worth mentioning that they've abandoned the "only going out at night" approach and follow a much nicer and scarier method: Considering that overcast north-pacific weather can make areas quite dark, that's what you get in plenty of areas, just the inside of buildings with no power or cloudy areas or rainy areas. This gives a greyish dark look at the game that matches well with its themes.

The plot is complex: Seems like Alan Wake disappeared years ago, and there's people that also disappeared in the lake that are reappearing and getting murdered by a cult, and you need to investigate this as an FBI agent called Saga. You start playing as Saga, who's a very interesting character that seems to have something more than intuition when resolving crimes, and you start investigating the latest murder. The game includes a special mode where you write down clues and follow up logic threads to figure out what happens, which I found quite cool, especially because later on there's threads that you might not find or complete fully, depending on your findings. 

Soon enough things turn to worse as Alan Wake's pages appear and indicate future attacks by shadow creatures, which keep happening as described. Without spoiling much, eventually you also play as Alan Wake, but it takes a while to get there, and then you can switch between these two characters as you advance their plots in parallel. 

In the middle there's also the FBC involved, and Ahti, the Janitor from Control plus other characters from previous games, connecting everything together.

When you play as Saga you find possessed shadow people that you need to light to burn their protection and then shoot, while if you play as Wake there's plenty of shadows around, some are harmless but some of them attack you and need to flash with light to reveal as monsters to attack back. Each character has slightly different weapons and abilities (instead of investigating cases, Wake can do fixed reality alterations of scenes and places), but the gameplay is basically the same. Saga needs to deal with occasional boss fights while Wake just has lots and lots of enemies depending on the area. 

There's a bit of free-roaming aspect in the game, where you can revisit areas and affect their status (the water level is important in this game, since the dark presence lives in the water), but if you're progressing the plot you don't need to do that, this is just for the bonuses and hidden items and logs (and there's plenty of those). 

The plot is amazing, although I called several of its twists in advance, but that's just a well-made story with foreshadowing, not a fault of the plot. It feels quite epic and deep, with scary, weird and even funny moments all thorough the game. The use of real-video actors mixed with everything else makes it a very cinematic experience, but very artistic. There's even a short movie you can watch completely at a certain point, which is not required at all for the game and you can skip and miss, but it's cool that they recorded everything in case you stay to watch it. The developers are Finnish and this is an aspect heavily referenced and shown in the game, which I think it's a nice touch.

The game is not long, as with most horror games, but still may take 15-20 hours to finish. It's quite unforgiving, to the point that I ended up reducing the difficulty in the last part of the game to avoid repeating the same scene time and time again. 

The only flaw I found in the game is that, after all of it, it feels the progress we've made in Alan Wake's global story is...not much. There's progress yes, but there's a lot of unsolved things left for a third part, or maybe a second part of Control, not sure. But this ties well with the internal world, since in the dark place affected areas you tend to have to go through the same place three times before being able to finish them for real....

Recently there was 2 DLCs added to the game. The first one is a lot of fun, with three independent stories a la "Twilight Zone", with a very light-hearted tone and lots of humour, with the last story being genre-bending about what's a game and what you do in it. The second DLC is more serious, following one of the main characters, a FBC agent before she appeared in the main game. The tone is also quite sarcastic too, poking fun at AI and content-generation farms and declaring them evil, plus introducing really really scary areas and concepts, making it a very scary but nice addition to the game. 

Remedy (the developers) are really doing great games, interconnecting everything and creating a very interesting world, and I'm sure to try and buy whatever they produce next.

When everything is done right

At university, between the geeky atmosphere of D&D comics, computers, videogames and people that loves stories, I was told about Baldur's Gate, and was give Baldur's Gate 2 to try. Later on I also played Baldur's Gate, and a bit of Neverwinter Nights 2.

I didn't finish any of them. While they were indeed very nice games, I found them hard and overwhelming, with too many people coming at you and asking you to do quests. The characters, though seemed quite nice, and the atmosphere and style of play was certainly fun. It seems to me it took too long for me to advance much and found the good/evil alignment present in the game a tad simplistic and somehow didn't quite catch me enough to finish them. It's hard to describe, they were nice games but also not so easy to play them, somehow? 

One factor for sure was the combat, real-time based with the option to pause. Combat tended to get very chaotic very fast, having to just pause constantly or just letting chaos ensure. There were also a lot of options and it wasn't very clear what builds were good or not, in my opinion. Anyway, the point is that I played them a bit, thought they were cool but not good enough to finish, somehow. 

So, years and years later, the announcement of Baldur's Gate 3 didn't impress me at first. However, after the first 2 Baldur's Gate games I did play other rpgs with similar style, like Pillars of Eternity. I really loved Pillars of Eternity, seemed to me that game did the same as BG and BG2 but did it correctly, and one of the best points of that game was the reputation system, which I haven't seen it done as well anywhere else. Anyway PoE pre-conditioned me to being more accepting of the style, so when there were more news about BG3 coming out I did check it a bit. And what I saw impressed me.

First, the studio: Larian Studios is an independent studio, they make their own games the way they want them with no interference from a bigger publisher or mother company, like it's commonplace at the moment. So, they have a certain vision and can stick to it. They had experience in other RPGs, turn-based, and everyone said they were really good too, although I had not played them. They are European-based, there's even an office in Barcelona, they seem to treat their employees well and try to respect people. In a year where big companies have fired thousands just so they can claim profits to their shareholders, the approach Larian seems to be having is certainly refreshing.

