Elysian Eclipse (The Spore successor?)

 Dare to dream?

In their purest and best form, the job of a video game is to spark the imagination and get people dreaming. Dreaming about being a roguish, ass-kicking, adventurer or a Goomba stomping Italian former-plumber; or maybe even about being an astronaut or a Star Citizen who has their wallets constantly pillaged in a never ending attrition of endless feature creep. (Wait, I think I lost my point a little with that last one; where was I going?) Some games take this to the logical conclusion and give us all the tools to feed our wild imagination and creativity however we so want. Which forms the general conceit for the love around the God Game genre: a type of game where the player assumes the role of omnipotent arbiter across anything from a small tribe of god-fearing faithfuls to an entire budding species. The game I want to talk with you about today is from that latter distinction, a game which proposed to simulate the genesis and evolution of a species from microbe to intergalactic superpower; I'm talking about Spore.

Spore is a game from Maxis, the kings of this sort of game, which really bigged up the idea of becoming the sentient mind behind evolution. Following your species across the various evolutionary stages and making gameplay and creative character building decisions that forms their genetic makeup. Maybe you give your monkey race a herbivore mouth and thus make them capable of only eating plants; how does that inform their intergalactic polices a few thousands of years later? This is the game in which you'll find out! Quietly about consequence and loudly about imagination, Spore captured the hearts of those who saw the cool animations in those daytime history channel documentaries and wandered about the journey of how these microscopic entities could develop into who we are today. In some ways its a educational game, just one with purpose and content, which inherently disqualifies it from being defined as an educational game.

You start off as a Spore on a asteroid that crashes into a fledging planet, and endure one of the most chaotically interesting stages as you battle for food sources in order to grow, as well as to harvest DNA points that can be used to add-on body parts from other slain spore microbes. A coherent gamification of the selective process. This carries onto the more expansive 'creature stage', where you grow legs (or don't if you want to be a slug) and guide your newly minted animals through the world above water, a less frantic 3D version of the spore stage. The tribal and civilisation stages play like RTS and 4X games respectively, with the focus being more on establishing a society and culture from an ostensibly intelligent race. And the Space Stage was the end of the line; an exploration based adventure mode with a slightly undercooked civilisation management meta game tagged on top of the package, this was the reward for enduring the trials of evolution. 

So essentially the game was a collection of minigames strung together to tell a single narrative, but it was an ambitious narrative from start to finish. Each stage could have been further fleshed out into an individual game of it's own, and by tempering the scale of those mods the team built a diverse, if somewhat linear, journey to the stars. Of course the belle of the ball in Spore was the creature maker, which proved to be one of the most impressive feats of design I've ever seen in a character creator. The player could form the shape, spine and appendages of the creature using completely accessible free-form tools, and the resulting abomination would animate and move to the player created specifications. It was marvellous, adaptable, easy-to-use and too impressive to only be used once for one game. And yet it was. Spore launched, didn't do as well as Maxis had hoped, led to the cancellation of 'Dark Spore', and was ultimately never touched again.

Until recently, it would seem. Youtuber and programmer Callum Upton, who apparently also had a space for the majestic Spore game in his childhood, shared his love for the game in a video and, in doing so, inspired one entrepreneuring indie developer to try and make a spiritual successor of their own. Wauzmons, of Seven Ducks Studios, on Itch.io is heading their own title 'Elysian Eclipse' to fill that evolution-game void which has been in our lives, and already we've got out a first demo for what they've been working on. Right now we can see that they've tackled probably the hardest ingredient in this recipe; the creature maker framework itself. The original Spore's systems were marvel's of creativity and ease-of-use, and from the impressions so far it seems that this developer has performed remarkably in their work.

The way that spores systems worked was through these modules of manipulation attached to the core 'body' of the creature that represented it's spine. The globules of matter attached to these modules could be stretched, shrunken or enlarged at the player's whim to form the core shape of the creature. Arms, legs, eyes and stat-granting accessory features could be stuck ontop of this core shape to provide utility, and each limb could be manipulated to a lesser extent, with core modules at points of articulation such as the shoulder, elbow and wrist of an arm. It's simple, but limited. Elysian has done away with the concept of modules and in it's placed introduced a free-form placement system wherein you stick random globules of matter into a conflux, essentially eliminating the original Spore's limitation of a singular core body piece to build off of. If the developer can figure how to make these custom creations actually move with a sensible skeleton (which I haven't seen shown off yet myself, but seems to be the hardest challenge here) then we'll actually have a marked improvement on something the Maxis team did back in 2008. That is an impressive point to build from already.

From the strength of this core system alone I'm encouraged to take this project with a modicum of seriousness, especially given that the breadth of Spore, at least in it's original package, is a collection of connected genre-microcosm-minigames; not exactly reinventing the wheel here at all. The creator system is the huge hurdle, and having mastered that it's might exactly be a downwards slope for the rest of the game, but certainly a even-ground progression for the rest of principle development. Of course then comes the wizardry of bug fixing, optimization and tying systems into one another and that stuff is totally beyond me so I couldn't comment. Also, this is assuming that Elysian Eclipse is intending to follow the Spore formula of basic minigames of grander genre titles, or dev may go crazy and decide to flesh out their minigames and then this game will become the next Star Citizen. But you know what, as long as it doesn't get as greedy as Cloud Imperium did: I'm here for the process.

Serious scope has gone into the planning stages already, with the plan for this game teasing two more stages than Spore even had! An 'Aquatic stage' directly after the cell stage and a 'Medieval' Stage tucked in between 'Tribal' and 'Industrial'. (I assume 'Industrial' is this game's shorthand for 'Civilisation stage') Throw in the planned modding API and multiplayer support, and I'd understand if you find all this to be a bit fantastical of a prospect for an independent team relying on backing from a community for a niche game from The Noughties. I'm torn. I want to believe, but these guys are shooting for the moon. But you know what they say, aim for the moon and end up in stars, right? (Even though that makes no sense on an interstellar level as the stars would be, comparatively, higher than the moon which undercuts the point of the proverb.) It looks interesting, and Spore needs a sequel. I wish the team luck.

Australia and Rimwold

 STOP! You have violated the law!

The Australian rating board for all things entertainment is like a bogey man hanging over the industry with his scythe constantly dangling mere inches over the neck of 'everything fun'. Consumers from the land down under already have to tackle a near garish hike in prices for most of their products as it is, but then that ultra sensitive board of hair-trigger pearl clucthers might just go the extra distance and ban any little thing from their storefronts altogether. Apparently they operate by the age-old logic that people are so perceptive to what they watch that seeing a single illegal thing portrayed in a fictional setting has a 50/50 shot of instantly getting that person strung out on cocaine. So with geniuses like that running the show, you can beat that creatives sometimes have an up-hill battle trying to bumrush their way to Australian customers. (I wonder if New Zealanders have better moderation?)

The latest victim of the Aussie ban-hammer was none other the stellar story-engine colony management game: RimWorld, one of my favourite games of it's type ever made. RimWorld shoves players on a mostly uninhabited planet in the middle of nowhere and asks them to build up a functioning society to prepare for the dangers that the various AI storyteller systems will cook up for them on the regular.  You can expect roving bands of bandits to come to kill you, psychotic blaring drones driving your colonists insane, colonies of burrowing insectoids crawling up to eat you, and just about everything terrible that the devs could cook up. It's a great and mostly feature complete (Still think the world simulation is begging for some fleshing out) platform for player driven stories and trying management fun. So of course if something is great, the Australian ratings board is going to come for it.

As it so happens, RimWorld had actually snuck onto the Australian version of Steam back in 2013, same as it had in every other country, without a lick of scrutiny. Perhaps because the sheer deluge of Steam games that flood in every other year is wholly too much for the Ratings Board to comfortably go over, so they demonstrate the breadth of their incredible talents by giving up and doing nothing. (True heroes. What would the Australian people do without them?) But when it came to sizing up RimWorld for console ports in the near future, oh that is when the ratings board could pull itself off it's rump long enough to go hole poking in this clever little title. And what they found was apparently bad enough to have RimWorld retroactively pulled from Steam due to a 'Refused Classification' label which was handed down, effectively making the purchase of RimWorld in that country illegal.

