Just out in front of all of this I am going to say if Peter Dinklage doesn’t get cast as Bijaz I am going to be extremely disappointed.  I mean, he can’t get ALL the dwarf roles, I know.  But I also think his body of work shows him to be well suited for this particular part.

So yeah, it has been confirmed that Denis Villeneuve will be bringing us a third film in the Dune saga based off of the second book in the original series (or the 14th book in the expanded Dune-verse if you’re into that) Dune Messiah.  I mentioned that in my look at Dune Part 2, and that set me on a path.

The thought of Dune Messiah being made into a film prompted me go back and re-read it to see just how strange it was going to have to be.  I hadn’t looked at it since the late 80s, so it was clearly time for a refresh.

But before I did that I went and skimmed Dune first.  I couldn’t bring myself to read it fully through… I’ve read it a few of times and both films and the mini-series were so true to so much of the start of the book that I felt like I had just read it even though it has been a few years.

Still, I jumped through enough to get a good refresher, remind myself of the timeline from the books, which as I noted in my post about Dune Part 2, were considerably different than the latest film, and a few other key items.  I had forgotten how early on in the tale Paul knows who his grandfather really is, how Paul brings a fighting technique… the “weirding way” so-called… which is what gives the Fremen mastery over the emperor’s Sardaukar, and the fact that Paul has been trained as a mentat, a human computer.

That last omitted from the film kind of annoys me if only because it is set up by a scene that could have been played for a laugh.  It could have gone something like this:

Leto: Oh, and we’re going to start training you as a mentat.

Paul: I thought you couldn’t tell somebody they were being trained until they reached the right age as they needed to be conditioned for it without their knowledge.

Leto: …

Paul: …

Leto: …

Paul: Oh, right… I guess I am that age now…

Also, the fact that Paul is a mentat… and mentats in general… make kind of a critical plot point going into the next book.  But they can probably gloss over that a bit.

Anyway, I was grounded enough to dig into Dune Messiah, which takes place years later with Paul as emperor, Princess Irulan, the old emperor’s daughter as his wife, Chani as his lover, and Alia, Paul’s sister, now the teenage high priestess of the cult of Paul.

Oh, and the Fremen jihad has cleansed the life from dozens of planets, brought hundreds under the rule of Paul, and have caused the death of something like 60 billion people along the way.  Paul isn’t all that happy about his lot or being used as the justification for such mass slaughter.  But he wasn’t happy with the old order either and he can see the future in a vague way and is trying to thread the needle to find the best path forward.

Meanwhile, the old order isn’t too happy with him either.  The Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild, and the Tleilaxu have teamed up to try and, if not overthrow Paul, to at least gain control of him to make him do their bidding.

And here we’ll get into some deep water with the next film.

We got a bit about the Bene Gesserit in the first film, though not as much foundation as they deserve.  They have been working to shape humanity for centuries, Paul as the Kwisatz Haderach being their ultimate goal, and they are more than a bit salty that they can’t control him after all the effort they put in to bring him into being.  (Yes, technically he wasn’t supposed to be the chosen one, but his mom decided to throw the dice and came up double six.)

But I guess we can get away with what we’ve learned about them so far.  Shady female organization, referred to as “witches” by resentful men, and wearing sinister costumes… though again, I think there was some comedy missed in not going somewhere with strange women with boxes administering painful tests being no basis for a system of government or something.

Then there is the Spacing Guild, which figures at least somewhat in the conspiracy against Paul.  I will say again, I want to see this sort of thing.

And the story pretty much demands it.  The Spacing Guild ambassador, in his zero-grav mobile spice huffing tank, is the conduit of the conspiracy, at least initially.  But I guess we could pass them over yet again, not get bound up in their weirdness, if the script is getting out of hand.  But if you want to know where David Lynch got his vision of the guild navigators as in the image above, Dune Messiah was the place. (He was also sizing up a second film based on the second book.)

Which leaves us with the Tleilaxu, or the Bene Tleilax, to contend with. (I didn’t casually know those two names for the same thing, I had to look that up even after reading Dune Messiah.)  They and their abilities and their skill with genetic manipulation and their ability to bring people back from the dead… kind of a big effing plot point in Dune Messiah.  You don’t dig into that, you might as well just admit you’re throwing Frank Herbert overboard and just doing your own thing.

