Space Marine II

 Blood for the blood god?

You don't always need that personal, intrinsic, connection to the source material in order to feel that crescendo in excitement around a new announcement. You just have to endure the endless references, the unsolicited loving call backs, the recommendations every other day. Not that I bemoan it all, that just shows someone out there really loves what they're talking about and if this property has fans that into it, then I can only assume it's worth at least a bit of the fuss. But then there's always that level of subdued fandom around Warhammer in particular, for which if a fan observes the slightest whiff of this topic they'll go on for hours, but they'll never go into their love unprompted. Perhaps that makes them one of the more polite nerd fandoms out there, but for me that made it hard to worm out what exactly it is that makes this universe so darn great. I want to join in on all the excitement guys; why won't you help me? Games, however, cannot by the very nature be quiet niche little projects going on in the corner out of my earshot; so I've made sure I'm receptive to hear all about this.

Warhammer has had something of a tumultuous history when it comes to adaptations from the tabletop to video games, or even decent support for the breadth of the tabletop source. Or rather, Warhammer 40k has those definers. Warhammer Fantasy was apparently so underloved that the owners, Game Workshop, turned around and rebooted that entire franchise. I don't even know how that works for a tabletop game! I mean, Wizards of the Coast don't even bother to wait until a new edition before making odd changes like subtly removing all references to evil races enslaving others for some quiet reason they refuse to clearly state. But Warhammer Fantasy must have been beyond saving if it needed a whole 'Age of Sigmar' resurrection. 40k, however, has been alive and kicking for a while now, but not quite always as 'lively' as some fans it to be. I may not be a fan myself but even I hear mumbles of certain factions going totally underrepresented, popular ignored corners of the lore and, most pertinently, a licence which is rented out more than the village bike.

For 40k alone there are VR Games, lane defence games, a virtual snakes-and-ladders style game, twin sticks, 2D side scrollers, a card game, an FPS looter-style game and 4X strategy titles out the arse- including one made by... Steel Wool Studios? ("Great going, Supersh*t. How'd ya f**k that one up so badly?") And this diversity is by no means part of some far-reaching unified mastermind plan for the franchise, it's the result of everyone and their mother being given a go at the franchise. Including mobile makers. Because nothing says "We respect our brand" like letting the leeches on mobile sink their claws into it. (I see that Game Workshop apprenticed under EA in the school for 'How to grow your brand as quickly and unscrupulously as possible'.) But with the scattergun spray of misses, the 'throw everything at the wall approach' did land a few significant successes; the famous Dawn of War series for one, and the less-famous-unless-you're-in-the-right-circles: Space Marine.

Now the original was a game about being a Space Marine, very straightforward, but the visceral, in-your-face, and exciting way that Relic realised that concept stood out from the crowd for a lot of fans. And that's because it was an adrenaline-fuelled third-person action game which sent players out with their Chainswords and machines guns to rip and tear through enemies in bloody dances of well-animated ultraviolence. Even just watching some snippets of gameplay it's very easy to see why a game like this would do so well for a franchise frequently dominated by more off-hand strategy style games. Sure, ordering a marine to slay a unit of Orks and watching them mop up the scene from the your detached, sky-high vantage point is just fine, but taking control of the man in blue, emblazoned, power armour and driving the response of each powerful swing with each satisfying press of a key is a whole other world entirely. And Relic must have pulled it off well for the amount of reverence that original regularly receives.

Of course, it only makes sense that Game Workshop would commission a sequel- 10 years later. (Was the original a commercial flop or something? What the hell?) And that exact sequel set off fireworks with it's debut during the game awards, even if what we saw contained just the slightest sliver of real, glorious, action. (A little bit of gameplay is better than none at all, afterall.) Even from an outsider I have to admit, seeing the Power Armoured Space Marines drop into a battlefield and carve their bloody path, even in a CG trailer, made for some striking visuals, and the trailer itself was exceptionally animated. If this is the sort of effort which is going into just the showmanship of presenting the game than it makes one wonder for what calibre of surprises that are being kept behind for the full game, waiting to blow fans away. (You've got to have some huge, impressive set pieces tucked away if you want to drum up hype in this day and age.)

Saber Interactive are the guys behind this one, and if that name rings a slight bell in the vast recess of your recollection only to go dead the moment you go and look, that's likely because they were responsible for the flash-in-the-pan World War Z game. Although according to what I can find on the Internet, it would appear they have an insanely eclectic history of helping out in other game franchises from Vampyr and the Ghostbusters Video game to Crysis and Halo. So don't let that one commercial flop fool you, these guys have experience and enduring talent behind their walls; no doubt. They may not be the original developers, but if you want to give the sequel to what is considered one of the best Warhammer games of all time to anyone, it's going to be someone which the sort of resume that Saber has. That doesn't make any guarantee, but it certainly tips the odds in the game's favour.

And the public seems to have heartedly accepted what they've seen thusfar, and it's not hard to see why. The gameplay shown off so far is about substantive enough to fit inside of a thimble, but it's all incredibly striking. Watching the player bat off swarming creatures like he's recreating the front cover of DOOM has an insane amount of movement all on the same screen at once, that one slightly lingering shot of the wider battle is buzzing with small loving details filling a huge portrait of indomitable scale, and there appears to be a jetpack. Not enough games out there have jetpacks, which makes me want them all the more whenever and wherever I see them. Even 'Warhammer-Community.Com' is confidant enough in the game as it is so far to call it 'More epic than it's predecessor in everyway'; which is quite the challenge when you acknowledge the insane reverence that predecessor still receives. I hope that confidence pays off for them.

As you've likely picked up from the way I'm talking about this, I would love to get into this sort of universe and it's games like these, rather than the hugely complex RTS 4X games, (I was always bad at RTS anyway, to be frank) which provide that open window. And when these games are fitted with this almost AAA gleam to them, that reflects very highly on the strength of the brand behind it. Does this mean that I'll someday get to a point where those terribly awkward 40K Youtube comedy skits I sometimes come across does anything other than make me cringe out of my skin? Probably not, you have to be reborn into the fandom to become that invested, but maybe once I've delved into this game and maybe given Dawn of War another shot (I know I'll need to) I'll be able to watch 'Astartes' again and appreciate it for more than just the outstanding animation and modelling work. So there's evidence of real time perspective conversion before your very eyes, proof of the transformative power of a damn good game announcement.

Fallout New Vegas 2. Yes, really.

 Be still my beating heart

So I know fairly well that I have sort of a precedent here; I've lost my heart and mind over the prospect of a sequel to seminal role playing masterpiece 'Fallout New Vegas' once before, during the great Obsidian buyout by Microsoft. Of course, this coincided nicely with the Bethesda consolidation to make sure that both Fallout and Obsidian, the creators of that original, were finally under the same roof so that if they ever wanted to, the option to go back to the franchise who's world they rocked was fully open to them. And after Fallout 4, a game which forgot it was an RPG, and Fallout 76, a loosely strung-together block of scripts that forgot it was a game; we really needed a return to Devs who just knew what they were doing the whole time, you know? People who had history creating the Fallout franchise, understood the areas to focus on which made this franchise special, and were brave enough to push the world into new areas and reignite the fandom. And now it looks like that might be a reality.

