The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:35am on Monday, 1st December, 2025:
Weird
Gosh, these 1950s books for boys were more open-minded than I thought.
8:45am on Sunday, 30th November, 2025:
Comment
I was planning on playing Pax Dei yesterday, but decided to uninstall it instead.
I started the game two weeks ago and spent over sixty hours in it (hey, I'm retired, I can do that), but the problem was that they were pretty well the same hour, sixty times in a row. You break up rocks to get metal. You chop down trees to process the metal. You turn the metal into weapons and armour. You need these so you can kill the boars and goats that attack you. You dismember their bodies to make meat and leather armour. You collect flowers so you can cook the meat, brew alcohol and create potions. You make cloth armour from either plants or wool. That's pretty well it. The whole game is a grind.
Levelling the different skills is out of synch. You need so much wood that you can be level 20 at chopping down trees and chopping up rocks, but only level 10 at turning the results into gear. You can be level 10 at butchering carcasses to make meat but level 5 at cooking it, so you have to do low-level, negligible-XP butchering in order to produce the scraggy meat you can cook. You learn "poorly parted" butchering of boars before "parted" butchering of boars, but "parted" butchering of chamois before "poorly parted" butchering of chamois. Some objects crafted using a skill at a low level need materials crafted using a skill at a high level — jewellery in particular. It's all over the place. Coming right after playing Dune: Awakening, this was very noticeable.
For crafting skills, levelling makes a difference in the form of new recipes. For gathering skills, levelling makes very little difference. You do a teeny-tiny extra amount of damage to trees when you go up a level in tree-felling, but it's beyond the decimal point; except when you manage to creep across a threshold, it's still going to take you just as long to fell a tree. I was very relieved the time I managed to increment my woodcutting ability such that it took eight swings to bring down a tree instead of nine (and eight more subsequently to get the wood from it, rather than nine more). You don't get more wood when your skill rises, though; you don't get more wood if you use a better axe, either. OK, so there's only a finite amount of wood in any tree, but given that if I chop a huge tree down I only fill a slot-and-a-bit in my backpack with wood, realisticness is not a defence here. You also get occasional pieces of resin and beehive materials, which unless you want to make hundreds of bows or ring your plot of land in behives you immediately discard so as to free up inventory space.
Nodes of metal that are broken up produce not just metal but sand and gems. You get much, much more sand than you ever need (it's used, with charcoal that comes from burning — you guessed it — wood to make glass that you can turn into potion bottles). Most of the gems have no apparent use. Some can be made into jewellery, but the jewellery doesn't do anything except maybe help spread the damage your characters takes when it dies. Some of the gems that jewel-crafting requires at level 2 don't drop until you're level 14. There were some level-1 jewellery recipes that I'm sure must exist, but I somehow didn't unlock them.
Levelling up crafting skills involves seeing which item you can reasonably make uses the fewest resources, then churning out as many of them as you can until the crafting experience bar crawls up to the next level. You can't salvage any of what you manufacture: you have to throw it all away. You can't even throw metal stuff into a furnace to recover the metal. Oh, and melting rocks down into metal (tin, copper, iron) takes 30 minutes per batch per furnace. You see a lot of furnaces around as you wander the countryside. The world does look gorgeous, by the way; it reminded me of that of New World, although neither game has a character-creation system of the same standard in terms of good looks.
Crafting progress is very slow after the initial burst. When I finished, my levels were:
Alchemy 7
Armoursmithing 8
Blacksmithing 15
Butchering 11
Carpentry 14
Cooking 7
Fletching
Jewelry Making 10
Leatherworking 10
Mining 21
Skinning 13
Tailoring 8
Weaponsmithing 10
Winemaking 6
Woodcutting 20
I was 0 in baking, mainly because it wouldn't initially let me build the necessary cooking workbench for some unfathomable reason.
All this was with the +50% XP you get from buying the game for a month, by the way. Gawd knows how slow it would have been without it.