Unlike the Spacing Guild, it is okay that they didn’t get a mention in the first two films.  In the books they get a passing mention in Dune, being the provider of specially horrible mentats.  Baron Harkonnen’s mentat, Piter De Vries, was a Tleilaxu special, and the baron mentioned that he needed to put in an order for a fresh on as De Vries seemed to be about done.

But with Dune Messiah they are out front and demand attention.  I will be very interested to see how they translate the aspects of the Tleilaxu onto the big screen.  Some of it will lend itself to a visual medium.  The metal Tleilaxu eyes and the face dancers should make for interesting sights.  But how to get across what the Tleilaxu do without having it all intoned by some character telling you what is up will be an issue.

And, like I said, Peter Dinklage better get the Bijaz role.

We have a couple of years before it will be released.

Meanwhile, now that I have wrapped up Dune Messiah, do I carry on into Children of Dune?  Again, I haven’t touched any of the Frank Herbert work besides the first book since the late 80s.  As I recall, this is where things start getting really strange.  Dune Messiah though, it was short and wrapped up the main story line pretty well.  Not the worst title you could pick up and read.

It is going to be one of those Fridays where I am going to uncork a bottle of frustration and rant a bit about various business deals and statements, each of which has managed to make me progressively more annoyed.  When I started this post I thought I might have to divert to Twitter to add in some of the more recent screw ups Elon has made.  But no, the video game industry continues to provide, and the main problem was limiting myself to a few stories and ranking them in the order of how likely they were to make my head explode.

• EG7 Sold PlanetSide and then What Happened?
  

Back in the EG7 Q4 2023 financials it was stated that the PlanteSide IP had been sold.  The actual mention was:

Daybreak successfully closed on the sale of a non-core IP for USD 5.9 million. The transaction provides EG7 with further improvement to its liquidity. This transaction will not affect EG7´s business plan and performance other than the P&L effect from the asset sale.

Closed a deal!  Sold the IP!  That must mean something, right?  A publicly held company can’t just straight up lie about this sort of thing, can they?

It came out later that PlanetSide was the IP in question and that the trademarks had been transferred to Bay Tower, a private equity firm, but that there was some sort of Jason Epstein connection in that and what the hell was that even about and what did it mean to the actual game, PlanetSide 2?  Let me just repost all the links from that point in time in case you are interested.

• • EG7 – Investor Relations Page
  • Massively OP – EG7 Q4 2023
  • Massively OP – Daybreak sold PlanetSide for $5.9M
  • Game Whisperer – PlanetSide IP sold to Shell Corporation
  • Inventory Full – Games for Sale
  • Massively OP – Daybreak’s DC Universe Online studio Dimensional Ink hit with layoffs
  • Gaming Idustry.biz – Daybreak confirms “less than 15” layoffs

And I guess we don’t know the answer to a lot of that, but apparently PlanetSide 2 has been moved within Enad Global 7 to fall under Toadman, the smallest of the EG7 studios, which posted a net loss of $5 million SEK in Q4 2023.

So now they had PlanetSide 2, in contention for the worst performing title in the Daybreak stable, has been moved to the worst performing studio in EG7’s stable.

Yay?

Some coverage:

• • Massively OP – EG7 transfers PlanetSide 2 development from Daybreak to Toadman
  • MMO Bomb – Remember How Daybreak Sold the Planetside IP?

Still, I should not be too hard on Toadman as, on their site they say they have done work for hire for a range of Daybreak titles including PlanetSide 2 and might have been responsible for the console port.  Maybe them taking over PlanetSide 2 will mean a PlayStation 5 native client for the title?  Who knows?

Meanwhile, that still doesn’t answer the question about the IP being sold, who really owns it, why they bought it, what they plan to do with it, or what it means to EG7, though I suspect part of the sale must had included the right to keep using the IP for PlanetSide 2 because to do otherwise would have been insane.

• UbiSoft Says Screw You to fans of The Crew

Back on the first of the year I made a prediction that UbiSoft would do something that would piss me off, and thus help sustain me in my beyond two decades grudge against the studio.  And, of course, they obliged almost right away by declaring their Skull & Bones title a AAAA game.