Now of course, I'm a total hopeless romantic for stuff like this, so if I'm given the sliver of a whiff of more Fallout, you can bet I'm going to fall over myself being ready to believe it. A guy in a Freddy Fazbear fur-suit behind the local Pizza Hut at 4 in the morning telling me that Fallout New Vegas 2 was right around the corner would be enough to make me pump my hands in the air screaming "Yeah baby! This is what I've been waiting for- this is what it's all about!" But this isn't just idle speculation, allegedly. What we've got today is an honest to goodness, apparent, source who, potentially, has a track record for reliability, I'm told. (I'm trying to cover my bases, but god I want to believe this with all my heart so bad!) Word is that stupidly early talks are being had right now to make a sequel to New Vegas, and if that is even remotely true than let this explosion of tacit excitement be undeniable affirmation that we fans all want this! Let Microsoft hear that this needs to happen, sooner rather than later!

Famously, Fallout New Vegas was a game made in about 18 months using the tools left over from the development of Fallout 3. That original game was a powerhouse in it's own right with many at the time rightly considering it a masterpiece pinnacle of RPG action adventure gaming. That title lasted about as long as it took for us to have a tangible example of what the best in this field could look like, when New Vegas was released in October 2010. I personally remember being very dubious about a new Fallout game, having grown to love and thus be extremely protective of Fallout 3. I felt like this was an attempt to replace that game, to overwrite it's place in history. And... I guess it kinda was. New Vegas reminded us what it looked like to traverse a post war 'society', not just a collection of stragglers. (so more Fallout 2 than Fallout 1.) It gave us a more complex narrative with branching paths, greater customisation, supremely evolved characters and powerful enough tools to mod the game to heaven and back again. (Fallout New Vegas still gets new mods to this day; that's a sign of a game with staying power in the community.)

But then, of course, the base release of Fallout New Vegas fell just short of the requirements for the staff over at Obsidian to get their bonus from Bethesda. There was a deal in place that the reviews for the game need to hit a certain average point threshold to make Obsidian eligible for their bonus, and it was threshold they proved to be just shy of. Now, of course, there was a specific deal made in good faith and Obsidian staff have reiterated again and again how there are no hard feelings over that, not lingering and not even at the time; but for the memes it is funny to go back and say "Damn, if only Bethesda had given Obsidian their bonus; we'd have a whole series of Vegas-style Fallout games by now..." In truth, Bethesda probably just wanted stricter control of one of their flagship franchises and Obsidian were too busy to entreat Bethesda sincerely for another project. Which is fair, what with Obsidian working hard to summon necromantic eldritch energies to resurrect the Classic Role Playing Game genre back from the dead and thrust it into the mainstream. (For which they've done beautifully, by the way. Pillars is a hit and Tyranny is one of my new favourite games ever.)

Fallout New Vegas 2, which is all we can call this game at such an early stage of negotiations, actually has a world of expectation waiting for it should the project go ahead; because the very idea of this sub-entry to the Fallout series has unwittingly adopted a sort-of unblemished messianic reverence in the community that is sure to be daunting to approach. People think of New Vegas as the antidote to all of Fallout 3's shortcomings, when the truth is that is was just a vast improvement upon everything that previous game was. Ask reviewers from the time and they'll attest that New Vegas was so buggy they needed to call the local exterminators after each play session, and to be honest I think a bit of confirmation bias might have played into that. I mean the game had it's issue with bugs, sure, and it fell apart when you started modding unless you bent over backwards to support the engine with fixes and capability patches, but the base game wasn't that bad. Unless you played on Playstation. Oh god, the game was crash-ridden on Playstation.

For now all we can expect, and rub our hands excitedly about, is a new story set on the West Coast of America and perhaps loosely following the expansionism of the NCR. But the great thing about Obsidian is that wherever they go next, what new factions or conflicts they bring to light, will probably be so fresh we can't even take an educated guess right now. I hope they'll be another conflict with many different sides that the player can pursue like there was in Vegas, but I'd like there to be a bit more nuance tied into these characters so that it's not quite so easy to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad ones. Sure the NCR had their bad slivers and the Legion had it's slight advantages; but I don't think anyone could seriously scratch their heads and wonder who's the cleaner-cut of the two. I want the sort of complexity that has you flip-flopping until the very last moment, like the conflict between the various struggling factions in 'Pillars 2: Deadfire'.

I would also adore a take on DLC even reminiscent of what Obsidian did with New Vegas; because that was an exciting bread-crumb trail of teases and pay-offs better than what any poxxy live service has done in the time since. From the moment we finished Dead Money, the post-game credits screen was teasing fans about some world-shattering battle which would occur in the last DLC which hadn't even been announced yet. And the two next DLC's had references and teases about some shadowy figure called Ulysses that was hunting our Courier for reasons that we didn't know. That's three whole DLC's worth of build-up to a confrontation that inspired data-miners, speculation videos, excitable whispers, and everything of the like all up until the release of the 'Lonesome Road' DLC. It was exceptional. I need something like that once more, just to remind me what it's like to be excited again.

Fallout New Vegas 2 could very really be a reality at some point in the future, and I have dreamt about this so much over the past decade that it seems almost surreal to admit it all could come alive. I've had so many ideas and plots, idealisations and suppositions, that it's almost a shame that this substance-less dream phantom of a title will someday take shape, because the ethereal wisp seemed so pure. But would I rather have the dream or the reality? And with that choice there's very little conflict- I'd take the real thing any day of the week- warts and all. So now that I've got myself, and hopefully you, all worked up; prepare to wait another three or so years until we actually hear if the thing got greenlit! (God this industry moves so slow sometimes.)

Cyberpunk is still being made apparently.

'We've got patches for days!'

People have the gall to get on Larian's case for taking their time before bringing out the 1.0 of their game in order to ensure everything works in the immediate, meanwhile they're more than happy to celebrate the fact that Cyberpunk 2077 seems to still be in it's beta stage almost a year after release and with everyone already having combed the game dry of story and secrets. (There really ain't no justice in this world.) And so CDPR, deep in their endless apology tour for the absolute state of their latest flagship, has bought the community their brand new heap of content in the biggest update yet; Cyberpunk 2077 patch 1.5. And with that came the exceedingly bold claim that the game was now worthy of being called an 'RPG'. There's a larger discussion to be had there about exactly what constitutes an 'RPG', although wherever we fall on that matter I think it's hard to insist that Patch 1.5 in particular added that special spark which pushed the gameplay other the edge. (Either Cyberpunk was a true RPG before the patch, or it still isn't.)

And though the elitist's RPG is still something that paupers like me can only watch from the sidelines and go 'huh, that looks cool. Wish I could play something like that', even from afar I can recognise cool steps of progress being made that I honestly wasn't expecting. We're seeing stuff like multiple apartments being added into the game so that V can go shopping for major home upgrades, although there still isn't really a reason to visit your home so the functionality of that is questionable, but the thought it nice. There's a few more customisation options in the game allowing players to change up some decorations in their apartment or fix up their character's appearance mid-game, although this is customisation for a first person character, not for the many vehicles and guns that feature much more prominently in gameplay, so again: not exactly world changing. And now there are honest to goodness reaction splashes when you shoot at water! No drawback here, this is something that was honestly, deeply missed from the original and it's just a joy to have it here and looking half-decently implemented too.