There is some combat. I saw boars, deer, chamois (goats), wolves, rabbits and badgers. I saw no birds. I saw no fish. I know there are bears , retextured wolves and perhaps some other critters in the higher-level zones, but I don't expect there'll be birds or fish there either. Fighting-wise, none of the animals really pose a problem unless they double-team you (killing two boars of your level is easy; killing two boars who are then joined by a wolf a level higher than you is not easy). There are groups of NPC enemies: these are generally harder to kill than animals, because if you're unlucky when you pull one then they do double-team you. Most of the time when my character died in combat, it was to the NPCs. Most of the time my character died overall was from fall damage sustained when, following death-by-NPC, I was resurrected at a shrine at the top of a rock face and tried to make it back to base. For each death to NPCs, I averaged maybe a death and a half from falling down mountainsides.
It's not just crafting skills that have levels: so do armour-wearing skills. I made the mistake of wearing the first gloves I could manufacture, which were of cloth, and then finding that when I wanted to use iron gauntlets I couldn't because my heavy-armour hand skill was 0. My light-armour hand skill was 10, but to raise my heavy-armour hand skill to that level I would have to go out and kill hundreds of boars or NPCs — which would have raised all my other armour-wearing skills, too, so the iron gloves would have permanently lagged behind them.
For weapons, you can't use the next tier unless you've mastered the tier below. You can make the weapons, you just can't necessaarily use them. Why is using an iron sword more difficult than using a bronze sword? In the world we live in, iron swords are easier to use the bronze ones because they don't bend as much and keep their edge better. In Pax Dei, you're stuck with a bronze sword until suddenly you can use an iron one.
Now, all this was done playing solo. I was very pleased when I started and saw people chatting in the chat window: I saw more communication in the first ten minutes than in my whole time in Dune: Awakening. This rapidly tailed off, though, and a week later I was only seeing the occasional plaintive message in French or German, or unanswered comments I made myself. Either people joined guilds and forgot about group chat, or they realised after playing for a few days that they were facing a life of grind so quit. It's probably the case that if you are in a guild, you specialise in just one or two crafts and get everything else from other members who specialise in different crafts, in which case the grind may be more tolerable. Given the castle-dimensioned size of some of the buildings I saw, I expect this does happen. As usual, though, games that focus on group play rather than solo play eventually lose the solo players. They may aim to promote social play, and indeed succeed very well at it, but many prospective players prefer to go it alone, and those that are social will see a chat box that's empty for hours at a time and figure that the game isn't social, even though it is. If guilds only communicate using guild chat, they become insular and the game seems empty to newbies; then, the guild members wonder why there are no newbies joining them. You do keep your players for longer when you have this social glue, especially if they've invested so much effort in grinding their skills, but you have far fewer of them.
It may be that Pax Dei's gameplay improves (or at least appears) later on, but I don't want to repeat the whole gathering-and-making routine for hundreds of hours just in case it might.
To me, Pax Dei feels as if it's still in early-access. The world is there and is beautiful, but its content is unfinished. There's nothing to do but grind, grind, grind. Yes, you can explore, but to what end? The game has great potential, but that potential has yet to be realised. I hope it pulls through, but given that all the updates so far are aimed at satisfying the needs of high-end players, I do worry.
I'm sure the developers know all this anyway, and have a roadmap to address the issues. With hope, somewhere along the line the game's artistic spine will finally become apparent, too. Give it two years and it'll be great.
For the moment, though, my home plot is going to go the way of every other plot abandoned by players.
8:48am on Saturday, 29th November, 2025:
Anecdote
I was in Sainsbury's yesterday at about 11 in the morning. It was quite busy, despite this being a weekday.
At one point, a woman who was shopping with her late-teens daughter said to her: "No, I can't go up that aisle, there are too many people, I get anxious, you know I get anxious."
OK, that's fair enough. However, she followed it up with: "There ought to be a time of day when only a certain number of people are allowed in at once". She wasn't joking, she was annoyed.
Hmm. Well 2 in the morning would work, as there aren't many people in the store at that time anyway. I'm therefore guessing she meant some time more convenient to her.
I can see a reasonable argument for giving people who have medically-diagnosed anxiety disorders free home deliveries, but it takes a rather entitled view of the world to want the second-largest Sainsbury's in the country to shut its doors for an hour to all but a handful of customers in order to accommodate their feelings of nervousness.