But, just in case that wasn’t enough, we have how they are handling The Crew, their 2014 racing title, which they are pulling the plug on and removing from player libraries.  If you try to find the copy of The Crew you paid $60 for, UbiSoft will suggest maybe you should buy something new rather than playing that raggedy old title.  They managed to come across so badly that the whole thing is driving a call for game preservation.  Some coverage:

• Massively OP – Ubisoft pulls The Crew 1 from player libraries, encourages them to ‘check the store to pursue your adventures’
• Massively OP – Stop Killing Games is a modern games preservation initiative prompted by The Crew’s cynical sunset
• MMO Bomb – Ubisoft’s “The Crew” Fiasco Is Just One Example Of Why We Need Games Preservation And Physical Media

Now, live service games are always going to be problematic in this arena.  At some point the game will stop earning enough money to pay to keep the servers running… and keeping the servers running costs more than you probably imagine.

On the other hand, a title that charges full price up front better have a plan for when the servers go down.  The servers to support the back end portions of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl were taken down years ago, but I can dig out my old cobalt blue Nintendo DS Lite and STILL PLAY the core portion of those titles.

Saying “Screw you, buy another game!” and yoinking purchases out of player libraries is not a plan, it is a way to bring the wrath of fans down on you.

This is UbiSoft management just being their usual shitty selves.  Business as usual.  I vowed not to give them another nickel when they made it clear they hated their customers more than 20 years ago, and they continue to keep proving it every year for me.

• Mike Ybarra say Let Them Eat Tips!

I was vacillating between making this its own Quote of the Day post or just ignoring it completely because it was so dumb, then hit a middle ground an decided it fit into this piece.  Mike Ybarra, former head of Blizzard, thinks we should be able to tip devs if they make a good game.

That is pretty innocuous in and of itself.  A charmingly naive desire to reward somebody for making a good game would earn a pat on the head from many sources.

However, a former President of Blizzard who demonstrated no issue with paying women less than men for the same job, only giving a mild bleat when Jen Oneal resigned because she was being paid less as Co-President of Blizzard in partnership with Ybarra, and who was blatantly trying to gaslight employees by pleading poverty while cutting bonuses for those outside the executive management boys club, coming out with that sort of statement against the background of mass layoffs in the video game industry just proves he is either completely unaware of reality or a complete shitheel… though, as always, I have to add “why not both?”

People rightfully dogpiled on his since edited tweet to point out the many problems with his sentiment.  Leaving aside the whole “everybody wants tips these days” and the fact that any such mechanism would likely go to the publisher who would extract their cut before passing anything on to the people who did the actual work, the whole thing would encourage publishers and executives to keep industry salaries low by pointing out that tips were now considered part of the compensation package.

If you want to help somebody out, but another copy of an indie dev title you played the hell out of.  That will probably help somebody.  But tips… those will go into somebody elses’ pocket without a doubt.

Coverage:

• Massively OP – Former Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra thinks players should be able to tip developers for their work
• Rock Paper Shotgun – Former Blizzard boss reckons you should be able to tip developers ‘another $10 or $20’ on top of $70 games

Also, here’s to hoping Mike Ybarra fades into even greater irrelevance so I won’t feel the need to ever mention him again.

• The Strains of Im-Possibility Space

We got something of a two-fer from Jeff and Annie Delisi Strain, the husband and wife duo who run/ran Prytania Media which funded several game studios.

The first up was the abrupt closure of Crop Circle Games, which was shut down in late March with little notice and no severance for employees.  A publisher treating game devs as disposable trash?  Must be a day that ends in “Y” I guess.  Crop Circle’s site was replaced by a terse statement about being able to secure funding after two years.  Normal industry stuff, callous but no surprise.

The weird bit is that on April 4th Annie Delisi Strain appended a long rambling statement making the whole situation about herself and the fact that Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach was going to bring her health issues into a story (something that never happened and Kotaku denies was ever planned) that was so strange that even an AI wouldn’t be that incoherent.

Once that bizarre addition got some attention, the site was shut down completely, but not before I went and made sure the Internet Archive had backed it up.  When gaming execs show you who they really are, don’t let them memory hole it later.

