Now Playing: Bladur’s Gate 3

Hailed as a masterpiece upon its release from Early Access, Baldur’s Gate 3 received overwhelmingly positive reviews and perfect scores. I’m not going to tell you that BG3 doesn’t deserve high praise – because it surely does. But when I see people speaking as if BG3 cannot be bettered, as if the bar has been raised to such a degree that no others can compete?

I’m sorry, but no. Just no. Because at its core, BG3 is a pretty standard CRPG. The key difference, I think, is that it possesses a degree of production value not typically seen within this genre – from visuals, to sound, to VA – BG3 is a CRPG with mainstream appeal. It’s designed to be more accessible, more appealing, more … well, casual.

But that’s not to say that BG3 has only succeeded by targeting a wider base – it still needed to be a damn fine game. And it really is. But is it the masterpiece I’ve seen so many proclaim? I don’t think so. I think it’s an excellent game that I thoroughly enjoyed and will continue to enjoy, but it’s also a very flawed game and those flaws become increasingly apparent the more you progress.

BG3 is a game that I’d describe as ‘front-loaded’ in the sense that all of the things that make it so damn impressive and compelling are there, front and centre, in the first Act. It’s an incredibly strong opening but sadly, BG3 can’t sustain the same level of quality from beginning to end. With each Act, the less impressive the game becomes – not to mention, the more buggy.

If I were to rate each individual Act out of ten, it would look something like this: Act 1 – 9/10, Act 2 – 8/10 and Act 3 – 7/10. It’s not a massive decline, but it’s a decline nonetheless. Although I do think Act 3 could be bumped back up to an 8 if they’d only fix all the damn bugs. It honestly still feels like Act 3 is in Early Access.

The first two Acts are by far the most substantial and polished, but the diminishing nature of BG3 is noticeable even early in Act 2. Then, at the end of Act 2 you are faced with a clumsy, poorly presented exposition dump before being thrust into the rough and ready Act 3 where the bugs really start to bite, the quests are less complex, the story progression begins to fracture and plot threads are poorly resolved – or not resolved at all.

Act 3 is just . . . messy. Not bad – messy. Despite the open nature of Acts 1 & 2 there was a clear focus to your progression. Act 3, on the other hand, feels incredibly scattered. New plot threads are introduced and then abruptly resolved, the game introduces a new companion far too late into the game for me to care or bother with, and it’s also the point the game begins to feel a little bloated. At this stage of the story I’d expect the pace to pick up, for the game to really hone in on what’s important. But BG3 can’t help but needlessly pad out its content in a way that’s detrimental to the overall experience.

Some of the combat encounters in Act 3 are also pretty poorly designed. They’re either far too easy and fast, or far too tedious. Some of the boss fights are also pretty bad. They’re not terrible, but they don’t feel as carefully planned or thought out as previous battles in earlier Acts. It kind of feels like the developers hastily tossed together some of these battles without really testing them properly.

Oddly, Act 3 is also probably the part of the game I found the most funny. I loved exploring the location and meeting all manner of quirky characters. It’s a shame such humour feels so tonally jarring. Considering the very serious nature of what’s occurring and the terrible things that are coming, it feels bizarre that nobody else in the location seems unduly concerned.

I can’t deny I still had a really good time with Act 3 though, and I do think it picks up after a pretty rough opening, but the dip in quality is noticeable in all areas. I do get the impression – and I could be very wrong about this – that Act 3 saw a lot of rewrites and changes and maybe that would explain why it feels so disjointed.

Overall, I did like the main story of BG3. There’s a twist, of sorts, that I wasn’t entirely won over by, probably because I didn’t feel the way it was presented to the player quite worked, but it did just enough to sell it to me. I did, however, find the ‘tadpole’ aspect to be incredibly disappointing from a narrative point of view. I can’t really say more without spoiling things, but it’s such a shame that plot (and gameplay) element proved ultimately meaningless.

As for the ending . . . well, it’s good. Not great, but good. Like a lot of Act 3, it can feel a little disjointed. There are some abrupt cut-scenes that try to wrap up and address everything related to your choices and it works . . . just about. I came away pretty satisfied with my ending. It’s not a perfect landing, but it doesn’t fall flat on its face, either.