But what was the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal? No, it was because the game depicted "matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults." Wow, what a wrap! How utterly scandalous and lascivious! Gosh, it makes me shudder to imagine the sort of depraved and unholy acts being performed in a game where you play little dot people travelling around a graphically simple world. But its all in the imagination, right? That's what fuels the fun of RimWorld, and it will be the fuel of all the sick monsters of society that spawns from one second of playing this dastardly game. RimWorld: Not even once!

Except of course it's not that deep. RimWorld is indeed a game wherein the creation and use of drugs is a gameplay mechanic, but it's used in a totally fantastical context. None of the drugs are named after real items and each are tied to systems of addiction and withdrawal which does not make them glamourous in the slightest. As for sex- none to be found. And violence? Okay there's a bit of violence, quite a bit; limbs can be blown off and eyes shot out, but none of this is actually visualised. Indeed, much of the gratuity of RimWorld is entirely depicted in status boxes and stat debuffs, allowing for the mind's eye to paint the picture. And also drawing a curious line that this ratings board is crossing. Are we to ban objectionable text now? How does this relate to books? Are the Sherlock Holmes books not worthy to adorn Australian libraries for their portrayal of recreational opium ingestion? Where do we draw the line, Australia?

But this isn't the first time that Australian officials have overstepped their mark when it comes to gaming. Just recently the stellar RPG that I've owned for a year and really need to get around to playing, Disco Elysium, got pulled up for it's drug use before appeals managed to overturn bans. And if we're to pull up ancient history, Fallout famously had to change the designation of it's drugs to 'Chems' and the name of Morphine to 'MedX', all to play nice with the Australian ratings board. Now of course this worked out for Black Isle Studios, and their legacy is better off for the changes if you ask me, but that does sort of reveal the asinine tiptoeing that these rules demand. Clearly no one is really enforcing the spirit here if they're going to let Fallout get away with some light renaming, so if no one likes the rules and the people in the office don't even want to stand by them beyond the exact lettering; why are they still there?

RimWorld appealed the ban that struck them off Steam, and thankfully the ratings board has come to their senses so far; although the game has been slapped with an R 18+ as though it's a freakin' porno movie. And the reason that RimWorld managed to slip through the cracks? Well it's like I said, because the use of drugs isn't glamourized in the mechanics and actually somewhat disincentivised, alongside the visual distance of the simplistic stylised art. Seems one can get by with leaving the weight of the details in the description bar; one again the power of writing has been underestimated for the good of society everywhere! Thank goodness for measures so draconic that even the dinosaurs who enforce them actively search for reasonable loopholes!

I'm not beating around the bush here; this is straight stupid. There never should have been this backlash anyway and once more, the rules were circumvented through corner cutting and excuse conjuring; to me these are the telltale signs of outdated rules that no longer serve the society they were made for. If you can't back up the evidence of the ways in which your laws have benefitted the ends it was designed to, and they tend to be more a tripping hazard than a safe-guard; review, reimagine, adapt. I'm happy for RimWorld's success in this matter, but I'm not naïve enough to think it will set an actionable precedent; no this will be a battle that will be fought every year until someone finally has the head-on-their shoulders to just throw out the rule book and start from scratch.

Sonic Original Sin?

 If you're strong you can fly, you can reach the otherside of the rainbow- Sun Tzu, The Art of Disappointment

Oh I had that initial second of such excitement when a brand new trailer for a Sonic game dropped on the Internet entitled: 'Sonic Origins'. Imaginations raced, what could be this 'Origin'? Clearly it was eluding to the 2D era of Sonic games, but could this be a continuation of the Sonic originals? That renegade spin-off series 'Generations', as we know the 3D version of that universe is going onto 'Frontiers' next? Or maybe a direct sequel to Mania! Yes, as you can imagine I didn't take the necessary time to stop and think about for half a second until my brother, resident expert in all things Sonic, calmly explained to me that I did actually know this thing was coming, he had told me so before, and that it's just the 5 thousandth collection pack for old-school Sonic games. That's Sonic 1, 2, 3 & Knuckles and Sonic CD, being packaged up and sold for some as-of-yet-undisclosed price which has more than a few people just a little antsy.

So of course I'm coming at this with more than a little trepidation. We've been sold these games more times than Metal Sonic has popped up in the series and no one's exactly thrilled to be bumrushed into purchasing them again; however there is something new coming with this package. You see, for the first time ever these games are going to be coming with a remaster for Sonic 3 & Knuckles, with the rest of the packaged games presumably being the exact same flawless remake jobs pulled off by Christian Whitehead for the mobile versions of the games. Now that does actually mean something to someone like me, because my very first 2D Sonic game I ever played was actually Sonic 3- (Although my first actual Sonic game was Adventure from nearly a decade prior to when I played 3- but we know how fans talk about the 3D era...) Yet even with that point of connection to this package, I would be lying if I said this wasn't more than a little disappointing.

Sonic is one of those franchises barred and chained by a single succession of questionable quality games when nothing about this series demands it needs to be this way. These games come from a platforming series about a blue Hedgehog breaking robots, why do we need a cohesive and continuing narrative? Mario doesn't, and has never, cared about such things and that series is a permanent classic in the video game world, and a Sonic contemporary. (If you squint your eyes and smudge the dates a little.) Me and my brother sat down to talk about it, and he explained that despite how it may seem, nearly every single 3D Sonic game has been following the exact same 'canon' since Adventure, excluding the obvious veer-offs, like Sonic 06 and Boom. (Literally the most broken 3D games in the entire series.) So there's clearly a stigma against going out there and trying something wild and unconnected to the past from the dinosaurs over at Sega.

When I saw the title 'Sonic Origins', my mind immediately raced to the ancillary Sonic media that tried to add enough depth and character to the Sonic world for words like 'origin' to have any actual value. And so of course, my tortuous, self-sabotaging, mind flashed at 'Sonic Underground' for a brief damnable second (Miracle, why must you remind me of Sonia and Manic on a daily basis? What have I done to deserve this cruellest of penance?) and then to the SATAM tv show. It was a couple seconds of racing thought, but before sobriety struck me around the back of the head with a half-empty glass, I genuinely believed that SATAM's actual, genuine fully-fledged alternate Sonic setting, was finally getting it's video game debut. How utterly and embarrassingly stupid of me.

SATAM (Short for 'Saturday Morning Cartoon', in reference to when the series was slotted for in the day) proposed a functioning and comprehendible Sonic world that consisted of more than just malformed grass loops courses and floating platforms. This was the world of Mobius, and it had swathes of various anthropomorphic garden-animal residents, a least one sprawling and rugged industrial metropolis, an apparently functioning system of government (a Monarchy), and a genuine tyrannical threat in the most dastardly iteration of Eggman we've ever seen: black-sclera Robotnik, as I like to call him. This is the universe that proved fruitful enough to be adopted by the comics and rode for over a decade before it was all rebooted, and then the comic series itself was eventually rebooted. (You know what comics are like; confusing.) Yet has Sega ever taken advantage of this entire pre-made world lying on their doorstep to make a game with it? They considered it for a spell, but ultimately no. They never took the plunge.

Instead of getting our fictional tyrannical robot Sonic dystopia, we have to deal with the real life sonic dystopia of trying to parse another moronic 'content editions table', because yes: Sonic Origins already has one of those mind bending plans to try and flog some stupid plan to us. Looking at the chart we can see that there really are only two actual editions of the game here, Standard and Deluxe, but a plethora of DLC and Pre-order bonuses that share and contrast items here and there, just enough to make you want to throw the whole thing in the trash and just slap on the inexpensive, normal, copies of the games that most fans have already bought twice over. You've got the 'Start Dash pack', only available by pre-order, which comes with 100 bonus coins (I don't even know what a 'coin' is in a game where you collect 'rings') a Mirror mode and a letterbox background- that's literally it. The 'Premium fun' also has that background, a Hard mode, (ooh) Character animations and camera movement in the main menu as well as on 'music islands'! (whatever that is.) And the deluxe version comes with everything in the premium pack, except for the letterbox backgrounds, but with the additional tracks from other SEGA Megadrive titles that standard version buyers can pick up through the Classic music pack.

I've seen a lot of bad content charts before, but this one is absolutely abysmal. Let's be totally honest with ourselves, the only 'content' on this chart worthy of an entry are the Hard missions and the music pack, to snatch the rest of this stuff out of the game and sell it at a mark-up is frankly embarrassing. You expect me to go out and buy animations for characters in the background of the main menu? Are you high SEGA? A mirror mode? Which simply flips a stage on it's head? That's worth an extra DLC to you? HOW ABOUT A LETTERBOX MODE? " An aspect ratio change? Cough up the dough!" Typically you see other companies attach crappy DLC chunks like a skin here or there, or maybe even a tiny mission pack. Sega went around and pulled crap from the options menu to try and flog it on the side for a bonus, how utterly pathetic of them.

