Tobold's Blog

Soap opera

2026-07-09T18:35:40.363+02:00

I am now 7 hours into Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, in the middle of chapter 3. So how does it play? Well, it doesn't. I don't have the feeling that I did much playing in those 7 hours. I mostly watched cut-scenes. I was occasionally able to move freely and do some random trash mob fights, and gather random loot on the street. But up to now there was only a single small "dungeon" that remotely resembled a role-playing game activity. The rest of the "game" consisted of walking to the next point marked on the map and watching the next cut-scene. Sometimes there was no walking, just a sequence of several cut-scenes.

I wondered when the game would open up, and found out that it would do so somewhat around the 15 hour mark, in chapter 5, twice what I played up to now. I'm not sure if I'm not getting too bored of this "game" before. Right now, the best I can describe it, is that it is a soap opera. Things happen continuously to the main character, but the sequence of events doesn't form anything like a coherent story. Funnily enough, the Synopsis section of the Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth page on Wikipedia starts with an editors warning of "This section may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. When this tag was added, its readable prose size was 1,518 words.". That pretty much sums the game up, even a plot summary of the game is a wall of text.

There is a pretty blatant absence of player agency. Everything that happened to the main character up to now just happened in a scripted cut-scene. None of it had anything to do with any decisions I was allowed to take, not that there were many. I can decide what moves to do in combat, but there is no difficulty setting, and the one default difficulty is pretty trivial. I do kind of like the turn-based combat system in which characters move slightly around between turns, and you can modify your attacks with your location; for example you move next to a bike, and then your standard attack is transformed into grabbing that bike and hitting the enemy with it, or if you manage to line them up, you can hit one enemy into another for extra damage to both. There are also some mini-games, although I haven't reached the "major" mini-games yet.

So all I can do right now is watch what happens to the main character, Ichiban Kasuga. It doesn't help that he is kind of a dumbass. Nice guy, strong sense of honor, but not very bright. Spent 20 years of his life in prison for a crime he didn't do, and still gets tricked and scammed several times per chapter in the story. Not the kind of hero I would identify with. In fact, he feels a lot more like a victim than a hero. This might be just me being old-fashioned, and preferring old-style heroes to the new-fangled "cult of the victim". But there is also some sort of dissonance when in the gameplay you win every fight, and then in the cut-scenes you always lose out.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Tutorial

2026-07-08T11:45:08.865+02:00

I decided on which game to play next, and it is Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. That is the 8th game in the Yakuza series of games, but I haven't played any of the previous ones. Mostly because the previous games were beat 'em up action adventures, and this latest game is a turn-based roleplaying game, which is much more the kind of game I like.

Starting this right after Pillars of Eternity, I couldn't help but notice a major difference in starting a Japanese CRPG compared to a western CRPG: Many western CRPGs start with character creation, and you need to make a lot of choices before even knowing anything about the game. In Pillars of Eternity I could play character classes like cipher or chanter, having no idea what those classes do. I also had to distribute stat points, and was supposed to read and understand a lot of small print to find out things like that the "Might" stat was necessary even for wizards to increase spell damage. In Baldur's Gate 3 that was less of a problem for me, but only because they used D&D 5th edition, a system I am very familiar with. If you never played D&D, good luck guessing in advance what the difference between a wizard, a sorcerer, and a warlock are. There have been a number of western CRPGs in which I started the game, played for a few hours, and then started the game over from zero to make different choices during character creation.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth doesn't have that problem. There is no character creation, you simply start by playing Ichiban Kasuga, the main character, and you have no choice of character class or stat distribution. All that comes much later, where you can change jobs, but at the start you just play him as a generic level 1 "hero". At the start of the game, you get a *lot* of cut scenes explaining the situation, your character, and his motivation, and the gameplay elements like combat are gradually introduced and explained in much detail. If anything, the problem at the start of this game, and many other Japanese CRPGs, is that it takes several hours of handholding tutorial before you are given the freedom to actually really take any decisions.

I have always felt that the optimum would be somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. Some gameplay to explain how things like combat work, and only then having to choose things like character class and stat distribution. But that sort of tutorial shouldn't take hours and hours either. I read that the tutorial of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is about 5 hours, which is somewhat balanced by the game taking 80 hours overall. But I still think that this is a bit much of a tutorial; I certainly wouldn't want to restart such a game and have to go through 5 hours of handholding with little freedom again.

Too much game, don't want sequel

2026-07-07T06:30:00.000+02:00

How long is a game? As it is frequently possible to play any given game faster or slower, there really isn't a simple answer to this. There are sites like HowLongToBeat, which can give you an average number of hours which people took to play just the main story, the main story plus some side quests, or everything. Pillars of Eternity, which I am currently playing, apparently has about 36 hours of main story, and takes 64 hours if you add a usual amount of side content. I just finished my run in 60 hours.

By chance I stumbled upon information telling me that if I finish Pillars of Eternity, I can use the final save game to load into Pillars of Eternity 2, and the sequel would remember my major story decisions of the first game. Nice idea, but my instinctive reaction to that information was negative: I feel absolutely no desire to play Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire anytime soon.

Come to think of it, a game doesn't have one length for me, but two: The HowLongToBeat length it takes to reach the official end, and the number of hours it takes for me to get bored with the gameplay. In Pillars of Eternity, I reached the "I'm bored now" end hours before I reached the "game over" screen. And thus I really don't want to play the sequel, which, while not being exactly the same, would still have very similar gameplay. That doesn't make Pillars of Eternity a bad game. I did have 50 hours of fun before getting bored. I just didn't reach the official game end in those 50 hours. I decided to rush the last 10 hours, to see the end of the story, but the gameplay for that wasn't much fun to me anymore.

The boredom counter kind of resets over time. Thus if I play a current game, even if I had gotten bored with it at the end, by the time a sequel comes out years later, I might well be willing to play that. Playing an older game like Pillars of Eternity means the sequel is already available, and I could play it right away, but my boredom counter hasn't reset yet. In this particular case, curiously the turn-based mode of Pillars of Eternity has been added years after the turn-based mode of Pillars of Eternity 2, and is considered better. So I am even less tempted to play the sequel, unless they rework the turn-based mode for that one.

Note that getting bored before the end isn't unique to videogames. I did not buy Frosthaven, the sequel of the highly successful Gloomhaven board game, because Gloomhaven was already too long for me. We played like 20 scenarios of Gloomhaven, out of 95 existing scenarios, or around 65 for a full playthrough, and decided that we had enough of that game.

I'm still unsure what I will play next. But it probably won't be any 2D with pre-rendered maps CRPG. So it isn't just boredom with any specific game or series of games, but after X hours playing one genre of game I am ready to play something completely different, or at least different enough.

I don't want to resync

2026-07-06T06:30:00.000+02:00

In November 2014, I profited from a Steam sale and bought Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, Digital Standard Edition for 14.99 EUR. I played the game for 46 hours, reaching the end, and I liked it more than any other Assassin's Creed games. While the graphics of 2013 do look a bit dated in 2026, I'm pretty sure that the game is still totally playable as it is. Which is why I am a bit puzzled why Ubisoft thinks that I would like to pay 59.99 EUR for Assassin's Creed: Black Flag - Resynced, a "faithfully enhanced remake" of the original game with only a minor part of new content.

Now for somebody who never played the original game, the best Assassin's Creed game with better graphics and minor gameplay improvements could well be worth $60. But having already paid a much reduced price for the original, and neither Steam nor Ubisoft giving me any rebate for already owning the original, paying full price for the prettier version doesn't seem like a good deal to me. I might have been willing to pay $10 or $20 to upgrade my existing game to 2026 graphics, but certainly not $60.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe "Civilization VI Resynced" would have been a bigger success for Firaxis than Civilization VII was. I didn't buy any of the Final Fantasy VII remakes, because those are too different from the original game; I might have been more likely to buy a more faithful remake with mostly just the graphics improved and a few quality of life improvements, but the same story and game mechanics as the original.

But somehow Assassin's Creed: Black Flag - Resynced appears like the ultimate admission of failure to me. Ubisoft clearly was unable to make a new pirate game people liked with Skull & Bones, and so they are trying to sell me the one good pirate game they did make for full price again. It is as if game companies who tried to milk popular franchises by releasing endless streams of sequels have now reached the limits of that model, with the new sequels being much less popular than the original games that started the series. And they decided that "more nostalgia, less innovation" was the way out of that dilemma. It is like saying that they lost the knowledge of how to make new good games, and cloning an old game is the only way they know how to try to reproduce the secret sauce.