Okay, onto the companion characters who I felt were a somewhat mixed bag. Obviously, this is more of a personal preference issue, but I cant deny I found some of the companions and their personal plots to be rather dull. It’s also a shame that some companions have far more content than others to explore.

Visually, as I’ve said the game is impressive – at least in terms of environments and effects. Character models are more mixed, and character animations and facial expressions in dialogue scenes look incredibly dated. They’re stiff and awkward and the expressions were sometimes so bad for my custom character they were funny when they weren’t supposed to be. I can live with it, but I’m not going to pretend it’s good.

If this review seems overly negative it’s just the kind of thing I do with games I really like – and I do think it’s important to highlight and criticise areas where a game falls short, particularly a game like BG3 where most other reviews just tell everyone how wonderful it is. Because it is pretty wonderful, but if we don’t also talk about its flaws, how can a game improve?

But before we get into that, I need to talk about the thing I wasn’t expecting to enjoy that much but ended up enjoying probably more than anything else – the combat. The game gives you so much variety in terms of classes, skills, spells, items and abilities and so many party combinations that you can clear each and every combat encounter is so many different ways. You can also utilise the environment to your advantage in some pretty neat ways.

Even though I’m not the biggest fan of turn based or dice roll based combat, I am big fan of combat systems that give me a lot of options to experiment and play with and that encourage and reward creativity. And that’s something I think BG3 does fantastically well. It’s a game that, even after clearing a tough battle or area, I’m always thinking of how I want to try replaying it in the future with different characters or using completely different tactics. That’s not to say that combat is perfect – oh no, the camera can be pretty damn terrible and I do have a few other issues to raise, but I’ll include those my big list of Annoying Things I’ll get to later.

It’s not just the variety of options in terms of classes, skills and combat that impresses me but in quest progression. BG3 has an impressive range of options for many quests that allow you to progress and complete them in several ways. It offers some of the most varied range of options available to the player as to how they want to experience and progress through its content that I’ve ever seen in an RPG.

However, like other aspects of BG3, this aspect is also somewhat front-loaded. The Goblin Camp is the key example of this. It’s the main quest location of Act 1 and offers an incredible degree of options for the player as to how they want to play and progress through its content. I’ve seen countless videos highlighting this fact and stressing that this is only one quest in the game, the implication being that all of the quests – or at least, all the core quests – offer a similar level of complexity.

But that’s not true at all. Whilst many other quests do offer several possible routes to completion, none offer such a varied range of experiences as the Goblin Camp. It’s the first major quest location in the game and it’s by far the most impressive in terms of options. This shouldn’t be a surprise considering this section of the game was developed, improved and expanded upon during two years of early access support.

The point that I’m making is that whilst it’s right to highlight how impressive this location and the quests tied to it are, the Goblin Camp is the exception, not the rule and it’s disingenuous to imply otherwise. And over the course of the game, the range of options available to you throughout your quests do begin to diminish.

What were once quests of elaborate, branching pathways now feel like quests of two linear lanes, only one of which leads to engaging content and the other leads to nothing but dead ends and no rewards – only a feeling that you made the ‘wrong’ choice. Don’t get me wrong, even Act 3 offers more options for progression than many other games would at all, but compared to what came before, it is clearly an aspect that has become increasingly streamlined.

Okay, time for an assortment of Annoying Things.

Let’s begin – the combat camera does, on occasion, focus on entirely the wrong thing or positions itself at an angle that makes it impossible to see what’s going on. Enemy pathfinding in battles can also prove annoying. I frequently saw enemies get stuck on their combat turn when trying to climb a ledge – up and down they’d go, over and over. They’d eventually decide what to do, but it was pretty tedious watching them try to figure it out.

Party pathfinding in the world can be terrible. Party members occasionally get stuck on scenery and you might not even notice until you get into a fight and realise your mage is half way across the map. This was a real problem in an area where the environment can kill you and I needed a character to hold an item to protect us. But then, in one location when I needed to use a lock-pick to open a door, said character inexplicably kept running to one corner of the room, taking our protection with him and slowly killing everyone else. I ended up having to tediously micromanage my movement, one character at a time.

Swapping companions in and out of your party is far too slow. You can’t just tell one member to depart and then select who you want to replace them with. No. You have to dismiss them first by talking to them, then go to your camp, then run to the member you want, then ask them to join and then return to the world. As you can imagine, I didn’t bother to swap out my party very often.

