Pour L'Amour et Liberte: 2022

I am not all that interested in your cosmology

It's not me, Obsidian, it's you:

It does go on.

And on.

And on.

I know, right? 😴

It's too bad, though. To Obsidian Entertainment's credit, the dialogues in that second installment in the Pillars of Eternity series are fully voice-acted, and the actors did a stellar job! (Giving credit where credit is due.)

To be fair, the Pillars or Eternity series has its fan base and its ~~cringe-worthy~~ cosmology has its well-meaning commenders.

Point in case:

I rest my case.

CRPG games are half about mechanics and rules, for one part, and half about story-telling and world-building—i.e. the power of words—for the other part. While many contemporary games, like Pillars of Eternity do well with the former, they seem to have lost their touch with the latter, which was the hallmark of the golden age of adventure games, from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, with titles like, say, Ultima VII (The Black Gate), or even point-and-click games like Quest for Glory (Shadows of Darkness), which did so well creating immersive worlds and engaging engrossing stories (including some simple, yet memorable, mood setting MIDI compositions), with so little, technologically , compared to today's era.

Lestrade may never glimpse the transcendental potential of words—though he well understands their everyday mundane uses.

I, on the other hand, feel that words, and the worlds they conjure, are mostly successful if they open for me a glimpse of attractive and undiscovered places.

The Nail of Fortitude

There is no knowing, these days, what will land inside my in-box at the Lodge...

Take this note from fellow member Matthew Hayden Atkinson, for instance:

I know, right?

The Quest del Saint Nail transformed the quest for the Holy Nail into a search for mystical union with God and made the pure knight Matthew Hayden Atkinson the Nail's ideal hero. Only Matthew was able to look directly into it and behold the divine mysteries that cannot be described by human tongue.