I'm usually the kind who just sits back, tuts his head, and says; "what's done is done, this is a buncha crap: but what'are'ya gonna do?" I have a different feeling with this one. This is insulting to the fanbase, this whole chart needs to be ripped up. Alternate menu animations and differing aspect ratios are fun additions to the core package, not substantial chunks of extra content to be sold for a premium; SEGA must think we're idiots to even consider a DLC strategy like this. What's next- are we getting a DLC pack to unlock Level Select? How about Debug mode? How much is it going to cost us to play as character's outside the base game they were included in? "Knuckles in Sonic 2? That'll be a cheeky fiver!" So let me just say kudos to SEGA for getting my high-flying hopes up with this announcement, crushing them with reality, and then utterly failing to meet my re-adjusted minimal expectations. Truly you are masters in the sacred art of disappointment.

Kojima and Sony

False alarm?

Not so very long ago there was something of a false alarm bell ringing across the industry as the ever trolling head of Kojima Productions, the man himself, decided to have a bit of fun with Twitter. He posted a picture of the Sony Games logo with a bunch of games behind it, totally without context, and just sat back as the denizens of his Twitter followers, well documented to pick apart an analyse anything he'll post from blurry pictures of legos to a list of western books he's currently reading, drove themselves wild coming to the, apparently obvious, conclusion. Clearly KP were preparing their audience for the announcement of the upcoming merger between Kojima Productions and Sony! How presumptuous to- oh wait. The actual tweet was of the PlayStation logo with a collection of PlayStation exclusive titles behind it, and Death Stranding stuck into the corner. Okay, I can see where the confusion is coming from.

Now to be fair, Death Stranding was a PlayStation exclusive title, but it came to PC later. And when I squint at some of the other titles behind this logo, sure most of them are from Sony owned studios (Sony is very cautious about sharing their toys) but there's a couple there that I either can't identify or don't appear to be exclusives at all. There's a sports game I can't exactly pinpoint because ya-know: sports games, am I right? And then there's a medieval looking game which I have no clue abo- oh wait, that's Demon Souls, isn't it? Yep, that's another exclusive from an exclusive studio. So pretty much Death Stranding, and maybe that sports game, are the only two pictures here not from a company in bed with Sony, conclusions were pretty inevitable to draw.

But Kojima is adamant, their studio is independent and will continue to be so for the future; although I have to wonder why that's even a point to belabour. I mean sure, Kojima Productions is independent today; but why are they independent? What is the reason for not signing up to the Sony wagon and becoming their exclusivity pumping machine? This is a genuine question, by the way, I'm not an expert on this particular facet of the industry, and my observations here can be only surface level. On one hand, independence allows Kojima Productions to have full control over what they make, although Kojima has claimed that Sony were hands-off during the development of Death Stranding anyway. The company would be pressured to make their games exclusive to PlayStation, but then Kojima tends to lean that way anyway, as he did with Death Stranding and has done with Metal Gear Solid titles whenever possible. And independence gives Kojima freedom of schedule; which is the only point I can't possibly refute, I suppose.

The relationship between Kojima and Sony reaches back far, to the point where their love affair has made identifying the distinction between them difficult. Who remembers back in Metal Gear Solid 4 (a game still exclusive only to PlayStation, which has not even been ported to PC yet) in which Snake uses a PlayStation controller in order to control an UMG drone? Or the scenes both in that game and MGS 1 where Psycho Mantis speaks specifically about PlayStation hardware and how he can manipulate it with his mind? (Which leads to some very cheesy, but iconic, fourth-wall breaking moments.) Death Stranding was even made with the express help of Sony studios, and was the headliner for their Direct showcase for a couple of years. All this time it's been hard not to see Kojima and his production studio as something of unpaid interns at their offices.

So what this incendiary tweet was likely referring to, if we use the ol' 'extrapolation' parts of our noggins', was probably some sort of upcoming collaboration between the two companies come the next PlayStation showcase, which of course means another round of watching the two lead acts of the romcom frolic around in the montage trying to pretend there's any legitimate 'will they won't they' in this paint-by-numbers script. Once there was a time where the prospect of these two powers joining up would have worried me, but since Sony has started to chill out on the whole 'porting to PC' thing I've lost my personal compunctions. By all means, let the Kojima heads into your web, Sony, I'm pretty sure the Venn diagram of active and excited Kojima fans and PlayStation owners are a circle at this point, the only weirdo outliers are people like me, so I say let the two elope and be done with it.

But of course, Kojima doesn't want to make that official step, because that would threaten to endanger that enigmatic anonymity that he enjoys so. I've never met the man, but from the distance of the internet, he feels like the type to not really appreciate having a boss. He'd rather be the mad scientist on the fringe of the industry, tinkering away on his little passion projects and playing the Wizard behind the TV screen when he wants to. There's a performance to the man that seems integral to his every choice and decision. I mean just look at the whole Bluebox thing with their game Abandoned. For months they were sized up as secret Kojima sleeper agents thanks to their difficulties with communicating to the Internet, and all it would have taken would be for Kojima to tweet out once that he was in no way involved with them, and that suspicion would have had a credible cradle to put the conspiracy to rest in.

I've played Devil's advocate before: 'he's known to lie to his audience here and there and thus his word would only inflame the issue', or 'he didn't want to draw more attention to the issue through addressing it himself and potentially cause more flaming Bluebox's way', but nothing I can conjure holds water. Whenever Kojima has lied he has done it in a comical and see-through way, such that it doesn't seem vindictive, but humorous in hindsight. (Except for the Raiden in MGS2 thing. That was cruel.) And as for drawing attention: this story was the talk of every game's journalist site for half a month, there's no signal boosting that any worse! Which says to me that he just loves the story, he loves the drama, and he won't sacrifice that for his smoke and mirrors stage presence. Even when a single statement could have done a world of good for a studio with terminal foot-in-mouth syndrome. 

Hideo Kojima is the phantom of the opera, a virtuoso recluse who wants the attention yet shuns the spotlight, at least until the stage is set to his exact specification. And there's just something so darn entertaining about a story with no straight answers, now isn't there? I love the show as much as the next fan, I'd be a fool to pretend otherwise; but in that same vein it can be oh so frustrating trying to pin down the man-who-refuses-to-be-categorised. Is he a loyalist or a loner? A showman or a no show? Yet at the end of the day does any of that even matter when he puts out great games? I suppose not. Unless Bluebox ends up getting themselves actually crucified with their genuine inability to convey a straight message; he could have really helped with that one.

Are new age MMOs unsustainable?

Or are heading towards a crash?

Massively Multiplayer Online games are no small business in this world of gaming we persist in, and they never really were. Pretty much since before adventure games and RPGs took their footing as genres capable of vast, sweeping narrative and spectacle, MMOs were pushing the absolute boundaries on what games even could be. Title like Gemstone IV, Merdian 59 and Ultima all call back to years before the solidification of the role playing genre, and really the entire gaming industry as it was, which may be exactly what allowed them to succeed in pushing the boundaries of connectivity, regular activity and occasionally ground-breaking feats with, for the time, mind-blowing events. Looking back from the precipice of hindsight, we can see the great world-running MMOs of their day as just mewling cubs, big by the standard of their day but only really big in comparison to the lean standards of most other games in the industry. Even the once furious and heated Ultima, Warcraft, Everquest war is now little more than a playground dispute paling when placed next to the wars of millions we see around modern franchises.

That is because we are in a new age of MMOs, one similar to the age where we began but drawn to different ends and effecting a different type of consumer, and we have been in this new space for a very long while now. One where the core values that Massively Multiplayer Games once thrived off have become tired and invigorating, and a new style of MMO, more inline with modern gaming sensibilities but sometimes still shackled to redundant philosophies, has become the norm. None of this is to say that MMO's are not as big as they were, not at all. The landscape and the number of gamers across the world has multiplied by orders of magnitude, and though the big MMOs of today are no longer ubiquitous with the very concept of video game playing like they once were, today's landscape sees more simultaneously, actively competing MMOs then we've ever before had in the brief history of our industry, and the chart curve does not look to be levelling-out any time soon. With this growth in audience and choice, comes the dissolution of that most primal of unspoken MMO rule: 'There can only be 1'.