Managing inventory for your party – especially characters not in your party but at the camp – is also pretty tedious. But that’s not as bad as taking time to set up custom skill bars that don’t save your settings if say, you get disarmed in a fight, forcing you to set up the bar again once you’ve retrieved your weapon.

Even if you just unequip a weapon for a short spell and then re-equip it – you still lose all your custom settings. This is pretty damn infuriating in one section where you lose all your gear for 2 minutes or so, and then you have to re-do all your custom skill bars for every character – weapons, items, scrolls. Everything.

Sometimes the camera completely misses what’s supposed to be a ‘cinematic’ moment. There’s one involving a dragon that was totally off screen for me because the camera was pointing the wrong way.

The game economy feels like an afterthought. I always had thousands more gold than I knew what to do with and there doesn’t seem to be a balanced selection of quality gear for all classes or builds. Even in Act 3, where I thought I’d get access to a wider variety of items, there really wasn’t anything that exciting to spend my money on. In fact, gear in general in the game is pretty disappointing not just in stats, but visually speaking.

Why is the level cap 12 when it’s so easy to hit very early in Act 3? It means you no longer have any sense of progression for your character, no new skills to unlock, no new abilities to try. You get a lot of xp for quests and combat but it’s entirely useless. It feels like the game needed another 2-3 levels for characters to progress through before the end.

Bugs? I’ve had plenty of those.

Act 1 was easily the most polished but I still encountered one optional companion conversation that wouldn’t trigger, and I lost one of my best weapons to a bug that saw it vanish through the floor when I was disarmed in a fight. This is also where I discovered a persistent bug in that, if I swapped one party member out at camp for another, I would no longer to able to properly access that character’s spell book unless I saved and reloaded the game.

I didn’t encounter anything too serious in Act 2, although one phase of the final boss of this section was somewhat ruined for me when my party was hit by a permanent ‘frightened’ de-buff at the end of the fight meaning I couldn’t move any of my characters. Luckily, I found a save and reload solved the issue, but it did somewhat spoil a key moment when I had to drop out of the game and look for a fix.

In fact, I found a lot of people reporting the same problems I’d experienced but too often fans of the game were awfully keen to gloss over or downplay these issues. I’m sorry – but no. Trying to pretend the game is a perfect masterpiece does it no favours. Especially when the problems continue to mount as you progress.

Act 3 is where the bugs really start to bite and become more than a simple nuisance. One of the first conversations I had in Act 3 featured a character whose head was glitching wildly across the screen. Not a big deal I suppose, but a worrying sign of things to come.

I then experienced my first serious quest bug in which a key item wouldn’t spawn although fortunately, I was able to progress the quest through alternative means – once again thanks to a Google search. I also began to experience a common bug during dialogue in which I would select an option but nothing would happen – the option would simply vanish, and then take me back to the selection screen and I’d have to pick whatever was left.

I also had a few instances of a character talking to me about a specific situation long after the situation had actually occurred, as if we were still in that location and it was still occurring as we spoke. That was weird. I also had an ‘unconsciousness’ character speak to me after I’d beat them in a battle attempting to initiate the fight we’d already had.

I started getting a pretty persistent bug whereby an enemy in combat would do absolutely nothing on their turn. They’d just stand there for 20-30 seconds making me wait, before eventually it would skip to the next guy. Then there was the characters who would suddenly be silent in a conversation because their VA hadn’t triggered. Oh, and one time one of my party just randomly dropped dead out of combat, on full health, for no reason.

Thankfully, nothing I’ve encountered has been in any way game breaking – but I’ve seen plenty of others reporting far worse than me. The game clearly still needs a fair bit of care and attention.

Overall, you don’t need me to tell you that BG3 is a great game. Everyone is saying it – and they’re right. But I think it’s important to tell people that it’s also a game with flaws and shortcomings and you might experience bugs that spoil or even break your experience. No game is perfect, and pretending that BG3 has no flaws is only detrimental to the developer. I’ve seen that happen with other games and as a result, they don’t really learn from their mistakes and only end up repeating them.

Whilst it’s great to see a game like BG3 winning so many accolades I do think we need to tone down the ridiculous rhetoric about it ‘raising the bar’ or how it’s ‘scaring’ other developers because they’re worried they can’t compete. Come the f**k on. It’s good, but it’s not that good, and there’s lots of areas the game could have been done far better, even without the bugs. Act 3, I think, still needs a lot more work.