Then, a week or so later, Jeff Strain announced another sudden studio shut down (images of his statement), Possibility Space, this time because he alleges that employees were leaking information about their project to the press.  The common thread here is again Kotaku, which was implicated as the reason, with their reporter Ethan Gach being named once more.

“Somebody leaked something so let’s burn the place down!” isn’t a normal business take.

Sure, the games industry isn’t doing well right now, contracting as it is from the pandemic highs when we all stayed home and added to our Steam library in search of distraction, so there are lots of reasons studios shut down.  But when your funding publisher shuts down two studios while attempting to blame one reporter at Kotaku… well, it feels more like the Strains live in some sort of paranoid bubble where Kotaku is out to get them.

• Pity Poor Naive Lars who Blew Up Embracer Group!  Oops!
  

Then we’re back to the Embracer Group, which has been struggling to survive by shutting down projects and laying of developers, all due to some extremely poor and dubious even at first glance business decisions made by CEO Lars Wingefors… who still has his job.

But in an interview over at IGN about Embracer Group Matthew Karch, who is CEO of Sabre Interactive, which managed to break free of the disaster that is Embracer, paints a picture of Lars merely being naive and feels that people are being unfair.  While the interview covers other topics, other sites like Game Developer immediately picked up apologist nature of Karch’s statements.  Incredulity was a common response.

The only things I can come up with for Karch’s narrative is that there is a non-disparagement aspect to his contract taking Sabre out of Embracer’s grip, that he doesn’t want to say anything that will come back to haunt him if/when he too turns out to be an incompetent boob and lays off a bunch of staff, or just solidarity among the capitalist class and feeling the need to protect themselves from all those greedy workers demanding to be paid, as they really eat into CEO bonus potential.

Anyway, back here on planet earth Lars Wingefors, whose compensation package no doubt dwarfs any of the people who actually make the things that Embracer sells, is paid based on the clearly flawed assumption that he is SO SMART AT BUSINESS.   Yet he foolishly bet on the line always going up despite obvious signs there was going to be a reduction in demand, negatively impacted the lives of thousands of people.   And in doing that, the only consequence he has suffered is being publicly called out for it… and dammit, Matthew Karch says that is going way too far!  CEO’s have feelings too man!

It is clearly too much to ask that a CEO be at all responsible for their decisions.  Accountability is for suckers.  Get a job where other people have to pay for your mistakes.

Maybe CEO should get tips.

• Random Rant about Private Equity

Then, not really on the topic of video games, I saw a nice article over at Vox about how private equity firms… also known as equity management and other innocuous terms… have been simply destroying everything they touch in the name of milking every last cent out of companies and then casting them aside to let them fail.

• Vox – What is private equity, and why is it killing everything you love?

They kick off with the example of Toys R Us and how it was bought stripped, and left to die as a deliberate business plan, but you can find many more examples.  The plan is to find the victim target for the same tactic, where a private equity firms buys it out, brings it private, loots it of all value, saddles it with debt, then had a final cash grab by going public with it again in the hope that a familiar name would fool people.

It happens over and over again and the firms that do it set everything up so they get the cash but bear none of the responsibility for what they have done.  Anyway, if you want to get mad, you can read that and how even Taylor Swift has had to fight the vultures of private equity.

There is the constrain refrain from the boss class in the US about “nobody wants to work anymore” that one can trace back over 100 years that is mostly a lament that people kind of expect to be able to live on their wages.

The irony in that is today it feels like nobody on Wall Street wants to run a business, they just want to get paid, either by demanding companies deliver all profits directly to them or through these private equity looting frenzies that destroy a company in the long term in order to get paid today.

We need more regulation in the market.  That’s it.  That’s the message.

The sandbox nature of Conan Exiles… figuratively speaking, though there is also a lot of actual sand in the virtual world of Conan and the map is a big rectangle, which lends itself to the metaphor as well… means that there really isn’t a story or anything to point you towards a particular goal.

You can hang about doing things like base building or crafting or whatever… at least on a PvE server like ours… and the game won’t get impatient or start sending NPCs your way to intone meaningfully about how great it would be if only you would go take a look down some dark dungeon down the road and look into whatever it is that has been plaguing the local populace.