CDPR have sort of taken an approach to patch delivery that is reminiscent of a company slapping down their brand new 'full release' or DLC package, in that they've laid out the broad strokes of what has changed but left the community to figure-out the specifics. In principle I understand why; they want people to dive in and play the thing for themselves rather than breeze through patch notes and go 'Huh, that's cool. I'm come back when it's finished.' but it does make me wonder if this is going to be the journey of Cyberpunk forever more. I mean sure, there's going to be actual DLC added to the game eventually, that much is a given; but for now the team seem content in providing technical fix updates (with a few snuck in tangible surprises in there too) as the content updates, in a manner one would expect from, again, an indie beta project chugging along it's roadmap. I'm not opposed to this approach per se, at least not yet whilst we're all still untangling what this means for the relationship between CDPR players and the company, but it feels atypical for the moment. For whatever that's worth.

One effect has been that this 1.5 update has stretched out the renewed spark of interest in the brand, so kudos to the team there for nailing their marketing. Although this has dropped in between the release of Elden Ring and... other developments... so maybe a bit of wider spatial awareness should be accounted for in the future from these guys. Heck, just earlier today I heard about even more perfunctory little addendums into the update that snuck under the radar, such as the apparent inclusion of the 2018 E3 trailer's female V face, which many preferred over the redesigned face that ended up in the full release. And, of course, the team even added in the aerial take-down for the Mantis Blades that featured in that trailer all the way back when the ability to crawl across walls like a spider was still in the game. (Still can't figure out why they cut that; it's not as though this neatly constructed world would have exploded with it.) All of which are exciting, they're little gifts from the mouths of community directly back into their pockets.

And I think that's the keyword to take away from this update; the community. Just about everything we've seen added for the 1.5 patch has been responding to complaints from the community. Complaints about housing, the lack of mid-game customisation, water physics, car AI, and missing stuff from 2018. Now in a way it would almost be impossible for CDPR to create a patch that addressed something not mentioned by the community, because the profile of the release coupled with the ferocity of the backlash meant that just about every shortcoming Cybperunk had was blasted on the jumbo screen for all to see, but there's something excessively 'for the community' driving this bunch of content in particular. A lot of it, customisation in particular, is decently immaterial to the meat of the game, but people asked for it so the team worked on it. That's a lot of power to give to the community and I hope CDPR know what they're doing by going this route, because this method of crowd appeasement will not end until the game lives up to the promises it made before release, and considering how lofty those promises were I don't think that will ever be feasibly possible.

So now I think the question that we're all going to be coming back to is quite simply; where are we heading to with all of this? What is the state of quality that CDPR wants to achieve before they deem the game built-up enough to move on? Because we're at the point now that those who gave up on Cyberpunk not too long after launch, deeming it not worthy of repeat playthroughs in order to witness all that they missed out on the first time, are getting anxious for that two DLCs we were promised, or heck even Ciri's debut in 'The Witcher 4' on the distant horizon. We've moved past fundamental fixes being the main draw of these patches and onto extremely lightweight features- (the dynamic map icon function is pretty cool but I'm not doing front-flips about it) so then where is the cut off? Is it here? Patch 2.0? Patch 3.0? When is it finally; Good enough?

To which I suppose the answer is: when the game is decent enough to support whatever wild DLC plans that CDPR are working on; because I can just about guarantee that whatever ideas the team were playing around with before launch have been drastically reworked and scaled-up in a hail-mary attempt to win back that reputation for quality which was decidedly lost in the whole debacle. Does that mean coding into the game the ability for NPCs to enter cars outside of scripted interactions? Or putting in systems resembling an honest-to-goodness police system rather than the placeholder scaffolding that the game has featured since launch? How about car chases? Pedestrian AI improvements? Or does that literally just mean getting the game stable enough and decent enough to support a new content drop for a vastly different DLC area to be added in? There really is no telling at this point.

With all this I have to ask myself, as I do every update, if now is the time to finally pick up Cyberpunk 2077. And this time I have to admit that I am a little tempted, and maybe if everything else happening around the industry and outside it wasn't going on right now, and the game was seeing a steep discount, (no, the current Steam discount doesn't even nearly cut it) I'd take the plunge. But I can't see the fervour which the game demands being met anytime soon, not until we officially enter that new chapter of the life cycle with that DLC launch. And some love to the world simulation elements would be cool as well, but each to their own on that regard. I suppose it's gratifying to see CDPR stick to their guns and work upon the game until they're blue-in-the-face, and I'm starting to come back around to hoping everything works out for them in the long run. Hoping that the game magically slots into place and earns back all the cred it lost out in in December 2020. But just when I get to wanting to route for them, I turn around and remember that Elden Ring is out, and it becomes hard not to loss interest, just shrug my shoulders and say that maybe it's all just too little too late.

I never followed up on New World, now did I?

 Where are things at?

New world; the Amazon wow-killer. I jest, of course, the very idea of a 'wow killer' is fanciful wish making from those desperate to house the next billion dollar MMO franchise in their stable. But New World did certainly have lofty expectations shooting around it's noggin, and high peaks it wanted to top. I wasn't quite so clued up on everything about New World when I last spoke about it because I was never interested in an Amazon-made game and thus I ignored it, but watching it's fascinating trajectory over the past few months has aroused my curiosity as an observer, if not a player. Something about the promise this game once made and the way that has evolved over the years resulted in an initial stamping of greatness that has slowly peeled away and diminished more and more into this meagre state, and I find that just fascinating. How could a game that had the world's ear for a moment fall so spectacularly? And can it ever recover?

First of all I'm going to start by mentioning what New World initially sold itself as, because this is a very important ingredient in what went wrong. New World was a going to be a full loot PVP MMO. If you don't think that sounds ludicrously risky for a budding AAA game studio to slap together as their first blockbuster game, then that's because I haven't explained those terms to you yet. A full loot PVP MMO is a massively multiplayer game built and geared around the action of players fighting one another, rather than AI enemies, dungeons and big raids, with the kicker being that when any player dies, they drop everything they had to be looted by other players. (hence 'full loot'.) The intention of this is obviously to make death punishing and something to be avoided, but it takes a very special type of person to dedicate themselves to a world like that.

Essentially, Amazon were thinking of a world where players would go out and craft, build equipment, resource collect, amass huge towns with their guilds and then gamble it all in warfare against other players. If they die, then they could start all over again from scratch. Sure, maybe the player 's skill level's might have improved, making the resource gathering just a tiny bit quicker, but you're still getting as close to square one as you get upon every death, and that makes failure cost a pretty penny in the most valuable commodity we have as humans: time. Incidentally, it's all of that risk, alongside the typically unfriendly, elitist community that games like this amass, which makes them usually pretty unpopular MMOs. The biggest I can think of at a moment's notice would be Mortal Online. (Although when I google the term I see Albion Online in the list. I don't know if that's a mis-categorisation or if Albion has been doing bank with Full Loot all this time and I've just never noticed.) And anyone who's actually played New World might have noticed; the game isn't that at all. And that's because things changed.

Whether it's from the feedback in their early testing, or maybe someone in the research department actually took the time to go out and check how much MMOs in this genre can typically hope to make, but Amazon made a pretty big heel turn towards leaning back into mass appeal- but needless to say that change in direction came a little too late. They had the bones of a game, they'd created enough to show it off to people, but now the mandate came down that this carefully crafted battlegrounds for PVP clan warfare now had to have AI enemies, and dungeons, and non-PVP progression, and essentially had to be a completely new game slapped onto of this one. Now I know that the Amazon Game Studios team are good, but they aren't wizards, so the fact that they put out a game which scored decently out the gate with critics and newbies alike is great- the subsequent fall off when people realised the content in this game was about as deep as a puddle is predictable. Like Anthem all over again, an insanely ambitious game genre not treated with the oodles of dedicated commitment and planning that it deserves.