Back in their day, the heated arguments between the various communities of MMO lovers out there were sparked by a people searching not just for an online game that they liked for the time, but encompassing online experience which would become their game. Singular. In that age it was totally normal, even expected, for players to have one title which would suck up all free gaming time as the player's 'second job', as we now coin it. Not many people jumped around from MMO to MMO, tasting the fruits of each, or even from MMO to other genres, and that was largely because these title were designed, intentionally or not, to foster the development of a particular type of player; an obsessive, hardcore. They were involving affairs of hefty esoteric systems designed to be understood only by the resolute, socially binding with groups of online friends who's only outlet was this particular game, and gameplay systems and roles specifically designed to be experienced by a specific subset of the player bas, because a lot of these games didn't design all the game to be experienced by every player.

Back in this frontier of development, it was totally acceptable to develop a job system wherein a player was expected to travel the online world as a virtual band, playing in bars to the enjoyment of other actual players who would then pay their wage. A true player driven economy, and more of a virtual second life than any 'metaverse' currently in the works can dream of pulling off. And nowadays, games just aren't like that anymore, the zeitgeist has changed, the artform has changed, and the audience has changed. There have been online titles in the modern world that have sparked angry spreadsheets detailing the fact that not all content in the game it tailored to be comfortably experienced and obtained by every player, when once that was the entire point of the game. You would be the small cog churning in the wider world of players, you didn't have to be the centre of the whirlwind: but people just don't have the patience for that sort of experience anymore.

Nor really should they. Not with the plethora of huge, quality rich, games of all genres that test and push at the zenith of the development craft every single year. I can't be spending all my time sitting down in Mortal Online in order to level up my resting so that I can recover from damage quicker; there's a 50 hour campaign of intense action waiting for me in Elden Ring. Even the intensely dedicated players, those who will look up strategy guides and scrawl spreadsheets of gear they need for a certain raid (guilty) usually have their own smaller games on the side, even if this MMO is considered their main. And these MMOs are no longer the soul form of communication with other gamers. Now even if you join a modern active MMO guild, that 'chat' function is used for perfunctory fluff; if you want to talk about serious business you'll be connecting over Discord, or any of the other much better communication tools which exist in our interconnected age. The role of MMOs as a secondary social network reaching across the inky black netspace are gone, the horizon of the undiscovered country has squashed into a thin line on the split between sea and sky, imperceptible to the supposed innovative-figureheads of today's internet.

So what are new age MMOs about then? Well a lot of them are about securing recurrent monetisation in as brief a window as possible. Typically this leads to the sorts of design fallacies that plague the larger gaming industry such as the 'create problem in order to sell the solution' paradigm; a secret to literally nobody at this point. But there's also a few lingering vestibules of the old way of doing things that were once quirks and have now bloated in tumours. Namely, the desire to be an 'everything game' and the bloating of content to keep the base locked to this game for days upon weeks. Most of the successful professional MMOs of the modern world don't suffer from these issues, recognising they just need to be the best that they can be in their field or/and share their player base with other games. Final Fantasy XIV, Lost Ark, etc. but the various new start-up MMOs fall for this pitfall time and time again.

Stubborn MMOs have a tendency to, in their 'modernisation', recede into their core base of players and insulate against potential new comers or undesirable casuals (who probably can't be twisted in spending as much) with content borne for the hardcore of the hardcore in their audience. Think World of Warcraft and their various stupid difficulty raids which require weeks of grinding to gear for and hours upon days of set-up to prepare for. Or Fallout 76 and the late game content which a lot of is balanced around depreciated broken god weapon and borderline glitch builds, because otherwise these popular playstyles would make a joke of ordinary content. These fortifications eek out any unwilling to sacrifice their every waking moment and make the game scene drab and content-free unless you become a hardcore player, and most people just don't care enough to dedicate themselves like that. So how does this equation of development work out?

Well MMOs are big games that require a regular flow of players to keep the lights on, and if the vast majority of players out there, casuals, don't feel like they're being catered for and end up leaving for a better game, or a more consistent genre altogether; then death is pretty much inevitable. New age MMOs are largely, conceptually, unsustainable; and it's the outliers, those that differ from the norm with their content strategies, who are really making their mark today and who seem to have a future for tomorrow. The novelty of MMO gaming has dissipated and the approach to building the games should shift in kind. These games can't rely on being social hubs anymore, they can't cloister solely to the 1% of the player base and favour them over everyone else just because they make the best cash cows, and they can't expect the entire world to be run my players who flock to these servers like it's their second job. Unless that game is EVE Online, because that is exactly how that game functions, as I understand it. The industry has moved on from MMOs are they used to be, now it's up to the genre to adapt or die.

The whirlwind of Poppy Playtime

A summer fling

With the ever onward movement of the games industry, constantly reinventing the wheel with newer and more even more bizarre trends and wild doomed-to-fail concepts emerging and sinking like giant monster sand worms, sometimes it can be a bit much to keep abreast of every development under the sun. Sometimes the bigger fads slip beneath the oceans of AAA shipwrecks colliding into one another, sometimes I'm just not on my game when the ball gets pitched, receiving a welt to the noggin' for my troubles. And sometimes I see the game, acknowledge the impact it seems to have had, and then for some reason just don't write an article about it, whilst under the distinct impression that I already had. Yes, I'm currently in that last camp; I could have sworn I mentioned Poppy's Playtime at least passingly throughout the past year but, according to my search function on the blog, apparently not. Must have been a busy week or something, I don't know. So in lieu of freshness, I've learnt a bit more about the full story of the game in question.

When Poppy Playtime dropped out of the ether, it was with that exact same new-indie-horror excitement that I think we're all bored to tears with seeing at this point. That inexplicable fervour of 'Wow everybody- doesn't this look decent? It is now the next big thing and I will become part of a community who will go onto defined our personalities through association to this brand. It is now to be praised as the new god of man, and anyone who raises a single finger of dissent will be burned at the stake for being a godless heathen.' We've seen this pattern before with 'Bendy and the Ink Machine', 'Hello Neighbour' and 'Five Night at Freddys'. (And maybe even Undertale, if we're going there. Not a horror game per-se, but similar cultural stain) Of all those games, I think only FNAf (and Undertale, if we're counting it) released with a proper full game and that has gone on to earn that series ludicrous success and mainstream attention. Although an indie horror game doesn't need to hit the Playstation Direct lineup in order to blossom into an empire anymore, it would seem. Because just the other day I, at my local supermarket, saw a small child playing with a Poppy Playtime doll like it weren't nothing. This game has made a mark based on a single episode which feels more like a demo, and that's worth a preliminary investigation in my book.

But first; what even is Poppy Playtime? Well if you missed it then let me ask you this: Have you ever seen a horror game that you forget about after a week? Then you pretty much know what kind of game Poppy is. It's a 'walk around the dark' kind of game with a generic 'toy company goes out of business' storyline which speaks to the bare minimum of conceptual effort necessary. But- there is a twist. Because the presentation of the game, the textures, the world design, the quality of the models and the sprinkling of a slightly interesting little gameplay device managed to make this demo sparkle against the refuge of this genre for that all-important instant. And the 'very memorable for it's technological achievement' chase sequence pretty much cemented this game in the fond memories of those who played it. The developer at MOB games may not have had a unique concept on their hands, but they had the raw talent to bring their trite concept to life in the best possible form that it could be, and that seems to have been enough to win the internet circuit.

Youtubers and Redditors flew in a frenzy for this game, playing its one released episode raw until they had every second of that one memorable scene with the Poppy chase ingrained into their souls. And to be fair it was an effective scene. The children's toy turned evil design concept might be overplayed, but the model is undeniably impressive. Tall and gangly with realistic fur and believably springy arms that interact with the environment exactly as logic would dictate. Technically I have to shut my mouth when blabbing about this game, because it's all just that solid. And with that attention, it goes without saying that MOB are working on an episode 2. There's a preliminary Steam Page already set up in anticipation of it, and now there's a game being made, the team might have a reason to start working on some real world building! (But then, we did wait 5 whole episodes for Bendy to add some real gameplay, only to be disappointed each time, so maybe it's best we stop expecting things from these 'wow, these look good and that's about it' style games.)

