How to handle failure

 Babylon stirring?

We all experience it at some point in our lives, a crushing slip and humiliating fall from grace which strikes hot across the face and leaves a lingering, searing, reminder that we were not worthy. Little stings as bad as failure, because when things are done ostensibly right, and we invest the effort, and push ourselves towards an end that doesn't ultimately work out, suddenly everything you've donated and sacrificed feels like a huge waste of time. No magical 'Chris Martin' is going to fly down from the stars to guide us home and fix us, all we have is ourselves and our embarrassment to show for a gainless venture. And if you allow it to, that wound can fester, and ingrain, and someday even go so far as to scar the soul. Which is why we always want to pick ourselves up and try to make the best of a bad thing.

But what do you do when you've got nothing to work with? I've had this thought ever since I looked at the recent colossal video game failures that have been blasted all across the industry because despite myself I feel bad for them. Sure, most of the time a bad AAA game comes and endures all the hatred and ridicule only to make half of Gibraltar's GDP and rock back home with pay raises all around. Typically it doesn't matter how badly you do for some in this industry, because once you've reached a certain size, as a COD MW3 achievement once aptly stated, you become 'Too big to fail'. But somehow, against the laws of nature, two big games from massive producers haven't enjoyed that immunity to consequence, and it's become more than a little pitiful.

I already mentioned Battlefield 2042 recently, and the fact that it's failure has been so resounding that just a few months after launch this once-legendary multiplayer franchise is seeing less than 1000 concurrent players on PC. But you must acknowledge how bad this is for DICE and EA. Battlefield games are not a case of yearly releases, so that one huge failure will last until the next financial year and then be swiftly forgotten. These games take time, and that's usually why they come out so polished and content rich, winning the hearts of fans who love this distinct style of military shooter even when the overall quality is as questionable as it has been these past few entries. Battlefield V came out in 2018, and 2021's Battlefield 2042 is the next follow up. If 2042 dries up it's player base before month six; that's 2.5 years of silence until the next game during which DICE is going to be tearing out it's hair to keep their antsy bosses at EA from chewing on their limbs in mad hunger. (I don't think EA would ever destroy DICE; they rely on them too much. But you know EA prime are going to be sweating out DICE for this humongous screw up of a game.)

Now what if I told you there's an even more embarrassing failure out there? One so pathetic it makes me cringe to even think about, and one which was actually published by Square Enix, developed by Platinum Games, and directed by Kenji Saito, the man who directed Metal Gear Rising: Revengence? No, clearly I'm not talking about 'Stranger giving Paradise a reach-around in the empty parking lot of a Burger King at 3am', that game has it's defenders who just love mediocrity for some reason; this is about Babylon's Fall. The little live service that couldn't. Couldn't nail a decent art style. Couldn't sell a remotely interesting premise. Couldn't keep a player base. Both TheGamer and Tech Rader (neither site links to the other, so I can't be sure who spotted this first. And I don't believe both sites just happened to have an alert set-up for Steam Chart) reported that on April 13th the player base was less than 10 people. For an online game. That is... stunning. 

And to be clear: I'm not saying that Babylon Fall doesn't deserve it! The game is, by all accounts, a joyless, soulless, messy water-finger painting nightmare, chock full of bad voice acting, terrible world building and a smear of Vaseline to make a muddy art style look undecipherable. And to round it all out, contrary to what one might expect given the development talents here; gameplay loop is dull too! Funnelling players through mostly identical levels with slow-paced combat and a combat complexity that demands a mastery no one can be bothered to stick around long enough to attain. Right now the game is sitting at a 'Mostly Negative' rating on Steam, because some people out there have this 'pity gland' which switches on in the face of absolute crap and forces them to stand up for a mess that doesn't deserve it. Try to recall this was sold at full triple A price with a painfully optimistic cosmetic store stitched onto the package.

How do you come back from lows like that? Battlefield devs are treating their game like a summer project, making incremental improvements piece by piece at such a slow rate that we should have a decently playable game here to coincide with the release of Battlefield 8. What hope does Babylon's Fall have in the face of its own, greater, woes? Coming from a property that no one has nostalgia for, struggling to break more than 200 players on it's best day? Well preppy pop songs off the latest Kidz Bop album will tell you that the first step is to "Never give up"; and indeed, Square Enix is married to the idea of sticking with this, capsized and already-sunk, ship. "There are no plans to reduce the scale of development." They affirmed on that most prestigious of platforms, Twitter. And indeed, if anything these guys appear to be blindly charging ahead with development for a game with less players than an on-pitch Football team on it's bad days. That's dedication, I guess.

Platinum Games launched this game with their planned content for the second season already completed and were about-gleeful to announce the start of their feverish work on the third season. This week has marked the start of a crossover event between this and one of my favourite Platinum Games of all time; Nier Automata (that one hurt to read) all they need to do now is beg Konami to allow them to do a crossover with MGR next and I would be buying the damn thing tomorrow! (Make Senator Armstrong a player skin; you know how much money it would make you!) And the question I have coming out all this is, will it work? I mean we're looking at a colossal failure that seemingly has no chance of grossing anything near enough to so much as break-even with development, but Square is funding the team to truck along regardless, is this all it takes? Is the solution to dealing with failure- simply forget about it until the failure becomes success?

In many ways that sort of obstinate brutalism is an ideology I ascribe to myself already; wherein I push at a medium I've no real talent for and just keep at it until I'm confident enough to either pretend I'm decent, or actually can't stop anymore. So maybe it's my own bias, but somehow I find that approach admirable. Sure, Anthem stuck around for too long and ended up costing everyone undue time on a project that was never going to go anywhere, but maybe Square will be the little studio that could. (Not so little studio, to be fair.) Platinum are crowd-sourcing solutions, so it really does lie in their hands to change things around. You know, presuming they actually take the advice of people who are turned off from the game and are offering ideas to win them over, rather than the nebulous braying of the self-hypnotised lobotomites who are trying to peddle this slop as an undiscovered gem of the industry. So how does one handle failure when they're a modern games company? Ignore it, apparently.