That said, there are, in fact dungeons.  I am not sure how Potshot found out about The Dregs, one of the early dungeons in the game… he does things like read up about the titles we are playing rather than just embracing ignorance like I do… but he mentioned last week that he had found The Dregs and that it was said to be soloable, so the two of us with followers might be able to manage it.

The Dregs can be found at the west end of the river that runs by our main base.  Potshot had scouted it out, so we picked a pair of followers and rode off down the shore of the river to get there.  There is a whole settlement just outside of the citadel where the entrance is, so we had to chop our way in, but that wasn’t so bad with the two of us and two followers.

We made it there and I got the location update because it was my first visit.

Then we had to get in.  Apparently you don’t just walk into The Dregs.  The door requires blood to be spilled on it, something communicated by what looked like a holoreel on the sealed way in.

Unfortunately, as one of the first of many mistakes, we had killed all the baddies close by, so there wasn’t anybody to pull and bring onto the location.  CE mobs, like modern MMORPG mobs, will only chase you so far before giving up.  Eventually we had to settle for an alternate plan, one of us dying.  We set some bedrolls up the hill from the building, then back inside Potshot did the “remove the bracelet” thing, which kills you dead.

That was just what the doctor ordered and, as his blood ran onto the stone, it opened up, revealing stairs down to the dungeon.

Potshot ran back from the bedroll, there being no real penalty beside inconvenience in dying, and we headed down into the dungeon.

There was a question about what to do with the horses.  We decided to have them stop following us.  That meant they ran back home on their own and we ended up having to walk back when we got to the other end, but we’ll get to that.

Like the rest of the map, The Dregs looks good and is a well done environment.  There is a lot going on, so much so that we missed a lot of it on the first pass.

We fought with the mobs in the initial water area, then headed deeper in.  The whole thing seemed pretty linear and we just kept heading deeper in.  There are some puzzles to solve to get past obstacles, but the hints of how to proceed were obvious enough that even we caught on after exhausting attempts to climb.

The puzzles all involve water which, when you unlock it, rises and falls, allowing you to swim up to high points to carry on through the instance.  That meant sometimes getting to the rise in time and sometimes having to wait for high tide to show up again.

There were some skeletons and a couple other mobs to fight, but honestly we found ourselves at the boss in fairly short order.

And the boss fight went pretty well.  He is in a pool of acid, so you don’t want to get in with him.  But followers are apparently unaffected by that, so they dove in and did most of the heavy lifting.  We banged away on the boss when he decided to beach himself now and then, and peppered him with some arrows when he was in the middle of his acidic hot tub.

Soon we had prevailed.  The boss was dead.  We got the achievement and whatever.

When he died the pool drained.  I ran in and skinned him, which yielded a couple of things.  But the main focused seemed to be three chests in the bottom of the now empty hot tub.

They were locked.  We looked around the room and in our inventory.  Had we picked up any keys?  No we had not.  Well, that was bunk.  Some online research indicated that one needs skeleton keys to get into boss treasures like this.  Those come from skinning overland world bosses as well as skinning the two bosses earlier in the instance.

Two bosses?  Did we miss two bosses?  I guess we had.

So we started to work our way back, only to find that dungeons in CE respawn with the day/night cycle, just like the main map.  Still, we found a boss we had missed, a giant spider called The Devourer , and went in to assault it, only to come out worse for wear.  We had slain the spider, and skinning it had yielded a skeleton key, but both of our followers had gone down in the fight.

And, working our way back through the respawns we quickly got in over our heads.  The followers were out main firepower it seems, and a batch of skeletons killed Potshot and sent me fleeing back towards where the main boss fight had gone down.

At least when you die in a dungeon you revive back at the start.  Difficult if there are respawns to get through, but at least it didn’t require opening the door with the taste for blood again.

After some more comedy and fleeing from mobs, we ended up leaving through the back door and walking back home to our base, making plans to re-arm.

There was a crocodile boss at an oasis not far from our base that we went after once we had some fresh followers with us.  We have to keep a recruiting drive going pretty much all the time to sustain our losses.