Ultra-powerful labor unions

2026-07-05T12:39:39.851+02:00

Imagine you are an employer, and all your employees and everybody else who can do their jobs are organized in a few ultra-powerful labor unions. The day the union decides that they want twice the money for their work, you are powerless, and only have the choice of either shutting down your business or paying whatever the labor unions demand. That is a pretty nightmarish scenario for most entrepreneurs, and especially in the USA, history has gone exactly the other way, with the power of unions much diminished over the past decades. No US company faces any risk that their human employees could successfully demand twice their current salaries and get away with it.

But what if the workers aren't human, and the name of those ultra-powerful labor unions are "OpenAI" and "Anthropic"? If you as an entrepreneur fired most of your human employees and have the majority of the work in your company done by AI, how much power do you have against the few companies that can provide that AI? If these companies raise token prices, and thus your labor cost, what can you do?

The push of employers towards AI, grading human employees by how much AI tokens they use, has led to those employees complying with that company policy and engaging in so-called tokenmaxxing. In many companies the cost for AI tokens has gone through the roof, with some companies blowing their annual budget in the first 4 months of 2026. This has resulted in more and more companies having to review the costs and benefits of AI labor versus human labor. And strangely, human labor being a decentralized market in which employers have more power than employees, could turn out to become the decisive advantage of human labor.

There are only a handful of AI companies that have models powerful enough to replace human employees. And these AI companies all make enormous investments into data centers, while currently selling their services at a loss. The old tech playbook of gaining market share by selling at a loss, and then raising prices when a monopolistic situation is reached, is pretty obvious. And that is a huge risk for the potential customers. Employers spent decades preventing unions to control a large percentage of their human labor, so now voluntarily handing over control of a large percentage of your (AI) labor force to a single organization sounds rather counter-productive. For a boss, human employees not only have the advantage that you can shout at them when things go wrong, but also that the power dynamics of job contracts are a lot more in the bosses favor.

Pillars of Eternity - Second Impression

2026-07-04T14:28:43.352+02:00

I am approximately halfway through Pillars of Eternity, having finished all quests in Defiance Bay and Dyrford, and now entering Clîaban Rilag. And I have to say that my motivation is waning. To explain that, I need to talk a bit about what a roleplaying game actually is, especially a computer roleplaying game.

All roleplaying games have at least a dual nature. It helps to know that the company that invented the first one, Dungeons & Dragons was TSR, which stands for Tactical Studies Rules. It was a company making wargames, and D&D at its core is a squad-based fantasy wargame. Tactical combat is an important part of nearly all roleplaying games, and even more so in the computer games. The other layer of RPGs is the story layer. What is that group of fantasy heroes fighting for or against? There frequently is an archvillain or some other greater evil, and in high fantasy settings the heroes might well end up saving the world, or at least a part of it. Now pen & paper RPGs usually just stick to those two parts, but in CRPGs there is quite often also a bit of a management part to it. The group of heroes has resources, for example spells, which deplete over time and recover by resting, and you need to manage these resources. You also need to manage equipment and inventory.

Pillars of Eternity has a big world-saving kind of story, about a very peculiar type of world. In this world, reincarnation is real, and magic / technology can be used to meddle with the souls that are transferred during reincarnation. The story deals with various aspects of that, from the main characters ability to remember his previous incarnations and speak with errant souls, to the major story about what gods are in such a world of reincarnating souls. While the writing is often quite good, it has to be said that the story is very complex, very long, and somewhat esoteric. It doesn't have the "tadpole in your eye" immediate directness and urgency of Baldur's Gate 3. Much of the story of Pillars of Eternity is only presented by text without voice acting, and that involves a lot of reading. In the end you don't really know whether you are chasing the archvillain because of what he did to the world, or just because you want to get rid of your status as a "watcher", as that is driving you crazy.

The walls of text problem of Pillars of Eternity is made worse by the game having been financed by crowdfunding. This allowed backers who paid more money than others to add their own text to the game, in the form of NPCs with their own backstories, or in the form of epitaphs on graves. You quickly learn that clicking on an NPC with a gold nameplate and reading his backstory is just a waste of time, as that story was written by a backer, and doesn't really have anything to do with the story of the game. Kickstarter stretch goals also added other unnecessary ballast, like an "endless dungeon" to crawl through for no reason, or a half-baked system in which you manage a stronghold, much worse than in Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

I am playing Pillars of Eternity now, because the game this year added a turn-based mode. For me, the tactical combat is more fun in turn-based mode, as I find real-time with pause frequently confusing. Having said that, I reached the point where the tactical combat isn't that much fun anymore. To me it seems there are some rather fundamental balance problems in the system. Due to enemies damage reduction being deducted from any damage you do, weapons that deal lots of damage slowly to me appear much more powerful than weapons dealing smaller packets of damage more frequently. And because the world of Pillars of Eternity has firearms, and firearms are slow and deal lots of damage, all of my group is now equipped with firearms or heavy crossbows. While against a large group of enemies some spells like fireball are very useful, against a single enemy my mage is dealing more damage with a pistol than with a spell. And the spell is a resource that depletes, while the pistol has unlimited ammo and shots.

Another reason that the game has become a bit too easy for me is the structure of many computer roleplaying games that have a main quest and optional sidequests. The dungeon I am in is apparently meant for level 7, but my group is level 9, because I did every single available sidequest. And that is without the DLC, of which is part is designed to be played at level 5+, and which results in your group being even more overleveled for the latter part of the main story. But the sidequests to me actually were more fun that the main story, as these smaller stories are easier to understand, and often deal with interesting moral dilemmas. They are more relatable than the main story about souls and reincarnation, because the moral dilemmas are of a kind that could also occur in our world, not just in a world with a specific way souls work. Being somewhat completionist with the sidequests and exploration also led to the management part of the game having become trivial, as Pillars of Eternity allows you to take all loot everywhere into a stash with unlimited capacity, and sell it from there later. I have far more gold, gear, scrolls, potions, and materials for crafting than I will ever need.

I think I am going to somewhat rush the rest of the game, and if that doesn't work, I'll stop playing before reaching the end. I can't remember a single computer roleplaying game in which I found the grand finale big boss fight satisfying. Some games do better than others by making the end feel better from the story aspect, but the final tactical combat is almost always somewhat tedious. Which isn't surprising, as even in pen & paper Dungeons & Dragons I find character progression at lower levels a lot more interesting than the high-level stuff.

Games vs. Movies

2026-07-03T11:50:11.611+02:00

In the Steam best-selling games of the week, this week there is a game called Meccha Chameleon. It is a so-called "friendslop" game, of hide and seek. That is to say that it is cheaply produced, but fun to play with friends. Cheaply produced as in two Japanese indie developers made it in two months. Fun to play as in going viral on social media and selling over 10 million copies. That is a problem for large game companies. There are a lot of triple A games out there that cost hundred of millions of dollars to make and that didn't sell 10 million copies. And even if Meccha Chameleon costs only $6, and the triple A game costs $60, or $70, or $80, the return on investment is obviously better for the indie game. And the people currently happily playing Meccha Chameleon are somewhat less likely to buy a triple A game this month; not that they don't have money left after paying $6, but because disposable time is also limited, and an indie game can eat up as many hours as a big game.

Why do big game companies make triple A games for hundreds of millions of dollars? It seems to me that the model for this was the movie industry. When I was young, cinemas still showed a mix of large blockbuster movies and smaller production, even B movies. But the economies of scale of movies made it so that the huge blockbuster movies were more profitable than the cheap movies. These days, indie movies are something only a few specialized cinemas in large cities might still show. The general movie market only has films that cost hundred of millions of dollars, and these crushed the smaller competition.

