The Conceit Of Filing

Its not that I'm completely against order and organization. Its not even that I'm particularly lazy, unwilling to put in the effort to achieve a degree of order. But for some reason I can't stand filing, an act most synonymous with order and organization. It's like an itch. A hard bit of popcorn shell in my gums. But that isn't a proper analog to my feeling on the matter.  That bit of shell actually is bothersome and uncomfortable. Stacks of paper and drawers of folders can hardly make one physically uncomfortable. Unless of course one were underneath a stack or stuffed in a drawer. And while that may be a metaphorical approach to my discomfort with the thing, its only representative of a small piece. A metaphorical hard bit of popcorn, stuffed between the gums. The problem is that, in this metaphor, I may be the hard bit, and the gums. The stack and the drawer.

The paper doesn't affront me. That stack of re-purposed plant fibers. That simian organization of a natural order. Imprinted with inks of similar origin. It's presence is not offending in the slightest...okay...maybe a bit. But the intention. That is the scrape. A massive, relatively massive, collection of...what? I guess thoughts, surely numbers, but for me, nothing?

Today, outside my office, I searched among the fallen leaves of a small oak tree. I found huge acorns beneath them. I had been watching one acorn grow for months. But I hadn't looked recently. When I did search, I found that the single massive acorn I had been looking at for weeks had fallen. As had many that I hadn't seen, or even conceived. These acorns not only grew without my involvement, they fell at a precise time. The tree somehow chose to live without my regard. I wasn't there for that decisive moment. But the tree, the acorns, the world functioned without me. I picked out the largest, cracked the shell and ate half.

Why the fuck can't these collections of wood fiber, bleached white, function without me? Why can't these words of thought percolate and diffuse into the world without my hand? Instead of wondering about my originality? About my meaning? These are questions I beat myself against.

But why should I be so bothered? There isn't an obvious depth of meaning to how things choose to be ordered. Nothing chooses to be ordered. Nothing stacks on purpose. Not by itself. As fall comes upon the deciduous trees their leaves stiffen, changer color, and fall. They fall according to a specific order, an organization, that wasn't created with intent. First leaf fallen beneath every leaf after, eldest first. All the trees, regardless of species agree to this order. The silts of a mighty sea slowly settle, great upheavals of volcanism explode, forming stones, that lay as they settle formed by sequence, but never intent. And so our soil is built. Without a damn word from me or anyone else. And that makes acorns. And all this functions just fine without any intervention.

But isn't that our way? To observe. To watch, hands weaving like a dirty fly's, in expectation. In expectation of an understanding of the order we are a part of, in order to subvert it? I'm sure it is my way. The cold calculation of it. That way which we would love to attribute to all of creation. That it is completely calculating. Cold and passionless. But creation, the universe, all of it doesn't fucking care, and could never know passion. Energy, in it's myriad forms is just as good as all encompassing entropy. It already has it figured out. It doesn't calculate. It does not plan. These things. These shortsighted things don't even matter to the whole. All of it is here, and there. All of it is then, now, and soon. And somehow the leaves that fall, and the silts that gather, have completely encompassed anything mankind has ever created. Without even trying they have included all of our shortsighted victories. Our fist raised heights. And our blood drenched depths. And the uncomfortable quiet in between.

But yet I stack and file these collections of papers. These historically meaningless words. These hopeless collections of wood fiber. Cut from lifeforms that had a greater potential than nearly anything that could be written upon them. And I realize that my problem with filing is the conceit. The absolute collective hubris. We watch, we see, we mimic. But we fall so short.

And that hubris turns upon us. We use this mimicry of natural order to slowly compartmentalize everything we know. To put everything in its intended place. Plants, animals, earth and, most especially, people. And we are finite in our organization. Finite in actuality. And that is the greatest failing. People base their experience off the small vignette of their conscious years. Combined with an ever changing future and nearly incomprehensible past, we decide where everything belongs right now. What is valuable. What is neutral. And what must be destroyed.

And we classify all things this way. All things and all people. This one good. That one bad.  That one doesn't even matter. She is expected to live this way, to expect this, and we will teach her so. He is expected to live this way, to expect this, and we will teach him so. This person doesn't conform, this person doesn't fit. That means they aren't a person. That means they will be ignored. Or destroyed. They don't fit in the drawer. They cannot be filed. They do not belong. They are not needed. Shred them. To fall and stack. In the order that they fell. Like leaves. Or pieces of paper. Lost words on their face. A hard bit, between the gums.

I fucking hate filing.