The fight with him… well, I think we won in the end, but both Potshot and I went down along with another follower.

We couldn’t find the follower’s corpse… not the first time this has happened… which was a pain because we like to recover the equipment, clean it up, and re-use it… kind of like the opening of Netflix version of All Quiet on the Western Front.

We went back to base, stowed they key, then went for the spider, where we had a bit more luck.

We had tuned up out follower a bit, going with some hardened steel weapons that we had obtained elsewhere.  We didn’t bother to use them because when they wear out, as all gear does, we couldn’t repair them fully.  But follower gear never wears out fully.  So the spider went down without loss and skinning it yielded another skeleton key.  We took that back to base and did some repair and updates and then decided to head back to The Dregs with the morning sun.

We got on our mounts, which had returned home without us last time, made sure we and our followers had food and supplied, then headed back up the river to the dungeon.

This time we managed to use the blood of one of the locals to open the door and headed in, this time with horses in tow.

We had looked up the instance and found a map on the wiki, where we found we had totally walked by the first boss, the raging albino komodo.  He was not too tough to slay, though when we skinned him and got a skeleton key, we realized we had left the other three back at base.

We’re just not that good at this.

Still, we pressed on, clearing our way through, followers protecting us, horses in tow.

The horses, like followers, would just materialize by us to catch up if they ever got stuck behind.  We pressed on, and found the side passage where the second boss, the spider lay.  We did better on this run, losing no followers.

Then it was down the final stretch, through the big water room to get to the boss again.

That brought us back to the main boss, the Abyssal Remnant, who we took on in the same way we had the first time.  It didn’t seem to go as quickly or as smoothly… perhaps our damage types were better the first time as we had focused more on blunt to smash skeletons than stabby stuff… but we won in the end.

When the acid hot tub drained we went down, read the scroll on the floor, which taught us some recipes, and had to pick two of the three locked boxes to open.  I don’t know if we chose poorly or not, but we ended up with a legendary dagger set and some other items.

Done, we posed for a shot… screen shots are a bit tougher in CE than some other titles, and the followers were not cooperating, but we managed.

So we managed our first dungeon run in Conan Exiles.  Granted, I think we were both in our high 40s in levels when we did it, so we had some benefits that fresh characters might have lacked, but we sort of needed that to make up for our lack of skill.

Ars Technica informed me last week that there are 861 rogue-like deck building games on Steam currently.  Given that was a few days ago, there are probably half a dozen more there now.

I feel like the term “rogue-like” (or roguelike, as it has become one word for some) has been diluted of its early meaning, which was literally a game like Rogue, which included a bare few essential elements, and its immediate progeny which included things like Moria, Hack, NetHack, Island of Kesmai, and even the original Diablo according to lore. (More in random level generation than perma death, but it was an influence.)

Ars Technical has a whole post about that too, how the term has evolved from a perma-death ASCII adventure game to meaning something vaguely like a title with no fixed path where you have to start over from scratch when you die, lose, or otherwise fail some objective.

And then there are deck building games, which has nothing to do with a wooden platform in your back yard to hold BBQs in the summer… though now I feel like I should check Steam to see if there is a redwood deck tycoon or simulator title out there… but rather a card game where you acquire cards along the way, as opposed to a collectible card game, where you buy cards in sealed packs for a non-stop sensation of disappointment.

I am not really a fan of either right now.  I burned myself out with a Nethack obsession back in the 90s and deck builders tend to be too much immersed in lore and details I can’t be bothered to learn, so my Steam wishlist is pretty clear of both.

Which brings me to Balatro, which is a deck builder based on the standard 52 card deck and the rules of poker.

I learned many cards games as a child.  Having opted to live with my dad when my parents divorced, he taught me a wide range of such games, from four deck canasta to gin rummy to black jack, and of course poker was in the mix.

We had a lot of time to fill when football season was over while we waited for the internet to show up.

And it isn’t that I am good at poker… I have more tells than… well… something with a lot of tells… and have learned I should never play for money.  But I know the damn rules!

I’ve been playing some form of poker since Poker Solitaire on the Atari 2600, and I like a nice card game to play now and then, so when I saw some people I follow online talking about this, I put it on my Steam wishlist.  And then there was a deck building game sale and I was in.