Games have very different economies of scale, especially when distributed digitally. The moment a game arrives on the Steam platform, there is nothing to prevent it from being sold millions of times at no additional cost to the developer. But there is also nothing to prevent it from being a total flop and selling just a few thousand copies. It then becomes a consideration of risk vs. reward: The two Japanese developers only risked two months of work, and if their game hadn't sold much, it would not have been a big loss for them, and maybe a fun experience. They got lucky and made millions, and after the share that Steam takes, they only need to split the money between the two of them. In comparison, 6,000 people are working on GTA 6. Now GTA 6 is extremely unlikely to flop, and will probably also sell millions. But its budget is over $1 billion, and it can't possibly reach the same return on investment as Meccha Chameleon. It can get its production cost back, and make a nice profit for the game company and its shareholders. It can't sell ten times more or hundred times more than expected, because the expectation is already selling 40 million copies, and that is approaching market saturation.

Of course any videogame of any size and budget can be a failure. The trouble with triple A games is that they aren't guaranteed to make their development money back, even if they just sell an average number of copies. That is especially bad for live service games, which are expected to not only sell well, but produce much additional revenue over the further lifetime of the game. The larger the company and the bigger the budget, the more people lose their jobs when the game just gets a lukewarm reception. Smaller studios and indie developers can more easily recover after a failure. The difference between the games industry and the movie industry is that there doesn't seem to be much correlation between the budget of a game and the probability of it being a commercial success. You can spend a hundred million dollars on making a game and sell less well than Meccha Chameleon. That is a pretty bad business proposition.

Garbage in, garbage out

2026-07-02T10:10:10.366+02:00

If you are reading this, I do hope that you feel that you get some sort of value from my writing, whether that be in the form of entertainment or insight. But the true value of the total content of my blog is limited: Most of it is about low-value activities like games, and while I certainly write down some facts, there is a lot of opinion here, and that pretty certainly has a lot of bias in one way or another. As AI scrapers are reading pretty much everything available on the internet, I am pretty sure that my writing is part of the immense mountain of data that did feed various AI models.

People like Elon Musk and Sam Altman for years have been promising that AI would reach "PhD level" intelligence. Now I happen to have a PhD degree. Over the course of my life, I have been producing piles of "PhD level" research work, starting from my actual PhD thesis and covering 30 years of work as a researcher in industry. But while my biased opinions about World of Warcraft have been scraped by AI and are now part of the models, my "PhD level" work isn't in those models. My PhD thesis is not available in electronic form anywhere, it only exists in paper form. My industry research is either long lost, or locked away in the computer systems of my employer, and not accessible to the public or AI scrapers. I have a number of scientific publications that are available, and my 32 patents are also public, but these are small windows into my scientific work. The bulk of my scientific work is invisible, proprietary to my employer, and not being shared. While in theory a patent protects an invention in exchange for sharing that invention, in practice there is an internal process that makes sure that the protection is maximized, and the sharing is minimized. Having done applied industrial research, I did do research studies that made my company millions in profit, but none of that will ever make it into an AI model.

I assume that this is the same for quite a lot of people. Many of us produce some written output both in our private lives, e.g. on social media, and our professional lives. But our professional output is legally owned by our employer, and guarded as proprietary and secret information. The part of as any AI model can possibly know is just what we produce publicly, in a private capacity. You can find a video on YouTube on how to change a spark plug, but not the totality of the professional knowledge of a car mechanic. And the useful information on social media is heavily diluted; already for a human it is hard to separate the useful stuff from the chaff, but an AI model just takes everything, and has notorious difficulties in separating facts from beliefs or jokes. It takes just one joking Reddit post telling you where you can stick that spark plug before the AI might end up repeating that as medical advice.

Long before ChatGPT was released, we already knew that a lot of the stuff you read on the internet is garbage. In the early days of LLM models, humans moderated the input of those models, feeding it for example digitally available books rather than unmoderated forum discussions. But with growth came the need for more and more data, and the AI companies became less and less fussy about the quality of the data being fed to the models, because they needed so much of it. If you grab terabytes of data from the internet, very little of it will be "PhD level" intelligent, and very much will be garbage. Garbage in, garbage out, is one of the oldest truths in computing.

A LLM model could probably replace me as a blogger. I have been feeding the models enough data to be able for them to simulate that part of my activity. But as they have extremely little data on my professional work, I don't see how a LLM model could do my job as a researcher. Even if there was actually some "intelligence" in artificial intelligence and those "reasoning" functions could actually reason, the models simply don't have the professional data that would allow them to do professional jobs. And no company would ever open up their proprietary company data to a public AI model. It is not about the quantity of the data, but about the quality. If I get stuck in a game, I totally trust AI to tell me how to proceed, because that sort of data is readily available. I wouldn't trust AI to engineer anything or to research anything.

Ditching your friends

2026-07-01T11:05:11.559+02:00

In Pillars of Eternity, the game I am currently playing, there are 8 companions in the base game, plus another 3 in the DLC. However, there are only five slots for companions in your party. Baldur's Gate 3 has a similar problem, with 10 companions in the game, and only 3 slots in the party besides your main character. There is some logic to that in the class-based system these games use: If you choose for example a wizard as your main character, you might not want a wizard companion. But besides those class considerations, each companion also comes with his own story and personal quests.

I have to say that I dislike swapping companions in and out of my party repeatedly. Of course, with some foreknowledge it is possible to always choose the optimal party configuration for every hard battle. But I am more likely to swap companions because I'm going somewhere which relates to a personal quest of that companion. You will want to have Lae'zel with you when dealing with the Githyanki, because otherwise you are missing out on the specific content of that interaction, and so forth.

But from a pen & paper roleplaying point of view that companion-swapping doesn't make much sense. Characters in a tabletop RPG would only change if either a new player joins the group, or a player for some reason switches to a new character. I over 40 years of D&D I never had a player switching back to a previously played and discarded character. A new player with a new character would also simply just add to the group, not necessarily replace a previous player with a previous character. But games like BG3 or Pillars of Eternity have hard caps on the number of characters in a group, so you can't just take an extra with you for the occasion.

I tend to get used to the characters I am playing with, and interested in their stories. Thus I am reluctant to bench them, just to get to know a new character and get involved in his story. It feels like ditching a friend. So maybe a better way would be if a game just had as many companions as there are free slots in the group, but those companions could adapt their class to result in a balanced group around the main character class choice, while keeping their personal stories constant.

Climate change, practically speaking

2026-06-27T13:48:06.238+02:00

I live in Belgium. Historically, the average summer temperature in Belgium is between 18°C and 25°C. Belgium also has on average between 180 and 200 rainy days per year. But then there is climate change, and averages don't help much if meteorological conditions are extreme. Right now, much of western Europe, including Belgium, is suffering from a heat wave. As I write this, it is 36°C outside and rising. It was 25°C in the middle of the night, so airing during the night didn't help much.

In general, I am well equipped against temperature extremes, as my house is built do "quasi zero energy" standards, with 36 cm thick walls in three layers and triple glazing on the windows. But after several days with daily temperatures in the mid-30s Celsius (up to 100°F), and not much cooling during the night, the rooms in my house are around 27°C (80°F) and it's getting uncomfortable.

The obvious solution, as all my American readers will immediately say, is air conditioning. A few years ago, when heat waves went from being very rare to occurring occasionally, I bought a good quality mobile air conditioning unit. It is a monoblock unit on wheels with 12,000 BTU of cooling power. At the start of the current heat wave it still managed to cool down our bedroom to 20°C before we went to bed. Enough to turn it off, fall asleep, and not get too hot by the end of the night. Right now that air conditioner is struggling. The problem is that you need to open the window to put the vent hose outside; and as much as I'm trying to seal the window around that hose, at 36°C outside I can't get the inside much cooler than 24°C. Which is an improvement to the 27°C before, but not a huge one. And if I cool my bedroom to 24°C, it gets too warm to sleep during the course of the night.

So I am considering adopting American habits and installing a fixed split air conditioner. Which might be expensive and difficult due to those thick insulated walls. In any case, while my monoblock air conditioner cost several hundred bucks, a fixed unit will be several thousand bucks with installation. On the positive side, a fixed unit with the vent going through the wall means that I wouldn't have to open the window to run the air conditioning, and I could achieve a higher difference between inside and outside temperature. In a situation where 40°C becomes possible in Belgium (the current heat record is 39.9°C) and heat waves are becoming more frequent, more intense, and longer, this investment might become necessary.

An Eternity later

2026-06-22T09:39:55.454+02:00

Once upon a time, around the turn of the millenium, the state of the art of computer role-playing games was the infinity engine: 2D, with sprites on a pre-rendered map that looked isometric, but didn't really have a third dimension. Famous CRPGs like Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale 1 & 2 used that engine. Then 3D CRPGs turned up, and the popularity of the 2D pre-rendered maps declined. Until Obsidian Entertainment launched a Kickstarter project that was backed by 74,000 people to the tune of $4 million to bring out Pillars of Eternity, released in 2015.