So these are talented visual artists working on this game, that much is a given; but who exactly are they and where did they come from? Well, as it turns out, the team behind this game are actually the old school Youtube Minecraft animators known as ZAMination, a content farm that has been riding the line of racy clickbait and children's content since... around about the Cambrian Explosion by my estimations. They make high quality animations featuring Minecraft blocky characters, which bring in the kids, but mix that concept with Five Night at Freddys characters in there to score those extra clicks. Mix in a touch of exploiting the sexualisation of the poster robot girls of the series, and you've got yourself an uncomfortable Youtube empire likely raking in more annual revenue than most will see out of their entire life-time savings. Oh, and they pump out pretty good animators too.

Well you'd have to be somewhat good in order slap out weekly twenty minute animation projects consistently. I'd imagine those employee's dreams have been translated into their animation software by now, and they're kept alive purely through a computer IV directly into their bloodstream and in constant communication with neural-charged nanobots ensuring their consciousnesses are locked in a hell of touching-up sequences twenty-four seven. And that talent apparently translates soundly into making indie games that look super pretty. And, of course, that background in running a multiyear children's Youtube channel properly primed the team to fully take advantage their moment of flame and pump out merchandise before the end of the month. Similarly, a couple of their Minecraft animation channels have branched out from FNAF themed stuff to now make Poppy themed Minecraft animations. A tad narcissistic perhaps; but everything feeds the popularity tree. 

At this rate, unless the follow game has a honestly revolutionary gameplay mechanic which makes the title even remotely fun past the initial playthrough; the zenith of Poppy's popularity is going to sizzle out before the next episode launches, and I think that's what the team are actually going for. Dumping all the hype and merchandise and self fellating videos in the now when you know the game is a hit instead of waiting and running the risk of the game falling off in the future like Showdown Bandit did. (Don't even want to think about how many Showdown toys got sent for the landfill.) Overall I think that makes Poppy one of most cynically corporate independent horror games to ever snatch the fickle whims of the fandom.

You might have picked up on it, but I don't particularly like Poppy Playtime. I think it's paint-by-numbers penned onto high-grade paper- which is to say it's pretty but uninspired. We'll soon be due a new wave of independent horror games that go back to the tired 'walk around and see slightly scary stuff' formula that we were just starting to veer ourselves out of, and this game's success will be the vanguard of that. Thanks MOB. But can I really complain that a small studio is making their dues and getting what they deserve? I'm tempted to say 'yes' given the people in that studio and the other things they make, but I'll defer to seeing what they make of this success with the rest of the game before laying them in the same 'god please stop making stuff' dump that tinyBuild is in. Poppy's Playtime came right out of nowhere and caused a ruckus when it did, but the jury's still out on whether it's here to stay.

The State of Mobile 2022

 Where are we today?

I make my feelings towards our Mobile overlords very clear during these posts. We share the same sort of relationship that real TV does with reality TV; an aura of one-sided hatred that must be endured because everyone knows that Reality TV brings in the butts to seats, and real TV tries to feed off the scraps to make it's living on the side. It's impressive numbers still, but they would be decidedly less impressive without Reality TV to tee up the crowd. That's pretty much how things are with gaming too. The vacuous, embarrassing wastes of space in the mobile market lowers the bar of gaming all around, and actual games with effort put into them make up the comparative minority of the market. And yeah, there's some bias there. A lot of the time we blame the worst practises of our industry on the example set by the money hungry mobile legion; and a lot of the time that's absolutely warranted, but maybe we hold a little of the blame ourselves for letting it get this bad. Whatever the truth lying at the heart of the swirling whirlwind of blame: one cannot deny that the mobile market makes bank.

In many of the largest consumer bases in the world, the number of mobile players totally outranks console and PC players on their own, entirely combined and multiplied by factors of ten. And this discrepancy is absolutely not due to the superiority of the platform. Gaming is a commitment, a time commitment and a place commitment. And neither are prices that the most fleeting of the casual market, those who make the majority of the population of the earth, are willing to feed into. Additonally much of the older generations still harbour those negative feelings about gaming and the culture around it from the scares of the nineties and the prejudices of the eighties, and thus bawk at the idea of expensive consoles or sitting down to dedicate an hour to a video game. However they still enjoy entertainment, and log into their smartphone app stores, and so they'll kill an hour during the commute crushing candy or with any of the other mindless appgames, and not even equate that spent time to 'gaming minutes'.

I understand this and I'm absolutely fine with it. Play the small time-killer games all you want, that's what they're around for. Not every type of game is created to cater for the whims of everyone, despite what certain TV settings reviewers might obstinately claim, and so if these are the bite-sized experiences that best fit into your daily schedule: then pop off. What I cannot reconcile is the point at which these mobile games start sneaking in ugly and aggressive microtransactions and these people actually buy them! How can you hold no interest in the gaming world, interact in the most basest of levels with it, but somehow decide to spend your money on mobile trash? It seems like a total oxymoron to me; but it's not fiction- this pattern of behaviour is proven and verifiable, and it's keeping the entire mobile industry as leaders of the pack when it comes to income generation in the gaming space.

Gamesindustry.Biz recently published a report which claims that during the year of 2021, $17 billion dollars in global revenue was generated for Anime Mobile games alone. A supposed niche sector of a niche branch of entertainment, soundly eclipsing cinema. Bear in mind that Anime mobile games are themselves a minority in the mobile game space. Altogether, they believe the mobile industry to be responsible for $93.2 billion global revenue. That's 'fly a beloved space-themed TV star to real space only to talk over them during the return party as they undergo a profound breakdown of ego' money. And all of that is being made through tiny MTX bear traps laid to slowly bleed the average Jane and Joe out of a little bit of money here and there. An extra retry here, a forced starter pack there, all inconsequential purchases in the moment with rewards that evaporate just as quickly as they're bought; but in bulk and stretched across billions of mindless swipes, and we near the 100 billion mark. Guess those numbers build up.

Now of course the Pandemic has it's role to play in this trend. As the years of lockdown bought society ever closer to their technology and the ways in which we can wring entertainment out of the jaws of boredom. Streaming services shot through the roof in subscribers (except Quibi) take-out services jumped from a niche luxury into an essential service and time-killer mobile games ingrained themselves further into the lives of ordinary, non-gamer, people. Only it seems that on the tail end of this lockdown, as everything begins to enter a state of relative normality, mobile gaming is not looking to drop off and relinquish this seized stranglehold as some others have, and the crash suddenly dawning upon Netflix isn't looking to spread to their shores anytime soon. This has been a springboard for the mobile market, launching them ever higher in the recognised global space.

But of course, this doesn't mean that traditional gaming is totally in the dust. In fact, 2021 was a fighting year for console revenue, as they reached a record high of $60 billion in revenue, although remember that 2021 was a new console release year, and that number would have been much higher if only the market had risen to meet the demand. Which it absolutely did not. Still, those sorts of numbers are enough to make traditional media look at themselves and wonder what they're doing wrong, whilst simultaneously making console developers look upwards at the mobile market and wonder what they're doing right. Gaming may be the 'now' of the entertainment industry (and maybe the movie industry as well with how SEGA are looking to prostitute out their brands) but with those sorts of numbers, mobile gaming is our sordid future.

And what do I mean by that? I mean that the influence over the norms of game design that mobile platforms enforce will bleed into generally accepted design the industry over. Remember that a lot of old industry heads who propagate the traditions of games that we love started as people playing those rudimentary games from yesteryear and dreaming big, whilst those coming into the market today are funnelling through the mobile space and taking the lessons they've learnt whilst working on those blunt-force money tenderisers. Designing problems to sell the solution? Mobile design 101. Flooding endless currencies and mismatched currency packs in order to confuse the audience? Mobiles games did it! How about the use of psychological manipulation tactics to tip the scales in favour of players buying premium packs? Mobile games should have a patent on that crap!

Of course that also means that all of the positive influences of the mobile market will bleed into console and PC gaming too, such as... the way that they... Okay, I'm drawing a blank: are there any positive practices that the mobile industry has bled onto everyone else? In a rare shade of optimism, I do think there's a slowly building wave of push-back against the worst of this bad adopters, sand it's a wave slowly rolling in with this coming generation of gamers that seem to come up wise to these sorts of schemes and largely unreceptive to mobile machinations. Ubisoft, EA, Square and others are learning this in the past year alone with enough failures to set your head spinning. Maybe that wave will continue onto the mobile market once that generation has settled over there too. Or maybe the trends we're seeing are anomalies and Sonic Origin's flogging of menu animations is our crystal ball glimpse into monetisation a year from now. It's a toss up. 