The basics of the game means playing a hand to beat a given score through a round, each round being made up of the small blind, the big blind, and the boss blind, the latter always having a name and a special rule that makes it more difficult.

You have a selection of cards dealt out for you to try and make poker hands from, as well as some discards to try and get better cards if you are left without much to work with.

The poker hands all have a base chip value (the blue on the scoring) and a multiplier value (the red on the scoring, referred to as the mult) and the cards you play add chips to the score, which is then multiplied by the mult value to give you your score for the hand.

The blinds require progressively higher scores to beat them.  However, with every blind you can earn some money for beating the blind and having some unused hands.

With that money you can go to the shop between hands to buy upgrades in the form of jokers, vouchers, and card packs.

Jokers have effects on the scoring of hands you play, adding chips or mult.  More chips are always better, but more mult is critical.

The vouchers give you some benefit that last throughout your run, while the card packs can upgrade how much base value a hand has or cards in your deck, giving them special attributes like bonus chips, cash payouts, or more mult.

The shop is randomly stocked so you may find different things there each round.  Also, you can only have so many jokers, with five being the default value (though you can get a voucher to add another slot) and those are usually key to progressing.

And, on top of all that, there is a whole collect them all, achievement aspect to the game, as expanding what you have used unlocks access to further items.

And then there are Steam achievements on top of that.

Among the high points, this is perhaps the only time I have ever managed a legit royal flush.

My only real problem with the game is why the hell isn’t this in the Apple Store so I can play it on my iPad?  That would be ideal.  It is available on Steam for PC as well as PlayStation, XBox, and Switch (I guess I could get out my Switch Lite), but not on my iPad.

I actually got loaded up Steam Link on my iPad to try using that and, while it is a workable solution, it is not ideal.  I would prefer a native version for the tablet, but I will take what I can get.

As for playing… I’m not any good and haven’t even managed to complete a full run yet, and it can be maddening to get what seems like an idea joker setup only to have the cards betray you and have to start over from scratch when you lose, but it does keep me coming back.

Related:

• Balatro web site
• Balatro Steam Page

I am going to towards Freeport for real now, starting from East Karana, which was a crazy scary place back in the day.  I remember being high enough level to feel confident wandering North Karana and crossing the bridge into East Karana and seeing all the stuff wandering back and forth there… all higher level and more dangerous that North Karana mobs… and scurrying back across the bridge to the relative safety of the North Karana.

Tidbit: You can’t swim across the river to zone into East Karana, you have to cross the bridge.

But eventually I had to cross the zone because I wanted to get to Freeport and friends who were on the far side of Antonica or on Faydwer.  We’ll get to Faydwer eventually.

My memories of the place are pretty vague, but looking at the map brings back a few memories.  Once again, borrowing from the Project 1999 Wiki:

The legend for that map:

• 1. Druid Ring with Druid and Treant
• 2. Bandit Camp with Tallus Holton
• 3. Shops selling Weapons, Food, Goods, and Cloth Armor
• 4. Sir Morgan (wanders east down the road and back)
• 5. Shops selling Archery Items and Food. Guards stand and patrol near the shops.
• 6. Gnolls
• 7. Haunted Obelisk surrounded by a gnoll reavers. At night, An undead reavers spawn.
• 8. Farm with farmers
• 9. Farm with farmers
• 10. Barbarian Fishing Village

Primarily I remember zoning in and being confronted with a ton of hostile mobs, including griffons flying back and forth.  As with North Karana, that appears to have been trimmed back considerably.

Still, there are a bunch of mobs I do remember, like the gnoll reavers we tried to camp once to ill effect.  Another corpse run in Norrath.

They hang out around the “haunted obeslik” in location 7 on the map, though it honestly isn’t as impressive as I remember it.

I was going to mention that technically it doesn’t even meet the definition of an obelisk, but that name was probably applied because they didn’t know what else to call it.

I also have memories of the barbarian fishing village, which is another one of those places that brings back a feeling of the old days, including the disappointment that there wasn’t really anything to do at the village, save use the vendor to sell some stuff cluttering your inventory.