I played Pillars of Eternity in 2015. But only for 16 hours, never even finishing Act I. In 2015 I was still playing World of Warcraft, and we all know how time-consuming that can be. But as I wrote in my previous post, I have been watching a streamer playing Baldur's Gate 1, and that revived my interest in games that use this sort of graphics engine. Now I have two problems with games like Baldur's Gate 1: Real-time combat with pause isn't really my favorite, and the pre-rendered rectangular maps are often too large; that is to say, the game doesn't really have enough content for the size of the map, and you end up spending hours walking all over the map just to uncover the fog of war. Now Pillars of Eternity, having been released 17 years after Baldur's Gate, is already a lot more modern, didn't fall for the same trap, and made maps somewhat smaller than BG1. And then Obsidian Entertainment in a somewhat surprising move added turn-based mode to Pillars of Eternity this year in April.

So I decided to give Pillars of Eternity another try. To my surprise my save game from 2015 was still there due to the power of Steam cloud saves. But I prefered to start afresh. In my 2015 game I had played a rogue as my main character, for the simple reason that this was the character class most notably missing from the early companions you can pick up. In my 2026 run I went with a priest as main character because I like playing priests, and they are rather strong in Pillars of Eternity. And then I used previous knowledge as soon as I reached the first village to hire a rogue hireling to fill that lockpicking / trap disarming gap; and I skipped ahead a few zones to collect the first 4 companions: Edér the warrior, Aloth the mage, Durance the priest, and Kana the chanter. This allowed me to do the quests and the first dungeon of the starting village with a full group, which worked very well.

I'm only 8 hours into this second run. Apparently doing the main story plus side quests without the DLCs takes up to 70 hours. I don't know if I'll make it to the end game screen this time, but I'll give it a try. And then there is a still unplayed Pillars of Eternity 2 in my Steam library, so I'm unlikely to run out of 2D pre-rendered isometric map games anytime soon.

Playing older games

2026-06-19T17:40:09.507+02:00

I am watching a rather ambitious series on Youtube where a streamer is playing *all* Baldur‘s Gate roleplaying games in order. He is still at BG1, but due to the enhanced edition of 2012, this rather old game is still very playable. Personally I am not tempted: I played BG1 decades ago, and I still don‘t like the flow of the game; the player spends a crazy amount of time walking over large zone maps to uncover the fog of war, and much of the time you find either nothing or just trivial stuff like a few low level monsters to kill.

As the game predates Steam, I have absolutely no clue how many hours I played of BG1. But I did play it through, and I did play BG2 and BG3. Baldur‘s Gate 3 I played for 340 hours, and in my opinion, it is the best game of the series. I‘ll play more BG3 before I‘d come back to BG1 or 2. But the Baldur‘s Gate series is special insofar as there is this huge gap of nearly a quarter of a century between 2 and 3. Even with the enhanced editions, the technological advantage of BG3 over the previous games is huge, and the design philosophy of computer roleplaying games has also evolved in that timeframe.

Technological advancement of PC games has slowed down. A game of 2026 isn‘t necessarily much more advanced than a game from a few years ago. And game series other than Baldur‘s Gate with more sequels than 3 and shorter time between sequels have a bit of a problem: The latest sequel isn‘t necessarily considered by everybody as the best in the series. As a consequence for example right now there are more people playing Civilization 6 than Civilization 7, and more people playing Europa Universalis IV than EU5.

If you look at the currently most played games on Steam, a lot of the games in the top 50 are older games. Newer games of the same series or at least the same genre exist, but players prefer the older games. The top 3 games are Counter-Strike 2, PUBG:Battlegrounds, and Dota 2. And people busy playing older games simply often don‘t have enough time to also play all the latest games, and so they don‘t buy them.

On the one side one can argue that making every game better than all previous games is an impossible task. On the other side we all know lots of examples where a new game feels like a beta test, being full of bugs and/or balance issues. I stopped playing EU5 because every patch is still messing very much with the game systems and that often has unforeseen consequences. I can see how other people would prefer a stable and established EU4 to this mess.

The „live service“ genre of games is most affected by this, and it is rare that a new live service game can gather critical mass and survive, while people are still happily playing much older games. But while things are less visible for single-player games, Steam player counts do at least suggest that sales of newer games must be down, seeing how many people are busy playing older games of the same genre. And game companies increasingly release remakes and remasters of older games, to make at least some money from all these people preferring the older games.

I don‘t think that the games of next year can beat last year‘s game just on prettier graphics. At some point graphics are „good enough“ and stop being a major criterion when buying a new game. But while good new games are still being made and have success, these all work with original content rather than using better technology. In a world where you can‘t watch the news without hearing the word „AI“, the progress being made on video game AI providing more realistic opponents or NPCs is practically non-existent. Many of the top-selling games of 2026 could have been made a decade ago, they don‘t use any technological progress at all. And unless that changes, older games will continue to occupy a large space in this attention economy, making life difficult for new games.

SpeculativeX

2026-06-13T11:09:49.645+02:00

Having worked nearly 30 years for the same large company, I do own shares of that company. Many long term employees of many large companies do, for various reasons: The companies are trying to buy loyalty by giving employees shares for free or at a discount, and there is usually some tax advantage to that compared to giving the same amount of money in cash. The company I own shares in is profitable, and has been profitable for a very long time. It reinvests part of those profits, but another part of the profit is given to the shareholders in the form of dividends. Over the decades I actually already received more money in dividends than I ever spent acquiring those shares. This is what is called a value stock. The share price of the company is in a mathematically logical relation to the companies revenues, profits, and dividends.

Yesterday was the IPO of SpaceX. It's IPO price was $135, and over the first day of trading the share price stabilized at around $160. If you multiply the total number of existing shares in SpaceX with that share price, the company SpaceX is worth a bit over $2 trillion. That makes is roughly 10 times as valuable as the company I own shares in. But if you look at SpaceX revenues, profits, and dividends, there is no logical relation to the share price. SpaceX has no profits or dividends. It makes roughly 10 times *less* revenue than the company I own shares in. In other words, the company I own shares in has a share price to revenue ratio of slightly over 1, while SpaceX has a share price to revenue ratio of slightly over 100. SpaceX is what is politely called a growth stock. The numbers only make sense if you assume that the revenue and profits of the company will grow at a rather fantastic rate.

Are the people buying SpaceX shares all fools? No, many are very rational people. For example there are people who undersigned the IPO, got shares for $135 from SpaceX, and then directly sold them on the first day for $160. $15 pure profit per share in just a day, nothing foolish about that. IPOs these days are carefully orchestrated. SpaceX only sold 5% of its shares, to keep the supply of these shares lower than the demand, more or less guaranteeing the share price would "pop" up on the first day of trading, creating a positive narrative.

But what about the other 95% of SpaceX stock, not currently traded? Elon Musk owns around 45% of SpaceX (in a special class of shares with higher voting power, giving him around 80% of votes and thus total control). Elon probably doesn't want to sell those shares, and is actually contractually prevented from selling them for a year. That still leaves 50% of shares in the hands of other SpaceX founders, early venture capital investors, and SpaceX employees. They too are still under a contractual lockout, preventing them from selling their shares, but not for long. SpaceX has a staggered lockout, in several tranches from day 70 to day 180 after the IPO. In other words, other than Elon Musk, over the next half a year, all SpaceX shareholders become free to sell their shares.

Thus the supply of SpaceX shares is going to increase a lot between now and the end of this year. That makes the trajectory of the SpaceX share price somewhat predictable. So predictable that is has a name, the "IPO pop and drop". It is very basic economics, supply and demand. Supply of SpaceX shares is increasing over the next 6 months, demand probably by not that much, thus a drop in share price is rather likely. In fact, some people are planning to make a lot of money short-selling SpaceX shares.

Now this certainly isn't financial advice. But if you were a strong believer in growth stocks, a believer that everything Elon Musk touches will turn to gold, and you do think that one day SpaceX will reach revenue and profits that are more reasonably aligned with its market capitalization, you might still want to wait for several months before buying SpaceX stock. There are a lot of stocks that are worth more today than they were on their first day of trading, but there are very few for who the first day of trading would have been the best day to buy them. And that is much more true for growth stocks than for value stocks.