In a lot of ways, I found BG3 far more enjoyable and engaging for its systems and mechanics than I did for its characters or story and that’s not something I usually say about an RPG and certainly not something I was expecting to say about BG3. Hell it’s the last thing I thought I’d say. Nevertheless, it’s a game I had a real blast playing and want to play again solo and in co-op if I can find the time.

8/10

Homeworld 3 (DEMO)

Homeworld 3 was one of my most highly anticipated games this year – at least until I played this demo. The original Homeworld was one of the first PC games I played. I absolutely loved it, and I still have my big, bulky boxed copy on my shelf alongside the Cataclysm expansion and Homeworld 2. Although the Homeworld Remastered release in 2015 wasn’t perfect, it still made me hopeful for a possible Homeworld 3.

And then we had Deserts of Kharak in 2016 which I thought was a pretty good land-based prequel to Homeworld and something that also gave me hope for future games in the series. And when Homeworld 3 was announced, I thought we’d get a game that did the name justice. But now? Now I’m not so sure.

There was something that immediately felt ‘off’ when starting to play this demo. Everything about the controls just felt wrong and I just don’t get why they changed a system that worked perfectly in the originals. The ‘modern’ – and even the ‘classic’ – controls just didn’t feel right. The camera movement felt slow despite cranking the speeds up to max.

Everything just felt more convoluted and complicated than it needed to be. I felt like I spent most of my time struggling with the controls to get the camera focused where I wanted it to be, or to get my ships to fly exactly where I wanted them to go. Maybe I just needed more time to adjust? Maybe, but the controls weren’t the only problem.

The UI is too messy and intrusive. Building, ship costs, research, fleet population – nothing is easy to read at a glance. And not only does it look messy, but it feels messy to play. Maybe it’s just this game mode available in the demo but everything feels faster paced than the originals and I’d be okay with that if the controls and fleet mechanics were adjusted to compensate.

But when strike craft are once again individual units to be grouped and assigned – and adding even a single new craft to an existing group resets the group formation – you don’t feel like you can adequately respond as quickly as you need to when you have to continually micromanage every single unit, group and formation. It just doesn’t translate well to a faster paced style of play.

Combat engagements are typically chaotic (and not in a good way), formations quickly lose cohesion, and grouping multiple ship types is a mess in a larger scale battle because they don’t seem capable of individually prioritising the most suitable targets.

Which would be fine, in a slower paced game, but in this (demo) mode at least, everything moves so fast that you don’t feel like you can really focus on individual unit tactics – it’s just group up, select all enemies and watch the fireworks.

Ship AI is also pretty bad. All the maps I played in the demo were strewn with physical objects both large and small that my ships had trouble navigating around. They’d frequently get stuck, or bunch up, or take a long, convoluted path to their objective. It can be even worse in combat when enemy (or your) ships just fly into the middle of a group and sit there getting pounded. The larger space structures can also make seeing what the f**k is going on a real nightmare.

Overall, I just didn’t really enjoy it and I really do hate to feel that way. But it seems like I’m not alone with my disappointment because the game has now been delayed due to feedback. But will it be enough time to fix all of these issues? I hope so.

Now Playing: Black Mesa

After playing through Half-Life 2 and the Episodes in VR and replaying Half-Life: Alyx I was looking for some more Half-Life action so I thought I’d replay the original. But then I saw Black Mesa was on sale and given its overwhelmingly positive reviews, figured the best way of returning to Half-Life may just be this fan-made remake.

And it was … mostly – but we’ll get into my issues later. I do kind of wish I’d replayed the original game before playing Black Mesa because it would have made it easier to compare both versions – but I didn’t, so I can’t. I do remember Half-Life pretty well though, at least in terms of the ‘main’ sequences. It’s the smaller stuff in between those that remain a little fuzzy, although I doubt they’d matter much to my overall review.

So, let’s not waste any more time and get straight to the point – Black Mesa is a fantastic remake of Half-Life but it’s certainly not perfect. It’s visually impressive and has a pretty great soundtrack. I don’t know how much of the music is original or simply remixed, but it’s great nonetheless. Taking such a beloved and important game like Half-Life and ‘reimagining’ it could have proven a dangerous disaster, but to their credit, the developers pulled it off.