Divine Wandering - A (Spoilerific) Divinity: Original Sin Review, Part 4

I've played around 100 hours of Divinity: Original Sin. The last 20 hours I played were brutal. There was an absolutely massive difficulty spike at the beginning of the third act. I consistently ran into overwhelming numbers of enemies that individually outclassed my party in nearly every skill set. I found myself spending more time blinded, knocked down, poisoned, cursed, weakened, and resurrecting characters than ever before. Three groups of enemies in particular took me over 6 attempts to defeat, each. I even turned the difficulty down to easy. Still I only won through by luck alone in many of the encounters. And conversely I found an entire large set of later encounters a breeze.

When I finally arrived at the final encounter of the game the difficulty spiked yet again. “I'm done,” I thought, “Its been a great ride.” A rather mixed bag really. While on the one hand I do appreciate a challenge, on the other the battles in Divinity: Original Sin lengthen as the game goes on. By the time I'd reached the encounter that broke me they were in excess of 45 minutes. Iterating on tactical combat that takes nearly an hour to resolve is too much for me. Each failed attempt sets me back nearly an entire hour of playtime. I decided to step back. Get away and play other games for a bit and come back.

So now I've come back and tried out that last battle once more. And I'm still in the same place. I no longer feel invested enough in this game to continue, for now. I in no way regret the time I've spent playing. I did indeed enjoy Divinity: Original Sin. But there are a couple of issues that started off as bothersome after the first ten hours, blossomed into annoying after about 30 hours, and were honestly infuriating after about 70 hours.

First and foremost was the log.

If the completion of one quest is contingent upon the completion of another there is really no way to know until you've progressed far enough in a given quest that you either complete or are stopped by a blue force-field, invincible foes, or other impediments blocking off the end. And I ran into these impediments several times as the game progressed. These impediments meant that I hadn't completed a prerequisite for this section of content.

As I came to understand them these impediments were placed to solve a problem. Divinity: Original Sin was created with around an ideal of freedom. From the different interviews and videos released over the course of the Kickstarter I came to understand that by freedom the developers meant that they would create a rich world filled with possibility and turn you, the player, loose. No hand holding, no quest markers, an “old school RPG” aesthetic. And while Divinity: Original Sin does successfully capture that old school feel, where it falls short is the log.

The quest log in particular is an absolute mess. Quest are listed in the order given, with no hierarchy of importance whatsoever. A side quest involving a talking well is given the same weight as a main quest involving a murder. And to make matters even worse there is a separate quest item that details your accomplishments as Source Hunters that moves up the queue after quests are completed. You can of course filter out completed quests, but this really doesn't help except to keep your log less cluttered. And it will be cluttered anyway. And if you reach a place where you can't continue the game will only give you vague hints near the place you a blocked from. So you'll be looking up quests and spoilers on the internet a lot. Or at least I was, and so were many different people on various forums.

 If the quest log would just keep track of the quest giver, which overworld map the quest is located on, and the current step to progress, or which quest is conflicting, it would do wonders. As it stands I found myself backtracking to dungeons that I completed around 40 hours in, after 80 hours of play. Just to retrieve a couple of items that it took me a half an hour or more of forum trawling to figure out that I needed to progress. At one point I was blocked from the final dungeon because of a quest (involving a certain demon rift and the End Of Time) I was given tens of hours before, that I didn't know how to complete. This was particularly jarring as once this quest was completed an absolute barrage of consequences, with new gameplay mechanics, that had occurred in the interim totally ruined the flow of the narrative right before the final quest.

And the second issue was that massive difficulty spike in the third area.

I think that I might be to blame for some of this. Maybe my party build is wrong. Maybe my equipment loadout is lacking. But for whatever reason, and for the life of me I can't figure it out, round about 70 hours into the game, or party level 16 I started getting annihilated on a regular basis by pretty much everything. The three groups of monsters at the entrance to Phantom Forest were particularly brutal. I would run around to different merchants trying to get more potions, scroll, equipment, skill books anything. I finally won by sheer luck in two of the battles and sneaked past the other. I feel like I may have missed some things. But I have no idea why, or where I might look. Then it happened again wit the final Boss. And after 100 hours I feel like its time to move on for now.

I will acknowledge that there is still a lot of game that I haven't experienced yet. I've not tried out the co-op multiplayer, which is a big deal I know. There is an entire skill set I never touched (scoundrel). And there are quests and alternate solutions to quests that I haven't seen or even thought about. Larian set out to make the best RPG they could. And they came to the community through Kickstarter to engage with the fans and craft something special. They certainly haven't failed in that regard. Not in the slightest. And I don't think that this will be my last journey in Rivellon. Not in the slightest. But I'm going to wander elsewhere for awhile. Its such a wide world out there.