Many of the people buying SpaceX stock now don't plan to wait until the company makes a profit and they get their money back via dividends. Instead they believe in the greater fool theory of investing: It doesn't matter whether the share price of a company is justified by that company's revenue and profit; you can make a profit from an overvalued share as long as there is somebody out there who is a "greater fool" than you, and who values that company even higher than you paid for it. That is purely speculative. But it is the explanation for the valuations of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and many growth stocks, especially in AI. You are not betting on a company reaching certain goals, you are betting on the mood of the market. That isn't investing, it is gambling. There are certainly people that made money that way. And there are people who still own a bored ape NFT, who bought Bitcoin for $100,000, or bought Pets.com shares at the IPO. In a market dominated by professional traders, how likely do you think a regular retail investor is to outsmart the bankers? If you want to get rich quick, you are probably better off betting on the outcome of soccer world cup. If you want to save money for your retirement, you should stick to boring value stocks.

Civilization uncanny valley

2026-06-12T21:42:36.153+02:00

So I wanted to try out Civilization VII after the Test of Time update, which was supposed to reboot the game. But as I hadn't played it for over a year, that turned out to be a rather weird experience. I fell into a sort of uncanny valley, where some things were familiar enough for me to make me think that I knew the game, while others had either changed or I had forgotten, so that they felt strange and off.

While I managed to play the same civilization over the ages, that actually was never really my problem with Civ 7, and I had enjoyed other 4X games in which you didn't stay the same for the whole game. My problem with Civ 7 rather was that the second age, exploration, feels very scripted and sameish to me, regardless with which civilization or civilizations I play it. It is just the tech tree that allows you the exploration, and the whole reward structure is designed to push you into that exploration.

So between the uncanny unfamiliarity with the game and feeling that I was still following the same scripted gameplay, I stopped half way through the age of exploration and gave up. For me this wasn't the patch that fixed all of Civ 7's problems and made me come back. And when I see the concurrent player numbers, it seems that the rest of the world feels the same. After a short peak Civ 7 is back to have far fewer players than Civ 6.

Concordia Special Edition

2026-06-10T10:57:22.210+02:00

I just pledged €193.60 for "Glory of Rome" pledge level of Concordia Special Edition on Gamefound. It'll be around €230 by the time shipping is added. That is a lot of money for a board game from 2013 that I have only played once. And thus a perfect opportunity to talk about bling and luxury in the board game hobby.

Not all board games are created equal. Something as simple as a deck of cards can have various different levels of card stock and finishing, so that those cards could be flimsy and wear out quickly, or be a lot more solid and wear resistant. Tokens can be cardboard, wood, or plastic. Meeples can be cardboard standees, wooden, or plastic miniatures, with or without sundrop or paint. Chip Theory Games is famous for making games that are completely waterproof: Game boards are neoprene, not cardboard, and printed poker chips are used as both meeples and tokens. The quality of the components has an obvious effect on price.

With many games, you don't get a choice: The game is the price it is with the components it has. I happened to me that I bought a game at a low price, but then was disappointed at the quality of the components. Great Western Trail: El Paso is a game I like the gameplay of, but dislike the shoddy material. Parts of that game I replaced with my own materials, like cubes and discs; but I can't do anything about the cards and the game board. On crowdfunding board games, the trend is more towards the other direction, I pledged for some games where I ended up with lots of plastic miniatures I didn't really felt necessary.

In the end that is a business decision by the game company: While a prettier game with better table presence can attract some people, others might then be turned off by the high price. So increasingly crowdfunding projects have several options, like a base version with cardboard standees and a more expensive version with miniatures. And of course there is usually a completely over the top "all in" pledge with all the expansions, and all the deluxified materials you can possibly think of.

Normally I am more of a base pledge guy. I actually prefer standees over miniatures. I also prefer wooden tokens over plastic tokens. But I also do like wooden tokens over cardboard tokens, and I especially like metal coins over cardboard coins. That is how I ended up with the "Glory of Rome" pledge level for Concordia, because it has wooden meeples and acrylic tokens instead of cardboard, as well as metal coins.

Concordia is the third "Special Edition" of a classic board game that Awaken Realms produces. They made special editions for Puerto Rico and Castles of Burgundy before. With the deluxification being a more recent trend, the original games were all cardboard. And for some games that is enough. I bought a copy of the old Castles of Burgundy for €19, while the special edition costs €90 plus shipping plus VAT, so around €130 for just the most basic version of the special edition. I didn't buy any edition of Puerto Rico.

Not only did I like the game Concordia more than I liked Puerto Rico or Castles of Burgundy. Concordia is also a game that already has a lot of expansions, and if you have everything you'll sit on quite a lot of boxes. The special edition has all the expansions already existing, plus adds a couple of new ones. And they all come in one large box, making storage easier. What I ordered is a luxury item and thereby by definition unnecessary, but I do get a lot of nice stuff for my money.

Ultimately this moves away from a game that one buys to play it, and enters the territory of a collector's item. It is slightly more useful than a Labubu doll, but the gameplay value doesn't really justify all of the purchase price. In my previous post I talked about Arydia, which did cost something similar, but that game we played for 66 hours, so a bit over $3 per hour, which isn't half bad for a board game. I would have to play Concordia a lot to get down to that price per hour. There is some satisfaction to have a game complete with everything (even if I didn't take the €330+ "Opus Magnum" pledge, as I didn't want the plastic miniatures), with deluxified materials making it look good. Not a reasonable purchase, but sometimes one wants to spoil oneself.

After the game ends

2026-06-08T09:47:36.589+02:00

Yesterday we finished our campaign of Arydia. We could have finished before, but we had spent a lot of time on a very long side quest already, and wanted to bring that to a conclusion. That involved one final boss fight. After that, we went to the final evaluation, where as expected we won the game. We didn't get the ultimate completionist win, but that would have involved a lot more hours chasing less interesting side quests. After 13 sessions and 66 hours played we weren't too keen on that, and decided to stop at that point, so we could start our next campaign game, Stonesaga.

I now put the whole Arydia game back into the box. What I didn't do is resetting the game. Arydia is a game which changes while you play it. Map hexes get turned over when exploring them, cards move from active to inactive or banished, additional game components are unveiled during the campaign. We have a big plastic bag full of cardboard tokens representing gear and other stuff we used and discarded during the game. Arydia is a "green legacy" game, so none of the changes are really permanent. It is possible to reset the game and put everything back where it was at the start of the game. The problem is that this would take hours of work, and I am not really motivated to do that.

I think we played through over 90% of the content of Arydia. Playing the game again would follow largely the exact same story, even if the order or individual battles could play differently. A second playthrough would certainly be a lot less interesting than the first playthrough. And as my board game library resembles my Steam library, too many games - too little time, I don't really see me playing Arydia a second time, even if I enjoyed the first campaign.

Unlike a Steam game I played and don't plan to come back to, a board game takes up physical space. Arydia is a huge box weighing 11 kg. I wouldn't even want to sell it used on Ebay or elsewhere, as I don't want to ship such a huge box. And with the game being in a state where it would need hours of work to reset, I doubt there would be much interest for it anyway.

So I am currently leaning towards throwing the game away. Maybe keep some of the materials like the painted miniatures for use elsewhere, and sort the rest into plastic and paper waste. But that feels somewhat ungrateful towards a game we had a lot of fun with. On the other side, I can't have too many games I'll never play again block all of my shelf space.

AI taking all our jobs

2026-06-04T09:43:06.798+02:00

The more I hear online about people fearing that AI will take our jobs, the more I wonder whether this narrative is based on a personal bias of digital natives. If your job consists of writing emails and Word documents and Powerpoint slides all day, a fear of getting replaced by AI is probably justified. And it is exactly the people sitting on a computer all day that also discuss the most online. But it that the real economy?

If you look at the totality of all jobs, you will realize that most people have jobs in which they manipulate physical objects in some form as core function of their job. Take the stereotypical entry level / student job of flipping burgers. ChatGPT can't flip a burger. You would need an AI-powered robot to flip that burger. And between the cost for the robot and the cost for the AI, it isn't obvious that the minimum wage human doing the job isn't actually a lot cheaper than the robot. Also, even an entry-level human employee tends to do better when things go wrong. Imagine the flat-top griddle having an electrical failure and not heating anymore. A human would notice instantly that his burgers aren't sizzling anymore and react in some way. A robot might happily keep flipping raw burgers, with catastrophic consequences when that raw burger reaches the customer.