The beginning was grand, as befitting a project with the sort of scope that Amazon was shooting for. 100,000 players, people enjoying their time, big name streamers having just been driven from WOW, sizing up the offerings here for their next big full time MMO. But then the cracks started to show. The content provided lacked variety, enemies played exactly the same, content dried up considerably towards the midgame, the main narrative didn't have nearly enough steam to guide the player until they were comfortable with all aspects of the gameplay. The endgame loomed in the far distance, most players didn't want to grind in order to reach it despite the pleas of fans who insisted that was where the real game started, and little by little the player numbers dwindled. Now I didn't think anything of this, because MMO's always have big drop offs as the curious peel off to reveal the dedicated subset. But New World just didn't stop shedding players.

And that might have been because of the seemingly endless bad news that the game has received day in and day out. There was the reporting exploit wherein players could mass report good players in order to get them temp banned and win company wars, only possible because of the automated reporting system. (Which is significant given that New World's staff insisted previously that all report cases were handled manually.) There were the failures in revenue streams that lead to mass deflation to the point where the 'repair' function because useless because it cost precious money so everyone just replaced their gear, an newcomer-unfriendly barter economy was set up by the community to keep resources running somewhat smoothly and faction wars toned down because of how expensive it was to keep territory tax up. And then there was the content creator who New World banned for exposing an exploit for them.

We've seen a drop-off rate of around 90% of the original player base, which isn't quite as bad as it sounds because they had so many players to begin with, but on paper that sounds downright dire. 10,000 active players is more than enough to sustain any middle-of-the-road MMO, provided that Amazon can keep them or win back others to replace those they may lose. Of course, to do that we're going to need Amazon to fix the one big problem that New World had suffered from over these few months: no new content. Not even a hint of new content. For a game as starved for things to do as New World, it's almost more important that new activities are added than it is for the rough patches to be smoothed out, because every month that people come back to the same lean game they bought at launch, those people slowly lose just that bit more faith in the plan of action that live service and MMO style games promise. 

So New World is in a tough state right now, but it's not totally slipped down the pit of irredeemable despair. There is a way out and forward, should the publisher Amazon have the faith to dedicate the resources to make it. New World crossed a huge milestone when it entered the public consciousness, and though I still have no love for the idea of a successful Amazon Game Studios property, I can't just pretend that this one doesn't have a future. But then again, so did Crucible, but Amazon just wasn't prepared to stick through it's problems. At the end of the day the biggest weight on this game's shoulders is a conflict in identity that I don't see getting resolved unless the team falls on one side or the other definitively. Either they retreat back to the original vision of a PVP MMO game, maybe not with Full-loot per se, but definitely with PVE content removed or heavily reduced; or they need to dedicate more to the wider appeal of a PVE MMO by flooding this game with enough content to compete with other PVE MMO's. (The later of which would be a huge undertaking, but would certainly prove the most profitable in the long run.) Which route will Amazon end up taking?

Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 7: Absolute Frenzy

Smashing Goblins

In an exciting whirlwind flurry of activity from an seemingly unintentional tease tweet, to an official announcement to a panel and sudden drop of the patch the very same day, Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access Patch 7 has launched for everyone to greedily devour in another playthrough of Chapter 1. This time the big addition to the game is the classic Barbarian class, complete with rage states, two subclasses and, my favourite, aesthetic character flourishes tied to the subclass discipline you picked. (A few extra customisation options are always appreciated.) There's also a completely reworked UI available to try out that goes a good distance to fix the whole 'mess of clutter' inventory screen from before, and this may be incidental but I've personally noticed huge optimisation buffs. It's not perfect, but I'm actually seeing smooth and steady framerates in some early sections and that just wasn't so much as feasible last time. And last but by no means least, we have the improvised weapon ability which allows anyone to grab something from the environment and use it as an weapon. Best used, in my mind, by literally picking up one enemy and chucking them at another! This also comes with a reworking to the 'throw item' mechanic, so that now you can throw a weapon and actually inflict the intended damage that a throwing axe or knife would. (And weapon throwing is even animated!)

But what about the big one? The feature that'll bring all the excitable BG fans to the yard? Yes, the Barbarian class doesn't drastic change up the fundamentals of gameplay the game but it adds flavourful options for aggressive support, frontline tanking and tough damage dealing. I like to think of Barbarians as a fighter class, but with a lot more burning fury and rustic personality stirred into the pot for good measure. This isn't even one of the classes you have to finagle around with the Early Access limitations in order to wring a decent damage potential out of them, the Barbarian comes pretty packed out of the box with Rage state, (buffs physical damage resistance, advantage on strength checks and saving throws and a small blanket buff to damage dealt) a natural trait that provides a constitution-based buff to Armor class whenever no body armour is worn and a slew of powerful subclass bonuses which can easily turn any old Barbarian into a powerhouse. (I've also noticed that Larian has thrown at least one enemy NPC Barbarian into the world, so watch out for that.)

Playing my third BG3 character, a 'blind' Githyanki Barbarian called 'Carinie No-eyes', has won me some pretty impressive early impressions already. Being able to charge right in the middle of the fray in order to draw attention, coupled with one of the subclasses (I picked Wolf Heart) which gives attack advantage against all enemies 2 meters away from my Barbarian, pretty much instantly makes me a heavy duty support for all of my teammates, increasing their chance to hit and crit everyone just by standing in the middle of a group. With this vanguard playstyle I've felt a lot more encouraged to try more violent pathways in quests, including starting a civil war in the Druids cove, (which I don't exactly recommend. Twenty plus NPCs in a single fight makes the turn-based battles take forever) marching up to that Ogre trio and just going swinging for a bloodbath and slapping an Owl Bear to death for no other reason than to see if I could. (Barely- but 'yes I can'.) If you're looking for a confidence boosting class to try some of the more action heavy alternative quest options, I don't know if it's going to get better than the Barbarian class right now. (Maybe the Paladin once that launches. I suppose we'll see.)

And then we have the UI overhaul. Oh, what an exciting little surprise treat this is! Gone are the days of blocky crowed features littering screen real estate, here are the user-friendly, and a tiny bit stylish, sleek menus with clearly labelled tabs and filters so that you easily relate what abilities count as actions and what are bonus actions, and what are class abilities and what are learned abilities and just all the small incidental you need to get a handle of your class quickly. I also think some of the tooltips have been rewritten so that important infomation is displayed, such as moves that take up your concentration slot actually listing that fact, which is a godsend for me. (I was always messing that up.) The turn-order UI is very different now, with it all being listed in a row instead of clumped in the corner. And maybe this was with the old version and I'm just noticing now, but if you hover over the portraits in the turn-order, you can see the move resources that each enemy still has available, just in case you forget who's expended their reaction move. The inventory is a lot nicer, and sports a search bar, but I still default to the team inventory screen most of the time; I don't know why we even need individual character inventory screens. Shop interfaces haven't been touched yet however, they still need some loving. 