Back in the day you would run across a place like this, a little settlement or village, and it would make the world feel more real or alive.  And then you would find that there was not much going on… mostly just a few buildings and some NPCs who were standing around.

It always left me for a sad longing for those little places to be more than they were.

There was another set of building, location 3 on the map, that was easier to get to… or at least not near the gnolls and the hill giant that still wanders around… which serves today as the last resting place of Aradune, Outrider of Karana, something I covered previously.

So there are some sights in the zone, and some mobs to hunt, but for me the zone mostly brings up memories of passing through it on the way eastward to Freeport and the Commonlands.

Looking at the map, there are actually two ways out of East Karana if you have come in from NK.

There is the Gorge of King Xorbb to the north.  I did probe this route back in the day as you can run through that to Runnyeye and then through Misty Thicket into Rivervale, the halfling home town.  However, the Gorge of King Xorbb and Runnyeye were directly dangerous and the route still left you needing to run through the dark horror of Kithicor Forest.

At the time the recommended path was to go through Highpass Hold to Kithicor, which you can see on the map above is pretty much straight east from the bridge, following the road.  You had to be careful on that road, but if you avoided entanglements with the locals, you would come to the road to Highpass Hold.

We didn’t have much in the way of maps back then, save the hand drawn variety like you see up towards the top of this post… and that map misrepresents facts on the ground, like you might take a few steps down the road and see your destination.

No, back in the day, on my first run to Freeport, I had NO IDEA how far that road would go.

Also, while they are missing now, there used to be some bandits that patrolled back and forth across that opening, just to make things a bit more tense.  Once I slipped past them it was up the path which goes… and goes… and keeps on going.

The map pack I have for the in-game mapping tool now available gives you a sense of how much a map like the one above made me feel betrayed.

You need to make sure you take the right side, the road up the valley.  There is a parallel lower road that pretty much goes nowhere.  I once explored it, just to check and it was a long run in and a long run out for no reward.  I recall there being a couple of mobs down there at one point and, of course, you can fall off of the high road and end up down below, which means running back out if you survived the fall and running to your corpse and back out again if you did not.

The road itself contains a sense of promise.  You run across several towers along the way that make you think maybe something is going on here, that maybe you will see something.

Towers at least imply the need to defend something.  I was alert for mobs that might ambush me.

Meanwhile, I passed another tower with a large texture representing a carving in the side of the canyon.

More trees, more road, then another tower and another carving in the side of the canyon.

The quiet, the lack of mobs or guards or any other travelers, the towers, the carving on the canyon walls, the trees growing on the road, it gave a sense of traveling through a past civilization, a place where people once lived but had died out or moved away leaving behind a world touched by the presence.

The quiet will do that… I don’t recall there being an atmospheric sound loop that played, just the thud thud of your feet as you trotted up the road, expecting to see somebody that never appears.

Eventually, after trotting along for what seemed like a long time, the duration heightened by the lack of anything besides trees and towers, the road narrowed into the telltale box canyon that hides a zone line.

Something in my wants to say a gnoll or two were out there back in the day, but that might be a false memory.  You would enter the narrows, take a few turns, then suddenly freeze in place… and after a few seconds, you would get the message that you were zoning into Highpass Hold.

On the far side lay the gate to Highpass Hold.

That, of course, is not the Highpass Hold of 1999.  That is one of the redone zones from the late SOE era, the furthest east such updates extended on Antonica.  I was surly about the neglect of Qeynos and the western reaches of Antonica back in the day.  Now I am happy they were overlooked.  But we’ll get to the soulless nature of those changes soon enough.

Next up, a fast pass through Highpass Hold.

The tales so far:

• EverQuest Starting Points – Surefall Glade
• EverQuest Starting Points – Qeynos Hills
• EverQuest Starting Points – Finding Qeynos
• EverQuest Starting Points – What Can I Even Say About Qeynos?
• EverQuest Starting Points – Under Qeynos in the Aqueduct
• EverQuest Starting Points – Is Blackburrow a Dungeon, a Zone, or a City?
• EverQuest Starting Points – Getting Out of Halas
• EverQuest Starting Points – West Karana Where the Scope of the World Begins
• EverQuest Starting Points – North and South Karana