In the absence of physical object manipulation requiring a robot, from the remaining jobs there is still a very large part that requires direct interaction with humans, typically customers. You don't need a robot for that, but you need your AI to not mess up by hallucinating. There are famous examples, like the Air Canada chatbot inventing a refund policy, and the airline being forced by the courts to pay that refund. Basically the courts found that a company is liable for their employees messing up, regardless of whether that employee is human or AI. That can get expensive for a company, when a tech-savvy customer persuades your chatbot to sell him a $70,000 car for $1, an error a human salesman is unlikely to make.

If I use the version of Google Gemini that is included in a regular Google search, or I use a regular ChatGPT chatbot, that use of AI is free. That is the typical tech business model of reaching a dominant market position by providing a service at a loss. Which is inevitably followed by some form of "enshittification", because sooner or later the company needs to provide its services at a profit to themselves. Those trillion dollar AI data center investments don't pay for themselves if you don't charge your customers sufficiently. AI companies already charge "pro" users and commercial users, and some companies had to put caps on AI use, because AI use quickly got too expensive. So even for the jobs that an AI can do well, the question is how much cheaper it is going to be than a human, and how the quality and reliability of the output compares in the end.

Sam Altman is predicting the Billion-Dollar Company of One, a startup built by one person with a laptop, an internet connection, and an army of AI agents, worth a billion dollars. While I don't think that is impossible, it is obvious that there are huge parts of the real economy in which such a company is unthinkable. The company can't be involved in any manufacturing, can't be involved in any handling or delivering of physical objects, and can't be involved with any services to humans that can't be done purely online. Robo bricklayers? Robo hairdressers? Robo plumbers? All of these are still decades away even in the most AI-positive scenario, and might never become a practical reality out of cost reasons. I am absolutely positive that AI will not take *all* of our jobs. Although we might end up with some surprises on which jobs AI eventually will replace; for example I can envision a future in which much of porn is AI generated, putting a lot of pornstars out of work. But if you look at a general classification of occupations, you immediately see a huge number of jobs that AI is extremely unlikely to perform in the foreseeable future.

Dice Gambit

2026-05-30T12:05:57.201+02:00

As there are too many games being released, it happens that some very good games fall by the wayside. This is the case for Dice Gambit, a rather excellent tactical RPG, which manages to combine a "very positive" Steam user rating with a concurrent player count of about a dozen.

Dice Gambit plays in an interesting world that combines elements of the Italian Renaissance, with families feuding over a city, with modern aspects like influencers or AI. Combat is based on a mix of swords and technology, with some extremely original character classes like the movie director. You unlock these classes by gaining faction reputation with the members of the feuding families. There is a default mode, where you are likely to get classes in a certain order, but there are options to randomize that during setup, and play a game with a completely different set of classes.

You start with a single character arriving by Vespa in the city, having inherited the Inquisitor title. You discover that the city is overrun with monsters, and get into a fight immediately. Over the course of the main story you marry, "incubate" children directly into adulthood, and go on expeditions with squads out of your family members. You have a general level, but can level up every class only so much, so you have to switch classes sooner or later. The stronger any family member is, the stronger will be the spouse he/she marries, and the stronger will be the children. That gets a bit confusing sometimes, because new family members start at level 1, while often being already as strong as their relations.

Combat takes place on a hex grid, and is dice-based. You throw a number of dice based on your dice power, which you can sometimes improve by leveling. You can use the dice results for basic actions like moving, shielding up, or attacking. But you also have 4 abilities (of which 1 signature ability), that allow you to spend some combination of dice for powerful effects. By leveling you also get passive skills. Ideally that all adds up to powerful combinations, like abilities that let you throw lots of knives combined with passive skills that make damage cascade to other enemies. Every character ends up very different through the combination of classes, abilities, passives and stats he accumulates. That, and the variety of different combat scenarios, makes combat very varied and a lot of fun.

There are three acts to the main story of Dice Gambit, taking around 10 hours. But there are a lot of interesting options in the setup, where you can replay the game in a different way. And you can fast forward the story bits you already know, so replaying the same main story isn't that bad. I have already played 20 hours of Dice Gambit, and I am not finished yet. Recommended!

P.S. You can play the first act as a free demo!

Bubble, meet needle

2026-05-26T16:45:37.739+02:00

For a while now there has been an ongoing discussion whether the US stock market is in an AI bubble. But bubbles are not only hard to identify, it is also pretty much impossible to predict when they will burst. So an event which has the potential of pricking a bubble is pretty interesting. That event is going to happen on June 12, a bit over two weeks from now. What is going to happen that day? Well, it is the day of the initial public offering of SpaceX.

Now you might wonder what a rocket company has to do with AI. Well, Elon Musk, who controls SpaceX, also controlled xAI, an AI company that owns Grok and the social media network ~~Twitter~~ X. And in February of this year, he sold xAI to ~~himself~~ SpaceX for $250 billion in shares. SpaceX now has three businesses, a very profitable satellite internet part called Starlink, an unprofitable rocket part, and a money-burning AI part. But in the documents filed for the SpaceX IPO it is claimed that it is the AI part that will address $26.5 trillion of "total addressable market" for all three parts of $28.5 trillion. The AI part of SpaceX is what is used to justify a total valuation for the whole SpaceX of $1.75 to $2 trillion. That makes the SpaceX IPO the biggest IPO in the history of the world, mostly based on a business that is losing billions of dollars of money every year, and doesn't have a very clear path towards a profitable future.

The SpaceX IPO will also be one of the first to profit from new rules for the Nasdaq index. Under rules valid until May 1st of this year, SpaceX wouldn't even have made it into the Nasdaq index, as for that at least 10% of a company's shares needed to be on the market. SpaceX will only have 4% to 5% of its shares on the market, leading to higher volatility, but this is now allowed since this month. Under another new rule, SpaceX will be added to the index after 15 days of trading, previously at least 3 months.

So there is a definitive possibility that the SpaceX IPO will, at least initially, do very well. With so little of the company shares being actually sold, the rarity of those shares could very possibly keep prices up initially. And 15 trading days later, every Nasdaq ETF would then have to buy SpaceX shares when the company is added to the index, further increasing demand for these rare shares. Meanwhile the people who hold the other 95% of those shares are initially locked out from selling them, with a staggered lockout period lasting a total of 180 days. As a speculative share for day traders and later short-sellers, SpaceX might be quite a hot ticket. For long-term investors, it is probably a very bad deal, as SpaceX is even more likely to follow a typical share price evolution after IPO, peaking shortly after the IPO, and then falling in the following 6 months. If SpaceX as expected is initially high on the Nasdaq index, any fall would be amplified by those ETFs shedding the share automatically.

Unusually, 30% of the SpaceX IPO is reserved for retail investors, which usually get nothing of hot IPOs. But of course there is a large Elon Musk fan club, who are likely to be interested. Despite a long history of overpromising and underdelivering, a lot of people still believe that any venture of Elon Musk can only make them rich. Even an IPO that list under its business goals to build a colony of 1 million people on Mars, and whose AI business prospects are also very much science fiction.

Where it gets interesting is the possibility of the SpaceX IPO either not doing very well, or crashing even harder than expected after the initial hype. If you believe in an old school idea of the value of a company being the sum of future profits, the numbers don't really add up. SpaceX is losing $5 billion on $18 billion of revenue. You can't even calculate a price to earnings ratio, as there aren't any earnings. If you calculate a price to revenue ratio, you get a ratio of 100. If you consider that Nvidia has a price to revenue ratio of 20, you begin to understand that it would take a major miracle for SpaceX to ever return the money to investors. Not only would AI have to become fabulously profitable, SpaceX would also have to beat all the other AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft to the biggest slice of the cake. Seeing how Grok is currently most famous for being able to undress women against their will on social media, that is quite a stretch.

