I can’t help myself – I have to spend another week’s worth of digital ink on Baldur’s Gate 3. (This blog is spoiler-free, minus whatever the screenshots give away.) After 25 hours of play with the full version, I’m confident in saying Baldur’s Gate 3 is the masterpiece the hype suggested it would be. So …
The Familiar and the New: Design Takeaways from Baldur’s Gate 3 Read More »
My stepfather is one of the smartest people I know – an engineer and a mathematician, a polyglot descendent of a Scottish poet, and a whiz with computers long before they were in every household. I’ve written before about how he first introduced me to games; to no small extent, I owe my career to …
Barriers Tumbling: AI and the Future of Game Development Read More »
In the last two weeks, a Baldur’s Gate 3 “controversy” was sparked by a July 8 Twitter thread written by the head of Strange Scaffold, Xalavier Nelson Jr. In the thread, he expressed concern about players expecting Baldur’s Gate 3 to set a new standard for RPGs. The suggestion, somewhat clumsily stated, was that Larian …
There’s a moment early in Baldur’s Gate 3 involving an owlbear that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. It made me sad, then it made me wince, and then laugh. It has it all – pathos and comedy in equal measure, executed perfectly by Larian Studios, the veteran RPG developer entrusted with what’s sure …
A while back, my dad sent me a quote that I immediately stuck on the wall next to my desk. It’s applicable to his long career in geotechnical engineering, but it’s attributed to A. R. Dykes, who was talking about structural engineering: “Engineering is the art of molding materials we do not wholly understand into …
Fumbling Toward Fun: Game Design and the Great Unknown Read More »
My dad, a retired engineer who operates a maple syrup farm in New Hampshire, rarely “comes down off the mountain” (as he puts it). When the occasion calls, he’s extremely hospitable and social with friends and family – but in his free time he prefers solitude and getting out in nature. When it comes to …
Over the course of my long career in the game industry, I’ve had good and bad experiences. Regardless of how a project turned out, I’ve always learned something. Sometimes I learn what NOT to do, but any time you work on a creative project with talented, passionate developers, you pick up something helpful. Two decades …