8:59am on Friday, 28th November, 2025:
Anecdote
When I awoke yesterday, I told my wife "This is the dawning of the day of aquarium", which is exactly the kind of awful wordplay she likes. It was true, too, because we went to the London Aquarium for a day out with our younger daughter, son-in-law and grandson.
We chose it, on the grounds that said grandson seems to like fish. He wasn't quite as fascinated as the rest of us, but an hour to someone who has lived 577,512 of them is 141 times shorter than it seems to someone who has lived only 4,095 of them, so he probably got a little bored.
Sharks have monochromatic vision, so I guess they don't really notice that that their entire world is blue.
8:02am on Thursday, 27th November, 2025:
Weird
For those people who want disappointed glass Christmas labradors to lighten their festivities.
Remember, though: disappointed glass Christmas labradors are for life, not just for Christmas.
9:06am on Wednesday, 26th November, 2025:
Weird
For those people who want a bad-tempered pot Christmas dachshund to darken their festivities.
Remember, though: a bad-tempered pot Christmas dachshund is for life, not just for Christmas.
2:32pm on Tuesday, 25th November, 2025:
Weird
It's a month to Christmas!
8:43am on Tuesday, 25th November, 2025:
Weird
Non-player characters need special permits to park in certain parts of Colchester.
12:16pm on Monday, 24th November, 2025:
Anecdote
Back in October, I showed some of the photos I'd taken while going for bike rides in the summer, prompted by the fact that the leaves were starting to change colour.
They've now changed colour —and changed location to the road, too — so here are some photos I took while they were changing. I only get to go on longer bike rides at the weekend, when I'm less likely to be flattened by a car between 9am and 10am, and as a consequence missed what were probably the best weekends picturesque-wise when I was either away or it was raining. Still, here are some fairly nice examples of Autumn as seen on narrow Essex lanes in late October and early November.
Don't expect equivalent ones for winter.
9:13am on Sunday, 23rd November, 2025:
Weird
Here's the final cartoon I salvaged from my 1960s MAD Magazine books before condemning them to the recycler:
These days, it wouldn't be a hippie and it wouldn't be cops, but the scene is the same.
10:45am on Saturday, 22nd November, 2025:
Anecdote
One of the duties of a BAFTA member is to vote for the annual awards. Being a new member this year, I decided that I should take this seriously.
As an inducement to play the games, rather than simply to look up their rating on Steam and go by that, a large number of them are provided for free. This is one of the perks of BAFTA membership, although of course you really should play the games before the voting deadline rather than hoard them for later.
There were 161 games on my list to play, only two of which I'd already played (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Dune: Awakening) and had therefore already bought for actual money. Two others (Atomfall and Civilization VII) were on my to-buy list, although Civ7 would have to have dropped in price quite considerably before I'd pay to check out how much worse than all the previous Civs it was.
I didn't play games that weren't available for free on Steam. I didn't play games that were console-only (I don't own a console) or that absolutely required a controller (as I don't have one and don't want one; as far as I'm concerned, controllers are new-fangled technology). This didn't put much of a dent in the overall number of games from which I could choose, but it probably knocked out some front-runners.
I read the descriptions of each game before I played. There are many game and story genres I don't particularly like and would never play normally, but unless they were red-flag bad (ones trying to give me an insight into some designer's internal mental health problems, for example) I considered giving them a shot. Thus, although I don't normally play games featuring dating, gambling, Alzheimer's disease, vampirism, word puzzles or Wuxia, I didn't dismiss them on that basis. At least two games from those genres were very good, by the way, so they made it to my shortlists even though I wasn't ever going to complete them (well, I did complete one, because it was only an hour long).
I already knew that I wouldn't be able to play the games all the way through because I didn't have the time, but as a designer I don't need to do that anyway to get a decent feel for them. I gave the ones released in the first batch a good chance to show themselves off, but as more and more were made available it became apparent that I'd need to be more selective in what I played and for how long. I therefore chose games I thought I might like, or that seemed unusual; when those ran out, I selected them based on how positive the Steam reviews were. Some deserved their positivity for their originality; others got it because they were well-executed examples of a generic format, or were super-deep games from some niche. I was still occasionally put off by very unappealing subject matter, so didn't try those games; I'm fairly sure that at least one that will be on many shortlists was absent from mine on that basis.