'Improvised weapons' is something that I've heard the community asking after for a while now, and it's implantation is about as supplementary as you can expect. The ability to pick up and chuck things makes for a nice effect, but it's typically not that much more useful then weapons and damage items you have on your person. Being capable of picking up and throwing people on the otherhand (permitting your character is strong enough to lift them) has all sorts of utilities. You can pick up a goblin and chuck it into it's pack to do small amounts of damage, but more importantly set-it up for a large AOE incoming from a teammate. You can chuck enemies into fire or acid pools to force a debuff on them. And I suppose you could theoretically throw an enemy off a ledge, but I haven't had the chance to try this out myself yet. Now all of these scenarios' were possible with 'push' (with the exception of chucking one enemy at another in order to deal damage. That one is new.) but that's situational and you could only take advantage of the opportunities the enemy was presenting for you. Now you can forge those moments for yourself provided you're dealing with a brawny character. Now all Larian need to do is fix the physics engine they broke, presumably with this feature. (Spiders no longer fall when you take their web bridge floors out from under them. I'm sensing a hotfix incoming.)

Another little thing that Swen snuck into the Patch 7 stream without extrapolating on, was the plethora of new magical equipment in the game that use new keywords. Now new magical equipment is always exciting, and Baldur's Gate 3 has magical tools that honestly eclipse anything that BG 1 or 2 was offering early game. Now we're looking at items which really change up your playstyle by encouraging you to play totally differently in order to benefit from their power. Point in case being the momentum keyword that I'm still learning about, but which seems to want the player to take active risks early on, at least with the item I got. I also found an item which might have been in Patch 6, but I still think is super cool to talk about anyway, being a pair of boots that task you with using 'dash', and everytime you do that character builds electric static charge that then get's distributed into the next person they hit. How cool is that?

 

Finally, at least for what I'm willing to cover, there are the optimisation fixes which comes as Larian better familiarises themselves with the lighting remake they did in the last patch. My game has buttery smooth moments now, which it never did before what with my less-than-fresh hardware; although I have switched that up with a lot more crashes. I'm talking about six in an hour, and that was mostly due to a save that corrupted out of nowhere, but somehow that makes the situation a little bit worse. Seems I've traded out poor performance for poor stability, and being unable to reliably play the game does sort of edge my class of hardware out of the target demographic unfortunately. Is the thing ever going to run okay for people like me, who have the recommended specs but only just? I dunno, it certainly seems like we're holding on by a thread with these issues. (It's a lot more of a pressing complication than the floating spider bug or the false positive files warning in the launcher.)

I've just started my Barbarian journey but, crashes willing, I'm very encouraged to stick it all out to the end and see where we end up. Because once again the experience feels fresh and that's one of the things I laud Baldur's Gate 3 for the most. The presentation and compositions of the fights feels endlessly cinematic, sure, the detail and design of the world is complex and tucked with enough alternate paths and clever walkarounds to rival the best stealth-action title, but it's the amount of gameplay variety introduced by each class and race which makes me giddy. If they can keep this up until release (and maybe even add in the Dragonborn race if we're really nice and eat all our vegetables) then we're going to get one of the most replayable, variety packed RPGs (not just CRPGs) of all time. But we'll have to wait until 2023 to find out... bugger...

The Tutorials Tutorial: The 3D Fallouts

War, War never changes.

Nothing and nothing, but nothing, is as important to the accessibility and adoption of any game with aspirations on mainstream appeal, as those beginning few hours. I'm talking introduction, tutorial and launching off points. If that start of the game doesn't manage to grab, intrigue or encourage the player than they just aren't going to take the time to stick around until the twilight hours for the super special mind-blower climax which totally redeems the whole experience. I mean... unless they happen to be me, because I'm a weirdo like that, but it's probably not wise to assume every consumer is as frivolous with their freetime as myself. And in my mind what makes that beginning hour or so particularly tricky, as well as important, is that it's when the designers need to both hook you into the early narrative as well as arm you with that fundamental knowledge you're going to need in order to carry you through the rest of your play experience. It's a balancing act of information and teaching, and one developer who have nailed this down to a fine art in my opinion, is Bethesda.

Contrary to their cleverly engrained action set piece tutorial intro from Skyrim, Fallout 3 is iconically slower paced and more methodical, and that's because it was elevated through the simply ingenious framing device of the player literally experiencing the life of their characters stretching from birth to death. (Well, in the vanilla version of the game it would be birth to death. 'Broken Steel' borked the neatness of that.) And so, quite literally, the game can take you through every single tutorial they have to offer and merely disguise it as another scene of you growing up. Of course, being professionals, Bethesda weren't that obvious with their implementations, and thus they did endeavour to ensure that every scene of the Vault Dweller's childhood was fuelled with narrative purpose too, but in concept alone the whole 'early years in the vault' has to be one of the most slam dunk marriages of narrative and functional tutorial in all of gaming and I just want to gush about it for a bit.

So like I alluded, shortly after being introduced to the world of Fallout 3 by the iconic narration of Ron Pearlman, the player is immediately thrown into the most immersive scenario one could possible expect from a first person RPG: their own birth. Functionally it's all rather straight-forward, you get popped out and then design how your adult self will eventually look through the use of hand-wavy science-magic something (with the game even taking count of your ethnicity so it can dub your Liam Neeson-voiced father with that same race) The next glimpse comes from the toddler years, and it's here where the smart design starts to really shine. So like every single game under the sun, Fallout 3 teaches the player how to move. (I know: someone would complain if games stopped doing this eventually, but sometimes it makes me wonder what the point of standardised control schemes even is.) But then you're taught how to pick-up and throw toys out of your toybox, showing off the physics engine and teaching the player of this functionally perfunctory, but still pretty fun, mechanic. (Every Scrolls-Out player has spent a morbid minute playing with the physics of a corpse they recently made.)

Then we have the actual building of the player's stat sheet integrated into the immersive setting of the game! (I don't know if I'm adequately displaying how cool I find that.) The player reads a children's book which rudimentarily explains the relevance of each stat before asking the player to lay their stat point spread, that's character creation effort I've never seen a CRPG put in! It carries over to the next snapshot of life too, with the game showing the player their young kid years. Here you're introduced to the Pipboy, the concept of branching dialogue trees and basic consequences and even a little bit of shooting. You're getting how this works by now, right? Bethesda feed you formative character scenes whilst slotting in tutorials to systems or game concepts wherever they might naturally fit. It's a total masterclass of immersive introduction and the designers don't make it feel like the narrative has slowed down for lessons in the slightest. (I actually think it does a better job than Skyrim at maintaining a consistent momentum.)

New Vegas, on the otherhand, is seemingly intentionally barebones by comparison. You have the same maintained precedent, of character sheet building wrapped into the immersion of the world, but it's less intertwined in the momentum of the moment. You know immediately when you're in a tutorial area and thankfully don't have to wait too long before you're let loose. As for gameplay tutorials... well the game teaches you how to move. And... that's about it. Yeah, New Vegas is a game that relies on it's similarity to Fallout 3, and the knowledge of that largely-shared audience, to justify cutting back almost totally on the tutorials. All of New Vegas' gameplay tutorials are optional and mostly geared to introducing players to New Vegas specific mechanics, rather than teaching the basics. This has the benefit of giving the player more early freedom, but the drawback of making each 'tutorial area' stick out like a sore, momentum-halting, thumb. Still, it works perfectly fine for a first playthrough and that's all that matters at the end of the day.