They did this by largely replicating Half-Life exactly as it was with only minor tweaks here and there – at least until the Xen chapters, but we’ll come back to those later. A few sequences have been expanded – or at least, they felt expanded from what I recalled – but none of it felt bad or out of place or too disruptive to the pacing.

Everything about Black Mesa up until the Xen chapters is pretty much perfect as far as a modern remake of Half-Life could be. I don’t remember the soldiers being quite so aggressive or mobile in the original – or headcrabs being quite so lively and damaging – so this remake does feel a step up in terms of difficulty from what I recall, but that’s no bad thing.

I think the most contentious issue people will have with Black Mesa is how the Xen chapters were remade. Actually, ‘remade’ is the wrong word because the Xen chapters in Black Mesa are so massively expanded and contain so much new content compared to the original that simply saying they’re a ‘reimagining’ would be an insult.

The Xen chapters in Black Mesa are almost like an entirely new game in and of themselves. Yes, they do touch upon the few key points of the original Xen levels, but that’s about it. And in many ways, the Xen chapters were the part of Black Mesa I was looking forward to the most. Why? Well, the Xen levels in the original were – and I think many would agree – the weakest part of the experience.

 

And when I reached Xen in Black Mesa I really was blown away by how good it looked and how much work had gone into not only expanding but completely overhauling this aspect of the original game. But a few hours later, I hate to say it, but I was getting kind of sick of it because Black Mesa was having such a good time with its new Xen content that it just didn’t want to end.

Sequences began to drag on for far too long and the novelty began to wear off. Because for all the weakness of the original Xen levels, they were at least fairly short and that made sense – because by the time you reach Xen you feel like the game should be wrapping up. It’s the final act. But not in Black Mesa. In Black Mesa, entering Xen is more like the half-way mark.

Okay, maybe not quite, but that’s what it feels like. Because like the original, once you enter Xen in Black Mesa you feel it’s time for the game to wrapping things up. But it doesn’t. It just keeps going. I want to be clear that I don’t think any part of the new Xen is bad. But so much of it desperately needed trimming down or cutting out entirely.

 

It feels like the game needed someone to cast a critical eye over the Xen content and make cuts to trim it down to a more suitable size. Yes, it sucks if you’ve spent time crafting content that then gets cut but it feels like because they didn’t want to waste anything they’d done or upset anyone working on the project they just put it ALL in the game regardless of the impact on pacing.

The pacing in Xen in Black Mesa kind of sucks. By the time I hit the endless ‘sucked through a vent’ or ‘riding a conveyor’ sections I really was getting sick of it. Once again, nothing wrong with those sequences as such – they’re just far too long. It’s a shame because for me, the way they kill the pacing kind of spoils the experience.

I don’t want to spend any more time complaining about Xen in Black Mesa though because this remake is far more than that. It really is an impressive accomplishment and despite my issues with how Xen was handled it really is a fantastic way to experience the original Half-Life. And hey, I’m sure a lot of people won’t agree with me and actually wanted more Xen content. But those people are obviously wrong. If you’re a Half-Life fan, this is a must play.

8/10

Baldur’s Gate 3: First Impressions

Despite the overwhelmingly positive praise I’d seen lavished upon Baldur’s Gate 3 since its release out of early access, I was somewhat wary of picking it up. I’ve not played Baldur’s Gate 1 or 2 – although I certainly wouldn’t say you’d need to in order to enjoy this sequel – and I’m not very familiar with Dungeons & Dragons in terms of lore, systems or mechanics. I also – and this isn’t an absolute (no pun intended) – don’t tend to enjoy turn based combat or combat that features dice rolls.

So I was wary, but ultimately I decided I couldn’t not give the game a shot. And after playing BG3 for more than twenty hours I thought I’d share my initial impressions. And I must say, I’m actually quite surprised by what I like the most about the game and by what I’m not quite so enamoured with. Because those things are practically the opposite of what I expected.

I thought the aspect of BG3 I’d probably find the hardest to like would be the aforementioned combat but it’s easily my favourite part of the game. I do still find the DnD dice roll mechanics to be somewhat frustrating at times, but what won me over in the end was the fact that the system has so many options and so much variety.