I love: Strip off and start from nothing

I thought it said 'Private Beach'!

Of the many uncommon gameplay scenarios that I love and other people seem to deeply despise, perhaps on of the most headscracthing ones on my end is the whole 'times when the game takes all of your stuff and throws you into a challenge area.' Just to be clear, I'm not talking about those final levels where the game takes all your weapons and skills and goes 'challenge time!', ('Half Life: Alyx') nor am I refencing the times when every skill and talent you've forged goes to utter waste against a final boss fight which breaks up into a straight 'press a couple of QTE events and you're done.' (Halo 4) I mean mid-game snippets when you've already reached the peak of your talent but the game design isn't ready to let you stomp all over it without putting up a fight. Just when you think there's nothing more to learn, you're stripped of everything, sent back to zero, and have to prove you're worthy of everything the game has given you.

I think it takes supreme confidence in one's systems to be able to bear itself without all those fancy gadgets and items which has bought you this far. And it's a great tool for contextualising exactly what it is that is making the player a badass; it is their skills or the sword tied to their back? A classic, 'are you wearing the armour or does it wear you' conundrum. And spoken in the unique language of 'gameplay' so integral to this special little industry of ours; I'm amazed, somewhat, that the Souls games have never repeated this rare practice. (Although considering those games depend on gear-defined builds to distinguish their gameplay variety; perhaps that isn't so surprising.) How about I demonstrate some titles that have taken this approach to great effect? 

Breath of the Wild famously features an entire challenge island of the course of Hyrule called Eventide Island. A place which magically absconds with all armour, weapons and food and throws you in the wilderness against everything from Moblins to a Hinox. All you have to defend yourself are the hearts you've collected, and the wits you've honed from using the Sheikah Slate up until now. That means really diving into the fantastic Breath of the Wild physics engine in order to make up the difference. Whether that be through starting fires and letting that rage encircle and burn groups, or rolling heavy rocks down hills for masses of damage; taking away those easy-win weapons forces the resourceful and creative mind out of the player's dormant psyche allowing for the subtle brilliance of BOTWs base systems to shine through. This island proved so successful that for the Trails in the DLC the team opted for a similar 'naked strat' and created pretty much the hardest challenge in the entire game. (Kudos, team.)

Far Cry 4 has a lot of high moments, and some lows; but one of the most promising in my mind came from the scene in which Ajay, the protagonist, is kidnapped and trapped in a mountain-carved prison with none of his tools. None sequentially (Because unfortunately this comes from the Ubisoft era where we can break these games down to their place in the uninspired sequence of repeated design choices) this marks the scene where the player is drugged and goes on a trip. But for its time that concept is actually utilised cleverly to have the player caught in a cat-and-mouse chase against their own delusions. Weaponless and defenceless, players are forced to play Far Cry in a totally different fashion for this moment, utilising cracks in walls and line-of-sight as though this is Outlast! And it doesn't even end with leaving the complex, because then the player is forced to fight their way through several checkposts, without their core gear, just to escape for certain. I'm still slightly peeved with the whole sequence, however, for the way that Ajay is literally placed in a cell without a door and just drugged, expecting that to be enough to stop him. Seems supremely contrived in my eyes, and I expected the entire escape to be a drug-fuelled delusion until the mission cleared and the game just continued; but for that brief moment before the shoe dropped I was enraptured in the challenge, and that's what matters.

Recently playing through New Vegas has given me the chance to confront that least liked of DLC by many, but one of my personal highlight favourites: Dead Money. The first of the additional content quartet, Dead Money traps the player in a Spanish-themed resort called The Sierra Madre, and locks them in a challenge of constant night, choking death clouds and deadly stalking Ghost-like creatures all over the shop. The theme of the DLC is greed and moving on, so it's somewhat fitting that in order to plunder the secrets of this hell you have to go in tool-less and blind, scavenging what you need to survive from bins and vending machines. I think I really started to hone in on what I love about this set-up whilst playing this DLC. It's the way in which the developers force you, through brute-force methods, to play as the weakling you started as but now with the knowledge to pick out what is important to your survival from what is not. You're not taking the Sierra Madre as carefully as you would at level one, you're picking through trash on the ground for anything you can use, using those Survival and Repair skill points to make bombs and poisons, and preparing a guerrilla campaign to overcome the death cloud and pull off the heist of the century! Dead Money is a an invitation to prove your mastery, and it's one I love to meet everytime I playthrough New Vegas.

And finally I present to you the king of this style; those that make use of it so much that it has become a genre style that generates millions upon billions each and every year; Battle Royales! Yeah, think about it! You never keep the same gear from match-to-match, all that differentiates a noob from a pro is the intrinsic knowledge of what loot is the best and how to best utilise it! Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends: All tap into that primal hunter-gatherer shade of the human psyche to fuel the power fantasy of starting from nothing and coming out on the top of the pack. And it's a constant gameplay loop of rising to the top and then being cast down to nothing, feeding those emotions time and time again. There's a draw to this style of gameplay scenario, and I think it's in the ego boost; who doesn't love to be the last one standing with the 'Number 1#' badge emblazed on their screen? No pre-game advantages, no pay-to-win, just resourcefulness and skill. This exact paradigm, perfected.

Adversity is sometimes the most useful tool in a game developers arsenal when it comes to establishing the satisfying power fantasy apex, and adversity scales with the advantages of the player. Short of starting the game from scratch, there really is no way to match the thrill of going rambo against a threat which you might role over normally, and overcoming the inflated hurdle regardless. I think this scenario strokes the same ego-glands that difficulty-defined genres that Souls-Likes do, only with the added benefit that you remember what it felt like to be the top-of-the-food chain, so you have the pre-established perception of superiority that now you have the opportunity to strengthen through trial and challenge. I live for those ego boosts.

Of course this is a trick to use sparingly, and like any set-piece this type of gameplay scenario works best in a short segment where we least expect it. I can understand why Dead Money can start to grate on someone when by hour 8 you're still trying to inventory manage whilst surviving the Cloud, and why the burst action of Battle Royales where you rise from nobody to overpowered in the space of five minutes is so easy to fall in lust with. Still, from a genre borne and bread around the ideas of power fantasies and feeding our egos, I'd say this is the sort of sequence that many great games out there would be remiss to omit. So if you're out there struggling to think of what special little moment your budding game needs to stick out that little bit more: try taking everything from the player and making them earn it all back.

'Fallout: New California' Mod Review

 Mods... mods have really changed a whole bunch!

Just the other week I found myself barraged by countless Fallout videos on Youtube, some jokes, some lore and other secret snippets of rare dialogues which even I'd never seen before. And thus it became evident, as ordained by that the great algorithm in the sky, that I was going to be playing through New Vegas again for the four millionth time. But this time I wanted to try something a little different, because you-know: Four million playthroughs. I wanted to experience something I'd never had the chance to before in New Vegas, see something new, live a new Fallout story! And so I took to the internet, sparked by vague half-stuck, half-dissolved memories, and searched up 'Fallout: Project Brazil'. (Which should give you some idea of how far back my knowledge goes with this mod.) What I found instead was 'Fallout: New California' and after an embarrassing amount of head scratching and frustrated re-searching, I actually looked at the screenshots for New California and went 'Oh, I recognise that.' I realised that this was mod that I had been looking for and it had finally released under it's new, full, title. And so I embarked on a brand new adventure.

As I hinted, I remember hearing about this mod from way back; one of the consequences of being such a diehard AlChestBreach fan from those halcyon days. Before I had a PC that could run Bethesda games, I instead gawked at the incredible mods that were being put together by fans, for free, on the regular. New Vegas felt like it got more modded quest content then any other game I'd ever seen; and to this day I sort of stand by that. New Vegas has a frankly stupid amount of quest mods. But it was the ludicrously ambitious mods that promised to add a whole new campaign which really captured the old imagination. You had your 'Fallout Frontier', your 'For the Enclave' and what was then known as 'Project Brazil'. Brazil seemed to go that step further than the others, offering an entirely alternative game, like a full conversion mod, wherein you'd experience a vault full of fully voiced characters, quirky quests and two distinct questline paths. Even back in that beta stage wherein only an unfinished version of the prologue was playable; I was blown away.