Then, the process: They've been developing the game for years, and there has been a public beta going on where the input of players has been taken into account as the game progressed. They've been re-releasing better and better versions until they were satisfied with the result and then released the game, focusing on the devices that worked and not stressing about making one single global release or anything like that.

Then the acting: They've gotten really really good actors, charismatic, really good at their job,and they've dedicated a lot of resources in recording lines and lines and acting them out, fleshing out the characters with the help of the actors and the team, and really taking care of getting the right expressions and voices at each moment.

Regarding the gameplay, instead of real-time combat, since this is D&D roleplaying, the devs had done it in a turn-based system. That was reassuring, and it made sense, a lot of powers and skills are meant for turns, converting them to real-time was more complex than just leaving them as they were. With turn-based you can calmly plan what you're doing, check the orders, and create strategies for each combat and try different things.

The graphics look very vey good, especially considering the massive areas the game has, and the character design and details are very well thought. Maybe there's games with better graphics, but with so many characters and combinations it's perfectly fine if the game still looks like a game, although the character's expressions are very detailed and communicate their feelings very well. 

Finally, the story and the quests: It seems they polished these to absurd amounts. The moment I saw some videos about the game, I saw the liberty they were given to the player. You could use your skills talking with people or interacting with the world, you could jump, you could fly, you cold throw things, you could do quests in a thousand of ways, and the game let you try them and also was prepared for it. 

So, I had to get it. And I did. And it's one of the best games ever. All the things I've mentioned come together into such a work of art, of love, of inspiration, where people did their best and offered their best that you can feel it while playing. I mean, it's not perfect 100%, there's a few things that have issues or could be improved, and in then end it's D&D, with its shortcomings of being very battle-focused, but anyway, this game is almost perfect, it's a glorious example of what to do when doing games. 

The game also offers cross-platform and multiplayer. The cross-platform is especially impressive, you can save your game in the cloud and then play form your pc, ps5 o xbox, as long as you have the game in each one of these systems. This means buying the game twice, but I confess I did just that, I was so impressed by them after playing a bit on my pc first that I thought they deserved it, and I've played in my pc and my ps5 at different moments. 

What is impressive is the sheer amount of combinations that are allowed, pre-thought and codified inside the game itself, with dialogue included to address them all. It needs to be experienced, but there's one case I saw which I will explain:

In the first act of the game, you find two camps, a druid camp with refugees inside and a goblin camp that is attacking the refugees and druids. Plot-wise, it makes sense to fight the goblins, since they're working for the big bads of the game, but you're given liberty about how to act. The druids have one good leader missing and the second-in-command is an asshole, that wants to basically kill the refugees living with them and perform a magic ritual that will isolate the druid camp from the rest of the world, to protect themselves from the goblins. 

So, my first though is that I wanted to save the refugees, and maybe some druids, but wanted to kill the second-in-command. But most games are binary, so its either one camp or the other, and the first times I played I just killed the goblins, where you get a lot of freedom since you can infiltrate them first and talk with several characters there and get info and do quests as well. Anyway, after the first time I revisited, and tried to side with the goblins up to a point where I was supposed to betray the refugees and it was too evil for my taste, so I ended up killing the goblins again anyway. So I played a third time. And the third time I discovered an option where you propose to the refugees to kill the bad druid. And you do, but then I was found out, and refugees and druids started to kill each other in a massive fight. And then the goblins came and congratulated me for this, but I didn't do it, it was accidental! But that the option that I really wanted was there was quite refreshing, and that this scenario was not talked in any of the guides I was checking to see options speaks of the level of detail this game has, most people may not even know this is a possibility, especially for "evil" play-throughs in which you don't want to slaughter the camp straight away.

Things just get more complex from there, with entire plot points being different depending on what you did and what characters survived, like the fact that one evil character that I just killed at first can be a companion later on depending on these same actions. 

In general the "Good" options are more polished, with less bugs, I guess because more people were selecting them and reporting issues, but the "Bad" options are still quite complex and different and there's just so many paths you can follow to your objective...

The game is actually pretty hard. In normal difficulty, if you just barge into fights unprepared, unequipped and don't use the right skills, you will die and die fast. You need to think carefully and plan and anticipate, and sometimes to have a bit of luck too. Some endgame fights are especially challenging and unfair, especial mentions to the Shar practitioners fight (like, a 20 against 4 pileup) and the Raphael fight (this one is purely optional, being the hardest fight in the game, but the music and the epicness of it omg, it's a must to experience it....)

Another good point of the game is that it just trashes the "Good"/"Bad" system and instead you have more or less affinity with your companions. Being bad once does not prevent you from doing good later, and in general you're just tied to your stats, but you're free to investigate options and do things anyway you want. It's also worth mentioning that thanks to the writing and the acting, the characters feel alive an deep, they do feel like your companions and you want to help them and progress the plot with them. Especial mention to the main actors, that have seen a lot of well-deserved success thanks to BG3 and all the interactions they're having with fans, their streaming of playing with themselves and in general being great people.

Finally, what they did with the support deserves another comment: They just keep improving the game and releasing new content. I mean, at a certain point maybe it's too much, but they added an epilogue, they improved several key functionalities that players complained about, they fixed bugs, changed texts, clarified things and in general just kept adding to the game, even when everyone had already bought the game.  

It's no surprise they've won "Game of the year" in every contest they've participated, it's that good, yes.

And as a last note, this is what happens when everything is done right, and when people make games thinking about the players, about what they would like to play themselves, about having fun, and about being fair and good and treating their employees fairly.

If more companies were doing things like this, the game industry would be much better...