Fallout 4 is a curious one, because having been made after Skyrim, you can see the ways in which Bethesda wanted to try and marry the two styles of Skyrim's intro and Fallout 3's. You have the contextually-sound character creation mixed with the immediately core-plot-relevant set pieces, high on the adrenaline and excitement, to try and teach-the-player in the action. Escaping Vault 111 is basically Fallout 4's version of Helgen, with more of a dynamic twist to the way systems are introduced rather than having an instructor standing over your shoulder literally telling you what to do. There are terminals to hack, locks to pick, and even one higher level closet with a powerful weapon inside that exists just to show you the limitations of your exploration at this early level so you know the sorts of rewards you're working towards.

Of course there is no single 'right way' to introduce these game as beyond sharing the same world and genre, they're all vastly different in the scopes of their regions, stories, and themes; but that's the kind of crappy toeing-the-line answer that'll net you decent marks during a Secondary School English exam. It's much more fun to pick a blanket favourite out of the 3D Fallout games, which leads me to comparing benefits. Fallout 3 has a tutorial that is immersively baked-in to the early game in an unmatchable way, however that does equate to a pretty bloated first hour of tutorial and introduction. Fallout New Vegas is hands-off and largely optional, but the tutorial sections stick out so much you'll probably never opt to endure them again on repeat playthroughs. Fallout 4's is exciting, integrated and forward moving for the plot, however it toes the divide between too long and too frustrating to go through again willingly. Ultimately I'd have to go with my main man Fallout New Vegas on this one, purely because I value replayability so highly, even if I think Fallout 3's intro is a freakin' masterpiece.

The whole point of a well crafted tutorial is the way in which it props up accessibility, for as many people as possible to engage with and enjoy the game. But so many ingredients go into the recipe of 'accessibility', clarity, brevity, optionals, integration, that the idea of hitting perfection is nigh on impossible. But then, perfection is forever an impossibility, is it not? That's what makes life so fun! Bethesda does have this type of interactive tutorial that resonates so clear and deeply with my personal perception of what makes a good tutorial, however I looked forward to being presently schooled by other approaches to this integral game design step when I soon expand my horizons into other sorts of games. And as we explore ever deeper, I want you to ponder, just as I do, how the art of the tutorial comes together to create that ideal tee-in to the games that we love.

Do we have too many series?

 Or too little originals?

This is a blog about video games. Ostensibly. That basic defining attribute seems to wane and flutter with the consistency of the sea's waves in the Bermuda triangle, which is to say I pretty much default to putting whatever I want on here, when I want. However, this topic in particular does actually spread a little further and touch on general themes of pop culture and entertainment in general; however to keep this from becoming one of those ungainly 100 paragraph blogs that I've done once or twice in the past, I'm limiting scope to gaming. I acknowledge the larger reach of this issue, I know that it's there, and I'm not being ignorant of it's existent, I'm being strategic. You got that disclaimer down? Good. 'Cause now I want to ask if we have too many series', franchises and, basically, sequels in the gaming world. Let me begin the self debating.

There is something undeniably appealing about the prospect of a sequel to a game series that we love, and I think a large part of that comes from the comfort of knowing roughly what to expect and using that as a dowsing rod to find quality. And that is an important boon for the discerning consumer. Gaming is not a cheap or under-priced hobby, no matter what those ghouls over at Square Enix and Sony try to insinuate, and oftentimes questions of 'is this going to be worth my money' and just-as-importantly 'is this going to be worth my time', trumps the desire for creative explorations and taking a chance. Having a solid developer working with a solid producer to make a game is already worth some motes of confidence, but how many times have we seen a great developer who makes great games stumble when trying something out of their comfort zone. (Or heck, even something different within that comfort zone?) Try the 'Avatar: The last Airbender' and 'Legend of Korra' games from Platinum Games, 'Anthem' from Bioware or the budding failure of New Worlds from Amazon Game Studios. (Although that last one is the product a variety of problems built on top of- 'inexperienced at this sort of game'.) It's no guarantee of success to make sequels until the day you die, just look at 'Battlefield 2043' (7/10 from IGN? No wonder people think of that site as a joke.) but it's a damn sight more reliable than rolling the proverbial die and seeing a developer shoot for the stars.

Although, there is a definite impact that this sequel mania, and the resulting gaming community-psyche it propagates, on the indie scene. You've already got a lot to overcome as an indie developer, working in an overcrowded field with lacking resources and trying to stand out, but throw out there an industry-nursed general reticence to try something new and it can feel impossible to break into the mainstream. (and it mostly is.) Indie devs have to rely on out-of-the-box ideas and creative new titles, but when faced with a consumer base drunk on safe, endlessly franchised, games, why would the masses ever even bother to try something new? 'The most profitable entertainment medium in the world' can feel like a somewhat deceptive accolade when the vast majority of that profit is funnelled towards the established sequel-pumping machines who 'lead the industry', whatever concepts like 'leadership' even means in the current state of the market. 

Additionally, when we think of all that money which does get funnelled into big companies, to then be recycled back into the development process, it is startling how often those astronomical profit margins go into feeding the status-quo loop of constant series perpetuation instead of, oh I don't know, actually pursuing genuine meaningful innovation! You'd have thought that now we've entered the period of standardised game design principles, we'd have the perfect baseline from which to start breaking convention and rewriting the norm, but all too often it's just not seen as worth the risk. (Yep, we looped back around there but from the other side.) Working on actualising new presentations, new art styles, new software capabilities, all of that feels almost stunted by the excuse of 'Oh, well since we're making a sequel we need to ensure this game is largely recognisable to the existing player base.' Now innovation comes slow and plodding, and when it does arrive, it's mostly to use new techniques to make the game look better, rather than play better, so that it at least visually eclipses the last game in the series.

Of course, on the flipside the very reason we have these series to begin with is because there are some stories, characters and worlds that we want to see grow and expand in ways that only be achieved through sequels and series. Hitman, Splinter Cell and Resident Evil all didn't really hit their world changing stride until a few iterations down the line, and that was borne from developers having to reinvent the wheel everytime they came back to their properties. Sure, there are some studios who phone things in (Ubisoft) but just as many truly hold-off until they can make something incredible before putting their all-precious properties' integrity on the line with a sequel, like Rockstar do. Additionally, series' can perpetuate whole genres by themselves and turn them into culture landmarks, just look at Castlevania and Metroid, or Demon Souls and Dark Souls. The familiarity of working in a series, with settings, frameworks and conventions you already know, makes for a sturdy springboard to bigger and better summits.

Then there is the practical side of working with sequels from the corporate side of the market; it makes for easier sales pitches. Having to find a unique selling point for every new game is incredibly taxing from a marketing stand point as not every idea sings it's own praises in the same way. If all trailers and previews were created equally, marketing metas would shift to mass homogenisation just to try and keep competitive with everyone else. Reliable series games that audiences trust and come back to lessens the burden, both on marketing and risk, because you don't have to struggle to compete with for eyes with every new project. Plus, working with what you know is inherently going to be cheaper because people know what they're doing and can coordinate with experience. Assets can be reused, systems recycled, wasted time reduced; it's already a more sure-fire strategy. (And then Battlefield 2043 happens and you start to question all basic understanding of familiarity that you thought you knew. The scoreboard still isn't out?)