I love combat systems that give me a lot of options and let me be creative and BG3 does a great job of both. This is a game where I’m happy to reload a fight several times to try different tactics to see what works best. I was worried that some longer fights – there was one where I was fighting 15 enemies at once – might drag on and get dull. But these are actually quite tense even on the default ‘balanced’ difficulty as you utilise your varied range of skills in clever and fun ways to succeed.

Admittedly, it takes a little time to click as you’re very limited in terms of skills and actions at the beginning of the game. But once you level up once or twice, the game really opens up and continues to open up with so many new ways to play, to approach combat and to build your character classes. I’m genuinely surprised by how much I’ve come to enjoy it – despite the occasionally annoying MISS MISS MISS streak.

The game gets off to a strong start despite the limited skills – at least in terms of narrative. For a player unfamiliar with DnD, I don’t think BG3 does the greatest job of explaining certain systems or mechanics. I initially wanted to play as a Wizard but was somewhat confused when being asked to pick spells in which the descriptions didn’t explain what various DnD terms – like ‘Advantage’ – meant practically in combat.

There are tool tip ‘trees’ you can follow that eventually give you some kind of answer, but that answer isn’t always clear. And I’m going to criticise BG3 for that – because I shouldn’t have to keep dropping out to search Google to understand what something means. And annoyingly, it often turns out that the answer is quite short and simple and could be easily presented as such, yet the game seems intent on obfuscating key information to an unnecessary degree.

I’m also not entirely convinced by the ‘rest’ system of ‘short’ and ‘long’ rests which yes – I get it’s a DnD thing – but I don’t think it necessarily translates well into gameplay. It’s something you’ll have to get used to – particularly early on when your skills are more limited, because you’ll need to rechange them after nearly every fight.

What works in a tabletop game doesn’t necessarily translate well into a video game and I’d rather see such systems tweaked to better accommodate the medium. If it were up to me I’d just remove the ‘short’ rest option entirely and have an automatic short rest ‘effect’ apply after every fight – including recharging spell slots. That would keep up the momentum and stop forcing you to go back to camp every time you run out of charges.

I’m also less than impressed by the current weapon and armour options I’ve discovered. Despite really enjoying the combat, I’m struggling to find gear that’s not only decent in terms of stats or abilities, but also cosmetics. In short, a lot of gear I’ve found looks like ass and doesn’t match visually at all. My character looks like a complete tool. I’m assuming (and hoping) I’ll get access to a lot more variety of gear as I progress.

The story, so far, has been intriguing. I’m enjoying it. And I’m impressed by how many ways there appear to be to approach and complete various quests. It’s hard to say for sure without a replay, but there does seem to be multiple ways to go about and complete the same objectives.

What I thought would be my favourite part of BG3 prior to playing was the companions but it turns out the opposite is true. I hate to say it, but I’m already kind of tired of some of the companions. I like Lae’zel the most because she’s the only one I don’t find dull, insufferable or whiny.

Gale seemed cool at first, but now keeps wanting to get me alone to show me his ‘magic trick’ and has a hump when I refuse. Shadowheart is rather bland and also whiny but maybe she’ll get better. There’s also a vampire elf who I found kind of irritating and some other guy whose name I can’t even remember because he’s so boring.

Now, to be fair, these are my first impressions and maybe these characters will grow on me over time. But the fact that I’m already skipping through some of their dialogue because I just don’t give a shit isn’t the greatest sign. I’m also disappointed by how little input or voice they have during key moments of the game. They just stand behind you like they don’t even exist regardless of what decisions you take.

Once again – first impressions – maybe this will change. But right now, all you get is a message that they ‘approve’ or ‘disapprove’. Why don’t they actually say something? They’ll sometimes have a comment to make after the fact, but it feels a little late and pointless by then. So yeah, I’m really not sold on the companions right now or how they’re integrated into the game.

Visually, BG3 looks very nice in terms of environments, but character models are a little rough – as are character animations. They can be very stiff and awkward. Facial expressions are also pretty bad at times. BG3 feels kind of dated on this front, but I can live with it. I’ve also already hit quite a few annoying bugs. None of these have been major issues and nearly all were fixed with a reload – but it’s worth pointing out.

Overall, I’m enjoying my time with BG3 but the game certainly has its flaws and shortcomings. I’m curious to see how it progresses and how my opinions might change on the aspects I’m not quite so enamoured with. I’ve still got a long way to go.