My memory might fail me, but back then we had a Vault littered with cool custom made items, quality voice acting, and a smattering of side quests that went some small way to fleshing out the various characters that New California would adopt. Having watched a couple playthroughs, I roughly knew how it all played out and thus when I actually had the hardware capable of playing the thing, I hesitated on actually playing the thing: wanting to experience the whole mod proper once it was good and finished. And so it slipped from my mind, like these things do, until the year of our lord 2022 when I suddenly said: "Why not?" I'd already played another huge quest mod tacked onto a game I already love and documented the experience for this blog, (I'm talking about my review KOTOR's 'Brotherhood of Shadow: Solomon's Revenge') so why not cover this one too? I discovered the name had been updated, pointedly avoided any screenshots or infomation pertaining to what I might experience and... spent the next day trying to get a working build of Fallout New Vegas mods to run ontop of it. (It was CASM's autosave feature which was causing all my crashing- can you believe that?) So how do you think I got on?

First thoughts? If you'll forgive a brief play-by-play, I think my head transcript reads a little like this. "Ahh, it's the custom cutscene I remember- So cool. Woah, is this intro a completely custom animation? How impressive that the team co- wait... okay, this is several tiers above my highest expectations." That latter thought would be my virgin reaction to seeing the heart of Vault 18, the Vault of choice for New California. It looked... honestly incredible. For someone who had seen countless quality mods that reuse vanilla assets dressed up with high poly custom textures or clever layouts to play into the fantasy of a brand new, wild, adventure, and even those that managed to squeeze out whole complex towns and cities for their mods to take play in; I was expecting an experience much along along those lines. A high quality, well designed little world space which felt new but also comforting and familiar. Not that I knock that sensation, for that pretty much sums up New Vegas in it's entirety! It was a game cobbled together in a year from the remains of Fallout 3, that game's DNA is just slathered all over 'Fallout: New Vegas'. But 'New California' raises the bar.

A custom vault, hewn under a dome of rock and snaking out from a central hub of activity and technology. Enclosed but wide and intimating, the sight captured the look of how I always imagined the underground America of 'The Amtrak Wars' to be like. And of course it was all unlike anything I'd seen from Fallout before. When I imagined playing through New Vegas with new eyes, my wildest dream couldn't have conjured an experience which so acutely sparked those 'brand new butterflys' that I felt when first loading up the vanilla New Vegas on my battered 360 just after school in the couple of hours I had before it got dark. New California whipped me straight back to 2010; that's the sort of power these Devs were juggling with; and I was speechless. All this from just seeing what the Vault looked like, mind you- I hadn't even taken the time to playthrough the thing yet.

'Fallout: New California' proposes a potentially stand-alone Fallout narrative wrapped into your New Vegas install that has its own complete self-contained story, starting from the confines of Vault 18 and reaching out into the eye of a storm that threatens to influence the Californian wasteland for the next decade, at least. And I say 'potentially' stand-alone, because you can, in-fact, carry your character over from the end of New California right into New Vegas proper. (The transition is as smooth as a block of butter left out on the counter for a mid-summer tan. Almost. I have a small gripe about it, but I'll touch on that at the end.) And it starts in the prologue, life in the previously unexplored Vault 18 wherein the player is caught mid-play in a game of Vaultball- about to make a decision that will shape the course of their life.

If there's one significant design distinction that the New California team clearly leaned towards; it was turning the dialogue role-play knob up to eleven. From the start of the game you're deciding whether or not you are a Nerd who gets barrelled over in a sports-match they were ill-advised to pursue in the first place, or a star quarterback Jock who thrives in the arena of physical fitness. And from there you can enjoy a smattering of small quests and incidental actions that will rub off on your impressionable young adult Vault Dweller with permanent stat perks. It was really cool to actively shape the stats of my character in gameplay outside of the typical stat spread of Fallout games. Even if I do think the sheer amount of perk stat buffs you can get has the chance to make you pretty darn overpowered before you've even left the prologue. (To be fair, this is a pretty tough DLC-sized mod; you'll need the help!)

Dialogue is full to the brim of fun character-building choices, many of which are interestingly enough based on the character's S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats rather than their skill-point spread, distinguishing this approach to dialogue role playing from pretty much every other FNV mod ever made, and FNV proper. It makes for a much more 'core character' dialogue check when you pass a dialogue pointcheck that you didn't just hit because you waited for a level-up so you could dump skill points over the threshold. Core stats are more immutable, and thus recognising their integral value actually made me a lot more willing to accept it when I simply didn't have what it takes, rather than hover over that 'reload' button like the timeline's most irresponsible Gallifreyan. That being said, I do like being able to grow into the right person for the job, which isn't always a possibility with the way this mod handles these checks most of the time, but I love the distinction from how base New Vegas would have handled this design element. It makes the experience stand out just that more.

The prologue offers an immersive and slow paced introduction into the world of Vault 18, meeting the colourful inhabitants, going on a few side quests, and mostly just adjusting to one of the two lives you picked between at the beginning. The curious will find a lot of explorative value tucked away in this location, proving that it's not just sprawling for the sake of being big. (Although making the nerd hobble around it on a broken leg certainly wasn't very kind, Cali Devs. You could have saved me that humiliation!) The central terminal in the middle of the Vault holds logs and logs of data, all of which are professionally written, telling the decently comprehensive story of the Vault. I was completely invested in reading all of them, simply for the love of a well-written lore snippet, and even then some of the finer details slipped past me. (for the life of me I couldn't figure out who the exiles that left the Vault generations ago were and when they left.) But the use of scouting reports mixed in with personal logs and the odd not-so-subtle 'main quest hook', all did a great job contextualising the world you are about to enter without feeling like a text-book worth of homework. Despite the fact it is, quite literally, a huge lore dump. Presentation can evidently sell anything, even an exposition library.

Atop of totally unique locations are high quality unique character models for the people who will serve as your loyal army of companions for the remainder of the mod. They all look visually interesting, some perhaps a little too so. (I spent the entire mod wondering what was up with Jamie's arm before finding out that her model was actually a whole new skin for a different character that the team never got around to implementing.) A couple of my favourites were Alpha- the Enclave-looking robot who is just a laser-cannon of death, and B-6-RK, a robot dog which frankly puts Fallout vanilla's Rex to shame. His entire robot-wirework frame bleeds effort in it's every bark and bite, and to think about the amount of work that went into creating him alone- phew, I have to put some serious respect on the dedication of this team!

Events transpire to force you out into the wasteland for the second half of the mod and this is where the mod struggles with itself a bit, as the linear nature of the narrative wants to keep ahold of you for as long as possible despite the fact there's a wide open world out there you really want to explore. The targeted introduction to this snippet of California is more than a little bit railroady, and the mod frets to let you off the tracks for more than a brief second whilst it prepares the set-up of the wider world. But once it does let you go, it sort of just pushes you off the embankment without so much as wishing you luck, into the the wilds of 4 different questlines crossing various factions all vying for control of this small chunk of land. And it's more than a little overwhelming.

I really was quite jarred when the training wheels fell off and I realised that I was the one guiding the narrative of who I spoke to and where I was working, because it is no way a smooth transition from what the game was doing beforehand. Up until a specific moment you're hanging out with your carefully curated cloister of companions, constantly conferring about what to do and where your options lie, and the next everyone loses all agency except for you and it becomes clear your guiding a posse of puppets across the wasteland. Yes, unfortunately despite their great designs and colourful personalities; the second half of New California possess pretty much nothing for the companion cast to do. No personal quests, no real main quest integration, (unless you slip down the Survivalist questline, I guess) and just the very rare interjection into world events that was so occasional I would jump everytime a strange voice from behind me would comment on the startling revelations we had just been subjected to.

New California's questlines are rather combat heavy, as one might expect from a mod made by excitable Fallout fans, but it does offset nicely against the dialogue heavy introduction, I suppose. Still, there were points when even the real life me was starting to feel symptoms of that Battle Fatigue which is bought up at one point in the plot. These large battle set pieces are incredibly functional in New Vegas' aged engine, and directed in such a clever way, with great positioning  and sound design, to make them feel massive and totally engulfing. You'll feel like you're in the middle of a war torn highway as mortar shells burst over your head and warring streaks of laser glitter back and forth in the night. I didn't know New Vegas could be this chaotic. Or that I would grow so weary to it so fast.