So the SpaceX IPO is a first test case, testing the markets true feelings on the future of AI. And if that goes well, the 6 months after the IPO will be another, longer test case. If the market holds up, later this year the IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic are expected. Overall, AI companies will have IPOs valued between $3 and $4 trillion this year. This could end in an US stock market that is even more concentrated on AI by the end of this year. Or somewhere before that end of the year investors will get cold feet, reject a hot ticket IPO, and cause a cascade of rethinking of valuations for AI companies, pricking the AI bubble. 2026 is going to be an interesting year for AI valuations, and thus for the stock market as a whole.

Why I didn't back Lands of Evershade

2026-05-25T12:16:58.933+02:00

Awaken Realms, a large board game company, opened a late pledge opportunity for their successful crowdfunding campaign Lands of Evershade. That campaign made over $13 million from over 30k backers, with pledges from $79 for just the base game, to nearly $500 for the all-in pledge (plus shipping and VAT). With the game already shipping, this would be a nearly no-risk way to back a crowdfunding project. And as I do regularly play fantasy campaign board games, I watched various videos and gathered information on whether this would be a game for me. Turns out, it isn't. Let me explain why.

Campaign board games very often have a simple premise: A game experience similar to a pen & paper roleplaying game, but without the need of one player playing the dungeon master / game master. For the person who would otherwise need to do all the DM/GM work, aka me, that is interesting. The downside is that the story is more scripted than in a pen & paper RPG. But different games have different amounts of storytelling, as well as different means. Arydia, which we are currently playing, has all its story on cards, and so there is a certain brevity. Other games have books, and there might or might not be an app with voice acting to read that book to the players.

The last two campaign games we played, Tidal Blades 2 and Arydia, did certainly have a story, but the focus of these games was more on the game mechanics, specifically combat. So we spent most of the time at the table moving our characters around a battlefield and using their skills and abilities to fight various monsters and bosses. And we liked to play that way.

This is where my research into Lands of Evershade resulted in me not buying the game: Several reviewers reported that in Lands of Evershade the percentage of time reading story was much higher than the percentage of time spent in combat. Yes, there is combat, but it is also totally possible in Lands of Evershade to spend a complete session just reading story, making decisions in that story, and never getting into a fight. There will certainly be people who like it that way, but this isn't exactly the style of me and my group.

I think that this also has to do with the fact that we are 4 players in my group. With so many people around the table, it is hard to have a long story sequence without somebody losing attention. I sometimes play games with my wife, and with just 2 players (and her being less interested in tactical combat), a story-heavy game is an easier sell. I could also see myself playing a story-heavy game solo, although I would probably prefer a computer game to a board game for that.

Rune Dice released

2026-05-24T14:36:16.278+02:00

In January I played the Rune Dice demo for more hours than is normal for any demo version of a game. This month the game released, and I bought it instantly, and played again for several hours. The core game has remained unchanged, but now Rune Dice has a proper Rogue-lite ongoing gameplay. By doing various things in each run, you unlock new runes, new relics, and new characters. You also level up your character class (regardless of subclass used), which gives you more health and better dice to start with. Rune Dice also now has 8 different character classes, with 3 subclasses each, as well as 3 different regions with 3 bosses each. So the replayability is way up from the demo. But then the demo was free, and the full game costs (a still very reasonable) $15, with another 15% off until Tuesday.

While it did happen this week that I played Rune Dice for several hours, I do appreciate that fundamentally a single run is well under 1 hour, even if you make it until the end boss. I can see this game staying on my desktop as an "in between" game, or when I don't have the energy to start something bigger. Chucking a few dice around and trying to cause chain reactions is always fun.

Rerolling maps

2026-05-19T10:32:13.603+02:00

I am currently playing Farthest Frontier. That is a game that I had my eye on since its early access release in 2022, but decided to wait for the full release. That full release came in October 2025, and then I still waited for release of version 1.1 this year in April before buying the game and playing it. I got it via Humble.com for $21, which means I didn't lose money by not buying it in early access. In 2025, 2,640 games were released on Steam in early access, out of a total of 21,400 games released. Some of those games get developed for some time and eventually get a full release, others are abandoned still in early access. While I don't always heed my own advice, waiting at least a while after early access release to see whether that game is being developed or not is generally a good idea.

When you start a game of Farthest Frontier, you select some settings for the map and the difficulty. From that, a random map is generated. And while playing Farthest Frontier, I fell into a pattern that is familiar for me with games that have random maps: I play the game for a while, find out how the game works, find that the map isn't great, or I made a mistake choosing my starting location, and thus reroll the map and start over. That can happen several times, until I finally have a map I am really happy with. With Farthest Frontier, I am now on the third game where I have been playing for more than 1 hour, and had a number of rerolls to get there. In particular, my first game didn't have any sources of sand, and my second map had a sand pit which turned out to be a "deep" sand pit, that you can't use until much later in the game. As sand is important to modify the fertility of your fields, I was only happy with my third map that had sand attainable from tier 2 on.

Farthest Frontier is good for rerolling maps, as it shows you a large part of the map after creating it, before you choose a starting location. In other games, e.g. Civilization or Age of Wonders, you only see a very small part of the map at the start, and it is hard to tell whether the location is any good. Then I need to either play a few turns just scouting before rerolling, or I save the game, use a cheat to reveal the map, and then reload with the fog of war back on when I am happy with the map. I admit that it is a bit of a weird obsession of mine to want to have a "good" map in these kind of games. A lot of people just take the random map / starting location as part of the game they need to accept. However, I have played too many of these games where it turns out much later that some "bad" maps can lead to very annoying situations which make me abandon that particular run. So I am preempting that by rerolling the map.

I am playing Farthest Frontier while waiting for the Civilization VII update 1.4.0, Test of Time, this evening. I am not sure why they didn't call it 2.0, because it really is a kind of relaunch of the game, after the first launch wasn't a big success. I didn't mind that you had to switch civilizations in Civ 7 1.0, but the transition between eras was jarring, the "victory conditions" between eras and at the end weren't much fun, and the whole thing felt rather restrictive. As patch 1.4.0. changes all that, I want to give Civ 7 another try sometimes in the coming weeks. Maybe not on the first day, I'll wait for the inevitable hotfix first and watch some reviews too. But I am sure that this will be another game where I will be rerolling maps until I find one I like.

AI virtue signalling

2026-05-15T08:42:43.472+02:00

I believe that artificial intelligence is an interesting tool, which is frequently overhyped by both supporters and detractors. To anyone who has experimented with large language models like ChatGPT or various image generation tools, it is obvious that AI has potential as a tool for creating both text and image. However, the amount of money poured into this technology stands in no reasonable relation with the possible monetization of the technology. Which leads to a rather pessimistic outlook on the possible paths forward, where either AI is replacing millions of white collar workers and crashing the economy, or AI fails to replace millions of white collar workers and crashes the stock market. It is a hype or doom technology in a media environment that breeds and lives of hype and doom. One would wish that cooler heads would prevail and we'd have some interesting conversation on the advantages and disadvantages of AI. Unfortunately, what we are getting instead is virtue signalling applied to AI.

A month ago, BoardGameBollocks, a mid-sized board game YouTube channel featuring a guy with strong opinions about board games speaking into a camera using a lot of swear words, made a video about his opinions about AI. He had a balanced opinion on AI, which is unsurprising, seeing how he himself is using AI to create his thumbnails: He said that for him AI is a tool, if it helps a good game designer to make a board game faster that was alright with him, and if a lazy game designer thought AI would do his work for him that would only create garbage. There was nothing exceptional about the video: The opinion was middle-of-the-road, and the style was in line with his usual content, some swear words of a guy talking at home into his camera.

However, somehow that video managed to trigger Tom Brewster, the Editor-in-Chief of the world's largest board game YouTube channel, Shut Up & Sit Down. So he used a secondary channel to post a video with his opinion: The BoardGameBollocks video on AI was "mythically bad, don't watch it", AI is the devil, and Shut Up & Sit Down has a policy to blacklist anybody using AI tools.