You'll note that I haven't named any of the games I voted for: this is because voting is still open, and I don't want to prejudice anyone else's opinions (not that anyone else likely to read this would be prejudiced, but it probably breaks some BAFTA regulation). I might give them once the final results are out (there's more than one round of voting), if I remember what I chose.
There were 17 categories I was eligible to vote for, and each voter gets to put in order up to six games in each category. I abstained from three that I didn't think I was sufficiently qualified for: Animation, Artistic Achievement (which means visual art, not game-design art) and Audio Achievement (which excludes music). I also didn't vote for Performer in a Leading Role, because that didn't show up on my list; I voted for Performer in a Supporting Role, though. For most of the others, I did use up all six of my slots, but there were one or two where I didn't think there were enough worthy entrants so left slots empty.
Some categories have showreels to demonstrate their offerings; some have statements. Surprisingly few of the statements were AI-generated, although some would have benefitted from a syntax check ("it's" when it should have been "its", that kind of thing). I didn't look at these until after I'd played the games, though; I didn't want them telling me what to look for (and not telling me what not to look for).
In the end, I played 40 of the games, or 39 if you don't count the one that wouldn't let me past the loading screen. If I found myself playing for longer than I'd intended, which happened more often than I'd expected it would, they made it to the shortlist. I uninstalled them all after playing, except Civ7 and Atomfall because they were on my wishlist anyway, and one other game that I won't name but that I actively want to see how it develops.
BAFTA membership is expensive, but given all these free games, it would be worth it even without the other benefits (which I have yet to explore).
8:39am on Friday, 21st November, 2025:
Weird
From the copy of the Eagle Annual number 9 I bought at the recent NSPCC book fair:
1950s Britain had a higher opinion of Cecil Rhodes than 2020s Britain does.
Rhodes died in 1902, 57 years before the Eagle Annual was published. 1959 is 66 years ago, so the Eagle Annual was closer to Rhodes than we are to it. There would have been powerful people still alive who knew him or were related to him.
Nevertheless, the use of the word "perpetual" was somewhat optimistic.
2:13pm on Thursday, 20th November, 2025:
Anecdote
Unlike some people, it's not my habit to photograph everything — or indeed anything — that I eat. I did make an exception when I was in Spain and was served this up as the final course of an 18-course taster menu:
It's a gominola de miel, or honey gummy. Quite why it looks like a cow I've no idea, it didn't taste like cow. Perhaps it was to get people thinking, ending a meal with a conversation-starter.
It peeled right off the plate, so if you were a barbarian oaf you could hold it this way and bite bits off it. I, of course, am not a barbarian oaf, so I put it all in my mouth at once.
It was tasty, anyway, which I suppose is only to be expected of an item on a taster menu.
9:22am on Wednesday, 19th November, 2025:
Anecdote
I was in the local shop yesterday, buying whatever stuff my wife had told me I should buy. I used the self-service checkout, which is convenient despite my having to say explicitly that no, I didn't buy any carrier bags this time, either.
On the manned till, a woman was emptying her basket so the person on the till could scan it. Seemingly in the belief that it would help, the woman announced everything she presented: "tin of green beans", "cereal", "tin of cat food", ... . She ranged in specificity from great precision ("Co-op 99 Fairtrade 80 tea bags 250 grams") to vague generality ("milk").
The person on the till was completely unfazed by this. I guess it must happen often enough not to be unusual.
Maybe if the woman were to announce the wrong products ("Cadbury's Dairy Milk" when it's actually washing-up liquid) she'd get more of a reaction.
12:17pm on Tuesday, 18th November, 2025:
Weird
I saw this in the beautiful village of Nerja last year:
That's more flowery prose than you get in British house advertisements. Ours have read as if they were generated by computer from a form since before we had computers to do the generating.
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).