When every other mission or so is a prolonged assault against literal armies, you find yourself cherishing some of the quieter moments, which you can still find from the few side quests scattered here and there. Also, I really did start to feel the pinch in resources throughout this mod, wherein by the end I was fretting over whether or not to use Stimpaks or endure slow Healing Powder HP regen due to having less than 5 stims on me. I've never been that low in a Fallout game outside of 76 before. Either I got really unlucky with mob drops or there's a seriously lack of healing items spread out across this chunk of wasteland. And considering I literally never found a single stim on any corpse; I'm thinking my problem might be the latter. 

The actual landmass that New California takes place in is not quite as impressive as the Vault, nor as interesting and rewarding to go and explore, which makes sense given the size of it. I think the choice of colour palate, a drained sandy beige, helped speed along a feeling of weariness whenever it came to exploring, as well as the design of the worldspace itself which relied on a lot of artificial rock valleys, small enough to prevent straight travel but not large enough to impress with their scale. I get the idea, you break up the sightlines and make the paths a bit windy and you obfuscate the shape of the land and make the travel time feel bigger and more epic. But when there's relatively few places of consequence to dot the land in-between major hubs of content, a lot of that feels like dead space. I didn't feel bad about abusing fast travel after an hour in.

New Vegas suffers from this a bit too, with both games being set in the desert, but what Obsidian did to get around this was guide the players on a curated path across the mainroad leading into Vegas, and treated them to small self-contained questlines every step along the way to keep them invested. California could have done with a more scenic route packed with their content across their worldspace; but what we got instead isn't horrible by comparison, it just gets tiring a lot quicker than I think the team would have wanted. However, whilst I might begrudge the journey and how stale they get, I have to admit that the destinations slapped. The NCR Union City was specifically based on the Fallout 1 & 2 town designs, with that white plaster desert-shack look which resembles something out of Star Wars. It looks spot-on to the original Fallout world design, only bought to life in the 3D space. And then there's the gaping quarry which the various Raider factions operate in. A bit too big to be navigated effectively, but certainly effective for that initial 'wow'. And some of the incidental locations you do stumble upon just beg to be explored. How can you not at least raise an eyebrow at the curious sight of that wrecked Sand Crawler to the south?

Nearer to the end of the mod the player starts being introduced to more grand and cool locations, capping off with a finale area that is easily the most impressive custom interior I've seen in a New Vegas mod. Although bear in mind that my only point of contention to taking that spot is literally Vault 18 from this same mod. (This team were in an absolute league of their own when it came to creating assets!) Without going into spoilers it's hard for me to elaborate on exactly what it was about those final few rooms that was so absolutely cool, but to speak in broad terms that those in the know can pick up on; I loved the call-back to early Fallout and think this project easily put that earlier iteration on a run for it's money. For the spectacle of sight-seeing alone, this mod deserves your download!

For the later half of California, the narrative take a free-form stance wherein you chase a handful of questlines down to decide where your chips will ultimately fall, similar in spirit to the layout of New Vegas. How the wider narrative itself is actually deployed to the player, however, it quite distinct, and in many ways bears a resemblance to the brute-force expositional methods of early isometric Fallout; wherein the driving force of the narrative is the player choice, with no central character pointing them here or there. In fact, I somehow managed to do the exact same thing I did in Fallout 1 here again, where I was only introduced to the identity of this story's big bad through my character's own dialogue. I didn't know who the main antagonist was, but my character magically did through means I know not. A blunder which, anecdotally, makes this feel like one of the truest Fallout 1 successor stories I've ever played. (And there are other reasons for that feeling as well, obvious to those who have played it.)

Some of the plot threads seemed to slip away from general cohesion, and the very concept of The Survivalists feels like somewhat of a 'space filling empire' in some regards; but the quality of the worldbuilding alleviates just enough of my apprehension to the use of certain factions here that I can accept what has been constructed here, if not exactly love it. And of course, there's the actual use of Project Brazil in the narrative which I found to be disappointing, purely due to my own self-built expectations based on my sudden realisation for what that title even meant. It wasn't until I was playing the game and heard the song 'Brazil' as used in Terry Gilliam's fantastic dystopian film of the same name.  I said "Ah ha! So that's the inspiration? The team are being driven by one of most bizarre and interesting dystopian films of all time? This story is going to be incredible!" Only to be let-down by the relatively conventional Fallout 1 style plot, with a few weird twists and turns here and there and a couple pervy plot points snuck in for good measure. (Can never hate a pervy plot point or two) None of which is to say that the narrative was awful. I actually think it was okay-to-good, and actually would love to play through it again in the future because of how enjoyable it all was.

But I can't pretend as though there isn't at least one huge narrative plot point which is sure to be controversial. The kind of narrative contrivance that you could only find in a fan-fiction setting and which, admittedly, I had a little trouble swallowing. I am not exaggerating when I say that this reveal, which I cannot in good conscious spoil, felt like a budget Kojima-reveal without the intricate set-up that wins you over despite yourself. This moment is really going to be a case-by-case instance, where for some out there it's going to break their experience altogether and for others, like myself, they'll find a way to swallow it and respect the idea of going there, at the very least. Although I don't think anyone will conclude that this reveal enriched the narrative at all, it more left a wavy question mark over the whole campaign.

Lore is, however, a fickly thing; and I can absolutely get over a mod playing fast and loose with things much more than I can an official Bethesda stamped product. (Fallout 4 and 76 have caused many a pulled hair with their glaring lore inconsistences.) Besides, New California itself literally told me to screw the canon and live dangerously, and I'm inclined to agree. If it makes things more fun, even if it's a bit twisted narratively, then I just say: go for it, son! To think that I used to bawk at the way Tale of Two Wastelands warped the story by making 'Fallout: New Vegas' a direct sequel to 3 (New Vegas starts three years later, afterall.) But this mod happily steamrolls right over that with the enough gusto I can't help but applaud. I bet this upset a bunch of lore purists out there, but if we were that married to sticking to the events of the games no matter what, then we wouldn't be playing around with mods in the first place, now would we?

Once the mod is done, and assuming you've reached one of the several endings which allow for it, (two don't) the story of the mod is transitioned directly into 'Fallout: New Vegas' proper through a slideshow that neatly covers 18 years of events and, to the credit of the writers, directly ties in one of the lingering plot-threads of New California into the canonical prequel narrative established by The Lonesome Road DLC for New Vegas. An extremely bold move to shoot for, but gracefully done. I was quite impressed. The team even included some rudimentary links of content from New California showing up in the Mojave, for those who just aren't ready to say goodbye to the cast. (Although I do wonder about how these designers interpret the ravages of time. 18 years later and everyone except Kira and Jenn has white hair? They're in their late thirties- how many pale white-haired forty year olds do you know?) Aside from all that, the story just drops you out into New Vegas proper with the levels and experience to totally roll over everything up to Vegas without breaking a sweat; kickstarting the quest to rule the Mojave wastes. Although now we have the baggage of an entire totally fleshed-out backstory to colour our view of the world.

Coming out of 'Fallout: New California' as it is now, in it's final state, I have to say that this is one of my favourite mod experiences I've had. Sure it comes with the trappings of amateur design direction, with an over abundance and reliance on prolonged action spectacle, but the execution of intent made up for the otherwise one-note direction. The visual design of certain interiors, public hubs and unique characters were incredible, easily matching or trumping anything that Bethesda or Obsidian had produced for the base game. Companions were a bit of a disappointment, more in that the team didn't have the time, I presume, to give them meaningful questlines and choice-dependent endings like one can expect from vanilla companions. And the overall story was ambitious, perhaps even a bit too much so, but I always prefer something which takes risks that doesn't always pay off, rather than stick to the boring road and accomplish nothing.

I don't do grades for mod reviews, given that they're usually a passion project of one individual and so it would feel more like I'm grading them; but for this special project I feel it's worthy of some special treatment. Given my experience and compunction to want to play this again, marred by small shortcomings here and there, I would be inclined to offer a B+ Grade in my ever arbitrary rating system, when comparing it with Fallout game experiences I've had. Yes, I'm comparing it with the actual published games, and I'd say it lands a decently high mark anyway. Personally, I'm going to consider this mod a must-play through on my future runs, just for the fantastic scope and diversity of choices presented here, and the richness of the talents on display. These sorts of projects are truly inspiring to me, for a project that took the time, fostered the talent and came out largely functional and playing great. I hope every individual who lent their talents here goes on to keep creating, Project Brazil proves that a lot of them have the all-important eye for it.