First of all, that was breaking internet etiquette: The biggest channel in a niche shouldn't badmouth a video of a channel in the same niche that has over ten times fewer subscribers. Calling out another content creator's video's lower production value, when that other content creator obviously hasn't the same financial means feels particularly mean. But Tom's video was also very bad on a range of other standards: It only said that the video he didn't like was bad, asked people to *not* watch it, didn't provide a link, and didn't engage with any of the arguments that were made in that video. Tom's video was just pure Cancel Culture: Another opinion is bad, so it shouldn't be heard, shouldn't be argued, should just be blacklisted. Tom's stated policy of Shut Up & Sit Down, in which he explicitly used the word "blacklist" to talk of any board game company using any form of AI, is also rather extreme. It is just Virtue Signalling, not a viable policy in a world where nobody can even tell most of the time whether for example the rulebook of a board game had some AI tools used for editing. Text and image generation and editing tools using AI are widespread by now, and unless a company is lazy and just uses AI content without further human review, the use of AI isn't even obvious.

Now if you make a video that badmouthes somebody else's video, there is likely to be a response. And if that somebody's trademark is using rude language, that response will be filled with rude language. The natural instincts of somebody having been insulted align with the economic interests on YouTube, where drama creates clicks, which creates revenue.

I do think that it is perfectly valid to be anti-AI. But when observing what has been going on on BGG and YouTube this year, it appears to me that being anti-AI is the new purity test of the hobby, with which some elite is trying to signal how much better and more virtuous they are than anybody else. We had games that don't even use AI being review bombed for just the suspicion of AI use. The AI witch hunt in the board game hobby is real, and it doesn't even serve its purpose.

Harnessing the power of parasocial interactions for virtual worlds

2026-05-10T10:58:00.001+02:00

You might be excused for thinking that OnlyFans is a porn site. But in reality, creators on OnlyFans make about three quarters of their income not from porn, but from chat. Lonely people, mostly men, pay a lot of money to have a parasocial chat interaction with the OnlyFans content creator. And that in spite of the fact that it is well-known that this chat isn't necessarily actually with the content creator herself; especially for the more successful content creators the chat volume is far beyond what a single person could handle in a day. So the chat gets outsourced, often to countries like the Philippines. And increasingly the "person" the client is chatting with isn't even a person anymore, but an AI chat bot. That doesn't seem to be bothering many people, and in fact there are an increasing number of other web services which explicitly offer AI girlfriends / boyfriends to chat with, with or without sexual content.

Large language model AI is pretty bad at getting facts straight. But its weaknesses in matters of truth are strengths when the task is a friendly chat: AI models tend to be extremely sycophantic, doing their very best to say exactly what the person using the service wants to hear. That can be bad when the person using the chat service is pondering something harmful, and the AI encourages that person. But outside those edge cases, many people think highly of their AI "friends", because those are so supportive, unselfish, and unlikely to contradict you.

The origin story of this blog is as a MMORPG blog. After many years of covering MMORPGs, I stopped playing those. While some were quite good if you just considered them as games, the overall feeling was that MMORPGs never lived up to their promise as virtual worlds. NPCs in MMORPGs were static and boring. Other players were either actively harming you if they could, were more interested in their own goals than interacting with you, or were simply offline. I certainly had some great moments of interaction with other players, and even great roleplaying moments. But mostly I had the choice of either fighting other players in PvP, which I hate, or playing a PvE game in which the interaction with other players was just a minor part. The most common positive interaction with other players was trying to beat group content together with other players, but that was not always a nice experience, and rife with stuff like guild drama or group members shouting at each other. The most famous player interaction in the universe of MMORPGs is Leeroy Jenkins, and that is telling you something.

It isn't just MMORPGs. Other attempts of creating virtual worlds, from Second Life to the Metaverse, not only failed because of technical problems and design flaws. The fundamental problems, that other players were online only some part of the day, might be gone next month due to having lost interest, and rarely had a positive social interaction with you are their primary goal, made the whole idea of virtual worlds that feel lived in impossible. People ended up playing The Sims instead, because the interactions with the NPCs in that game were still better than the social interactions with real people in virtual worlds.

So I had a vision of a future in which somebody would create a virtual world which was predominantly or even exclusively populated by AI chat bots. Where you could live in a virtual village, and have virtual friends and neighbors that are all powered by AI. They'd be there 24/7, they'd always be interested in chatting with you, and they'd always be nice. They would have memory of previous interactions with you, and a consistent personality. The virtual world could optionally have game mechanics, like Stardew Valley or The Sims, but in a way that wouldn't punish you if you spent most of your time just having parasocial interactions with AI chat bots. I do think that such a virtual world would be highly attractive to a large number of people. Maybe humans just aren't good enough to populate a virtual world and make it feel alive.

Wealth generation through houses

2026-05-09T09:23:00.001+02:00

I am a boomer in retirement, being financially comfortable. So you might assume that I did as many in my generation, and created that wealth by buying a house when I was 30. Instead, the house I live in is my first one, and I only bought it not so long ago, when I was already 57 years old. But then, I bought it without needing a mortgage. Houses are not the only possible path to wealth generation. In fact, as long as you spend less than you earn and invest your savings at a decent yield, you'll generate wealth. So why do so many people think that a house is necessary for the middle class dream?

Much of this is in fact psychology, not economics. Saving is hard. If you have unspent money, there are numerous temptations available, and countless people who are clearly out for your money. The huge advantage of a mortgage is that it forces people to save money. By borrowing money to invest in an asset, you turn optional savings into required debt repayments. People consider their mortgage repayments like the rent they paid before buying a house, as a fixed cost, not as something that ultimately generates wealth. One day the mortgage is paid back, and surprise, surprise, you are suddenly sitting on a valuable asset.

Since the end of World War II until the financial crisis of 2008, houses have been a great investment in most countries. Houses are an investment which result in two different sorts of yield simultaneously: One is the rent you are saving by living in your own house, which is a yield that you "get" (or rather "not have to spend") every month. The other yield is the increase in value of the house, which historically in the period mentioned above has been well above inflation. Combined, the two result in a historically great return on investment.

Now social media have fabricated an intergenerational conflict well above the natural conflict between generations that already the ancient Romans have been writing about. Part of that is just how the internet works, taking small conflicts and blowing the out of proportion, because conflict drives clicks, which can then be monetized. Another part might stem from an attempt to deliberately stoke intergenerational jealousy in order to turn public opinion against state-run pension systems, as turning these systems market-based would generate billions of profits for the finance industry. So there is a wide-spread story around that older generations somehow conspired against younger generations to make it impossible for the younger generations to buy houses and get wealthy too.

The more likely explanation is that there isn't a conspiracy, and the high housing prices are an accident of history, caused by a number of reasons. Some of those reasons actually can be blamed on current owners of houses, e.g. zoning laws. Other reasons are more political, where the neoliberalism that started in the 80's led to a global retreat of governments from providing social housing. Housing was thought to be best provided by the free market, and the market pretty much everywhere failed to provide affordable housing, as affordable housing simply isn't as profitable as unaffordable one.

However, there is a part of the story that is nearly never discussed: Would it actually be a good idea for younger generations to buy houses today in order to create wealth and provided for a comfortable retirement? Now the part about mortgages forcing people to save, and house ownership giving a yield of unspent rent remains valid. However, it isn't obvious that house prices will continue to rise above the rate of inflation. If you bought a house in 2008, the value of that house dropped after the financial crisis; and while in general house prices are back up to where they were in 2008 plus inflation, there has been stagnation in the housing market over the past years.

The future of house prices is uncertain for two reasons: One is the fact that the political consequences of people not having affordable housing, whether bought or rented, are high. There isn't a government in the world that is currently not working on policies to make housing more affordable. The second factor is demographics: Many countries have already reached peak population, and while the US is still growing, that growth is only driven by immigration; and immigration has an uncertain political future as well. The world's largest generation, the boomers, are soon going to leave the single-family homes they currently live in, and move into retirement homes and cemeteries. Both of these factors combined, and given that house prices are currently at historical highs, suggest that betting on houses continuing to increase value faster than inflation is not a safe bet anymore.

The dream of a single-family home in the suburbs with a white picket fence providing financial stability might also be outdated for cultural reasons. The single-family home doesn't make much sense without a family. Marriage and having children are both strongly decreasing in popularity, especially with women. It is hard to imagine somebody following a 4B ideology (no dating, no sex, no marriage, no children) still believing they need to buy a house to fulfill their dreams. The prevalent housing of the future might be the one-bedroom apartment in the city, and the advantages of ownership vs. renting aren't quite as obvious for these.

That doesn't mean in any way that wealth generation will become impossible. It might not even be harder than for the boomer generation. The younger generations will just have to learn to save more of their income and spend less. How that clashes with their ideas of work-life balance is a different story.