Now I've purposefully shot at both extremes in this blog, but the place I want to rest in is on the question: where is that ideal middle ground? Because I don't want a world where all the creativity of the market is sucked dry and everyone suckles off the teat of 5-10 core gaming franchises, but I don't want one where every game is a one-and-done with every new release being another waystation in a wild west of a market. Luckily we live in neither world, and yet the perception of the dominance of franchise-games is perpetrated by the sheer omnipotence those games hold over the zeitgeist of the gaming community. I think that our gaming trade shows, largely informed by legacy marketing norms, holds a chunk of the blame here. Every reveal event is ruled by the franchises that are going to immediately arrest attention rather than giving it to the new games that might snatch up a more niche sector of the audience. Efforts are made, by the more conscientious show runners, to balance the slate, but you just have to look at events like The Game Awards to know that the scale between 'brand new' and 'old rehashed' is still heavily tilted.

So I think we need better to be done from our industry events, because at it's heart the morphing of public perception is very much the sole purview of marketing agencies the world over. I'll admit that I become less interested in seeing a new game if it isn't part of an established franchise, and that's an ingrained reaction in mine and other's heads which I know could be unprogrammed with the right efforts. Think of how much more opportunity there will be in the gaming landscape, a medium perfect for establishing niches, were the new is perceived as equal to the old- it would be a renaissance period for indie visibility. To answer my own question, although it may sometimes feel like it, we don't have too many series' kicking around our gaming industry, we have too little attention for the world around them. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Star Trek: Resurgence

Boldly searching for a little longer than the developers want you too.

I've always been more of a Star Wars fan than a Star Trek one, in my core. Make whatever suppositions about my intelligence that you wish to from that simple fact, but I won't shy away from it: the thrill of Science Fantasy holds so much more promise to me than the faux-rigidity of Science Fiction. That being said, I have been keeping decent track of the Star Trek shows over the years because the originals do, very much, have a place solid in my childhood and heart, as such I'm not a total clueless rube regarding the whole universe. I know of the significance of the many Enterprises over the years, the hero-worship of Spock and Kirk, the inconsistent danger posed by Star Fleet regulation phasers, and the original Enterprise's captain's propensity to shirk protocol, throw himself into the frontline of danger, all so that he can have get first shot at rolling the die on space herpes. I also know that, incredibly, there haven't been any great Star Trek games over the years!

Okay maybe I'm exaggerating a little there: we haven't had many great Star Trek games. Although I will never go back to play it in order to check, I'm decently sure that 'Star Trek: Shattered Universe' was a great dogfighter Star Trek game which really allowed us to buy the scale of these giant starships from the relative miniscule cockpit of our tiny combat-fitted transport shuttles. (Although saying that: everytime I see a screenshot, the Starships look small to me. Maybe I'm inflating my memories again) I also played a frankly unhealthy amount of 'Star Trek: Tactical Assault', which I know some people dog on nowadays but I make no apologies: I think that game slapped. It was a full starship combat simulator game which put you in the captain's seat and let you battle Romulans and Klingon's around an elaborate wartime plot-line. (And there was a second Klingon Campaign too. How could you go wrong there?)

Of course, nowadays the only Star Trek games that get any sort of attention are the abysmal mobile rip-off scam games, (Which I wouldn't play if you held me at gunpoint) that VR title which allows people to playact as bridge members, (For which I have no friends to enjoy) and the decently popular Star Trek MMO game. (And I'm not in the mood for starting a brand new MMO from scratch, no matter how many times my Uncle-in-law tells me it's the bee's knees.) Where are the action adventure Star Trek games, where I get to play as an actual person, not a vehicle? The sorts of games where I can visit strange new planets, battle for my life against weird aliens, embroil myself in weird sci-fi narratives and do the whole 'boldly go where no man has gone before' thing from the show? Well with any luck, that sort of game starts right here with 'Star Trek: Resurgence'.

Okay, so maybe its not quite the 'action' adventure game I wanted, but 'Star Trek: Resurgence' does covet a style of game that we haven't seen before with the Star Trek license, and one that seems to slot into it's place fluidly; a narrative based adventure game. Yes, I think we all had sufficient Telltale vibes when watching this gameplay, what with the typical over-the-shoulder exploration angle (only this one promising more dynamic environments) dialogue scenes where player input is requested, and the customary digitisation of a living actor that makes you feel weird just to see. (So we're resurrecting Leonard Nimoy now? 'Mkay.) But beyond that there was something else, something more. 'Star Trek: Resurgence' looks smoother than a Telltale game, free from that typical comic-book style, it appears to even have some gameplay sections to it, we could go so far to call this an action title: So what's going on here?

Well I looked it up and this game is being made by a relative newcomer to the industry called Dramatic labs (Or is it 'Bruner House LLC'? Get your game together, Google!) which is led by one Kevin Bruner... who was the creator and CEO of Telltale? His list of accolades reads like a laundry list of heavy Telltale hitters, with producer credits on 'The Walking Dead', 'Tales from the Borderlands', 'Game of Thrones', 'Sam and Max', and the very first episode of 'The Wolf Among Us'. Wow, is that a legacy to leave behind! Of course, on the company website and on his personal site he is listed as 'the founder' of Telltale, despite the fact it appears he co-founded the company with Dan Connors. Strange that one would just exorcize the 'co' there, seems like a pretty important omission to just forget the business partner you launched a ten year company with. But who am I to say what's going on behind the scenes with a guy like- oh look, Google is an interesting tool, isn't it?

You might remember how Telltale famously managed to tie itself up so badly that all it took was a single week for the company to go bankrupt, which means that when looking at a new company from one of the former CEO's of Telltale one should probably wonder if they're currently looking at 'one of the good ones'. But if you happen to come across an investigative article from The Verge (which claims to have unnamed sources 'in the know') then you might see the name Bruner specifically, bought up as a major point of friction within the team. According to that reporting, Bruner worked on some of the development tools that Telltale would go onto to use, then strangle on, throughout it's ten-year history, which is why he got a little upset when he saw, in his eyes, undue praise and profile for the 'The Walking Dead' go to Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman. (Two project leaders for The Walking Dead. But then they did go on to make Firewatch later, so maybe Kev had a point...)

The point is that he's been characterised as a bit of a baby who doesn't like to play in teams, which is something he directly disputes (and claims is the opposite of the truth) and it turns into this whole big mess of 'he said, she said'. The point is that we have in front of us a really good looking narrative Star Trek game, but there is a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the creators. Of course, all of that being said and disseminated for discerning consumers to ruminate on, none of the games Bruner produced were actually terrible products, so this isn't cause of concern for quality; and the idea of jumping into a world like this like one: featuring two members of a Star Fleet crew, with criss-crossing relationships, responsibilities and story-affecting decisions to be made: we really do need someone with proven credentials to pull off this game at it's fullest potential. I think Bruner's name is a vote of confidence towards that goal... just maybe not for the management inside of the studio. Allegedly. Who can say for sure.

So we've got ourselves a new competitor on the narrative story-based game front, someone to go up against the new Telltale and DONTNOD, and if you've been around here for a minute you know that's something I'm freakin' giddy about. I give DONTNOD some crap, mainly for the more cringe-driven, writing choices in 'Life is Strange'- but they all produce quality content for this under-represented sector of the Industry and I commend them for that. To have a new warrior enter the pantheon, is like having a new kid enter the playground, bringing with him whole new games and toys that we haven't seen before; and I'm buzzing to see these new techniques mix-and-match with what we know to push the craft forward for everyone. I can't see a single way that in the game itself this title has done anything wr- it's an Epic Store exclusive isn't it? I haven't checked, I just feel it in my bones. Everything is going to right, there has to be- I knew it! Dammit, Kevin, I've only just learnt about you and you've already let me down...

Shadow the Hedgehog: The Original 'OC'

 Don't steal

With the news that Jason Mamoa is in the scopes to play Shadow the Hedgehog for the, already-on-the-slate, Sonic The Hedgehog 3 movie, I've been thinking about the role our ultimate lifeform plays within the Sonic canon. We can assume that the movie makers are looking to smoothly transition into adapting the 3D universe games and so it's only a matter of time before they run out of material and we start seeing freakin' 'Mephiles the Dark' up in this franchise, so let's savour the characters very tip of the decent before this franchise fully tumbles off the cliff and into the abyss. But then, saying that; is Shadow really the brink, or is he the first slip off into the deep end? Because when you stop and think about it, I mean really analyse his role and personality, then Shadow really is just the single biggest recurring fan made OC, (or Original Character) who somehow finagled his way into becoming an established series veteran. 

When it comes to fan fiction, there's a stigma around the concept of OC's, or fresh characters who are slotted into existing franchises with new stories, because most observers instinctually see these personalities as poorly conceived self-inserts. And a lot more times than not, that is exactly what they are. Pixie-dream characters with no real personality, weight within the fiction of the world or decently carved place within the heart of the story they've been shoved into, usually made by children, and typically containing about as much creativity as is required to select the 'paint bucket' tool in photoshop and recolour Shadow to be green. (Yes, I know there's a green Sonic in the Archie Comics. This franchise is notorious for blurring the line between canonicity and OC content.) OC's are typically overpowered, effortlessly cool, (although 'cool' in the way that a 10 year old boy would describe use that word) sometimes break the thematic boundaries of the rest of the narrative world with their ill-fitting presence, and if we're really lucky; they're full of angst. Now with that description of what the worst of OCs can be, let's take a look at Shadow the Hedgehog.

Introduced in 'Sonic: Adventure 2', Shadow is the serious, brooding foil to Sonic's aloof irreverence. He is coated with pitch black fur, apart from an inexplicable blood-red stripe up his forehead. He just so happens to be able to run as fast as Sonic, the apparent fastest thing alive, thanks to rocket boots strapped to his feet. He has a tragic backstory involving cloning, being some sort of ultimate weapon, and seeing a young girl, his only friend, be shot dead in front of his eyes. He speaks in nothing but gruff, offish tones and rides the line between antihero and villain in a manner vaguely similar to Knuckles the Echidna's first debut. And though this might not tie into his debut, I feel it's far too important to who Shadow is as a character not to bring up that he eventually had his own spin off game where he was not only the first character to swear in this franchise (at least in the games, I don't know what sort of sick stuff they were up to in those Archie comics) with liberal use of the 'outrageous profanity': "Damn!"; but he also made gratuitous use of, to the point he's even depicted with them on the front cover, guns. Real ballistic lead throwers. Shadow the Hedgehog just shoots people. Straight up. Do you feel the edge yet?

There's a pattern whenever it comes to properties that linger just a little past their freshness, where some new creative slides into the ideas room to try and revitalise the flagging fiction with extremes either in new story scenarios, major character events, or just reshuffles of characters we thought we knew. Then there come along ever more 'ambitious' ideas people who endeavour to mix all three together so as to create a character who exists to be 'extreme'. And whilst sometimes, amazingly, that works wonders and excites the source material once more, at other times it can feel shallow and formulaic. As though you've just personified the very concept of a being that is 'cool' in hopes that your audience will resonate with that, rather than create a living, breathing, 3 dimensional character who has likable traits to them, but believable flaws and weaknesses too. Think 'Carnage' from the Spiderman Comics, made to be Venom but stronger, more violent and all around better; at first it really worked to make an interesting foe that fans wanted to see more frequently, but then as the creators started to realise that their shallow creation didn't really have much in the way of 'depth' about him, they had to start making changes to either flesh him out into being a character or double down on the 'edgy cool' factor. Which is what has led one of the most recent iterations of Carnage being, hold on while I check Google... a super powerful Symbiote god-being with metal wings and devil horns (like a bloody death metal album cover) called Dark Carnage. Dark Carnage? What, did the 'big book of edge' run out of slick bad-guy adjectives so you had to revert to basics?

I don't think Shadow has ever fallen to those extremes in any of his iterations, but god knows it isn't for lack of trying. A lot what defines this character is the same sort of insubstantial inner conflict that would make, and I'm sorry to make this comparison yet again, an adolescent nod their head for the truthful powerful mirror of their own personal struggles. You see, Shadow is the perpetual victim of being misunderstood, just like every youth of the 2000's thought they were, and though he's originally presented as the antagonist because being the bad guy is cool, it isn't long before he's switching around with the whole 'enemy of my enemy' logic back to the tentative side of the franchise heroes. But here's where the 'insubstantial' part of his writing shines, because Shadow never even properly flirted with being bad again. Despite his attitude, despite his lone-wolf demeanour in a series that came to support togetherness as it went on, and despite literally carrying around a gun and shooting people, presumably dead, in his own spin-off; Shadow has forever been the 'dark hero' in the franchise, which makes his whole presentation seems like a front.

And all of this, the angst, the basic recolour design, the, later controversial, use of firearms unlike any other character in the whole series, line up perfectly with the designs of a fandom character. Which is why it makes so much sense that Shadow the Hedgehog actually was created by- no I'm kidding, he was made by Takashi Iizuka, a real adult who worked on the franchise. But that model for creating series addendum characters would be whole heartedly gobbled up by the Sonic fandom community to fuel the birth of endless recoloured 'OC' creations that have gone on to be one of the most prevailing legacies of Sonic fandom. Something as simple as palette switching and turning all the personality switches to one-note really resonated enough to break free of Sonic fandom as well, and spread into internet fandom the world over. I think we can safely say that without the influence of Shadow's legacy, we wouldn't have ever had such iconic characters as: Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way. And then where would we be as a society?

Since Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow has been a near inexorable addendum to the Sonic lineup, bought back into the franchise time and time again despite, you know, literally dying at the end of his debut game. He showed up in Sonic Heroes, that aforementioned spin-off game where he used guns (and which remains the only Sonic game in the franchise with branching narrative missions dependant on arbitrary good-or-evil choices made by the player. Does that make it more of an RPG than Cyberpunk? Maybe.) Sonic 06, Sonic Battle, (a fighting game) Sonic Riders, Sonic Rivals 1 & 2, Sonic Forces and so many other games and even some TV shows inbetween, each time being his same surface-level surly self. Enough to make his personality 'iconic' and thus feasibly untouchable. Meaning Shadow is not only the first and most influential 'OC don't steal', he's also destined to be the longest lasting, as to even dare of fleshing him out in any way is to face the unrelenting bullying-might of the Sonic community. And the Sonic the Hedgehog movie creators will tell you from personal experiences how good the Sonic Community is at bullying. (It did work out in the end, though.)

Which brings us back around to Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and what exactly will be done with Jason Mamoa's Shadow the Hedgehog. (presuming he says 'yes' to the role.) I think that in current year it's impossible to completely recreate a character who is presented and acts exactly like Shadow does without facing considerable, justified, mockery. And the Sonic movie has already demonstrated that this version of the property isn't taking itself nearly as seriously as the 3d era Sonic games were known to get, so perhaps we may be looking at the first iteration of a Shadow with some actual charm to him. Because Mamoa is dripping with charm, you'd be wasting a casting otherwise. Could this mean a new dawn for this shell of a character to finally become more than the prototypical OC he has served as for over 20 years now? We may only speculate.