Mario Maker: Taken too soon?

 Dearly Beloved;

It's no great striking of the established foundation of reality to opine that Nintendo have a real lack-lustre approach to matching the practises of their more modern industry contemporaries. I suspect part of that delineates from the inherent sense-of-superiority dripping from a games industry prominence that eclipses all of their competitors from the time, nudging the old dinosaur into believing they don't need to match the new watch, they've been right before and they'll always be right. Another part may come from the desire to seem apart from the rules and standards that other developers and publishers live by, allowing Nintendo to happily go about their machinations outside of generally accepted rules of business (like deprecation over time) without adequate judgement. But I think that this quixotic egoism has proven as much a detriment to their model as it has a 'freeing of the shackles', and no where has this proven more true than the manner in which Nintendo has grasped the 'Live service' model.

Live Service began as a promise. One made from former Halo Devs to their new fans, that their new game 'Destiny' would persist for a decade. (I'm sure there's some errant example of a 'Live Service'-style initiative within the industry beforehand, but Destiny was where the spark was lit for the rest of the world.) Of course a single game cannot have such a shelf life, and so Bungie would need to supply the game with content, new events, reasons to visit day-after-day and grind away, as well as big events to whip up the entire community, all to keep the Destiny lights on. Over time that promise was broken, we were lightly gas-lighted, but it was all to move Destiny onto the framework of Destiny 2: a game Bungie seem to riding towards that 10 year mark. (They've made it 5 with no signs of stopping.) So that is the baseline for what a 'Live Service' is; continuous renewal through developer support for as long as that game remains popular to its audience or the developers have a replacement readily to hand. It's a commitment.

Now the idea pretty much caught fire across the industry. Every developer and their mother crawled up from beneath the floorboards to grab their own room in the limited body this is the percentage of hardcore players willing to stick to a single game, or series, throughout eternity. It was always going to prove a struggle for this sub-genre, first to be seen and then to be established, because unlike with other types of games the 'Live Service' demanded so much from a finite spread of audience; as such many future attempts have fallen by the way side. Live Services that either didn't hit that initial fandom in order to justify being supported by the developers, Live Services that fell off entirely to the point where making a sequel seems moot, and Live Services that weren't probably designed to host rapid content deployment in a fashion that such a style of game requires. So it is was some surprise that when Nintendo came to the party, fashionably late as per usual, they seemed to have a decent grasp on everything required.

Mario Maker 1, but more so 2, are great examples of the elements which make the ideal Live Service. They're fertile grounds from the get-go, hosting a forum for User Generated Content (USG) backed by one of gaming's most beloved mascot franchises. Their very nature contained endless potential for new content to be introduced by the fanbase through their sheer creative talent, almost nullifying the need for developer support whatsoever. And Mario Maker 2 came in with regular substantive updates to the tool suites that users had access to, allowing for whole new combinations of USG and providing endless more content to be created with every single update. It seemed that 2019's Mario Maker 2 was the perfect fertile ground for endless 'Live Service' growth, maybe with some DLC chucked in down the line in order to provide some recurrent payment for Nintendo and justify continuing, for the rest of time. Or at least a good decade. It was dead before the end of 2020.

Why? How? Who let this happen? Because Nintendo stopped providing updates out of nowhere, and no replacements being in the works, fans have been left with their hands up wondering why it is Nintendo seem so adverse to seizing upon one of the best opportunities in their history. Mario Maker's updates had, up until then, shown so much potential! You had the update which bought Link into the game as an upgrade for Mario who came complete with his own suite of moves and interactions with the game mechanics, essentially remastering every possible USG map combination in the game. You had a competitive championship mode introduced where players could speedrun Nintendo designed courses against the wider world. You have a whole 'World Maker' mode introduced where players could essentially plan out an entire Mario game worth of levels and theme it however they so wanted. And then the game went inexplicably dark.

Both of those major updates were huge teases that any other developer could have rode for the next 5 years alone. A new character system which could introduce meaningful gameplay switch-ups? They could have worked off of Smash Bros Ultimate's model and charged for DLC characters who would unlock an entire suite of content through their inclusion. A World creator mechanic? That could be supplemented with touch-ups and reworks, and maybe even reimaginings of themes to match the DLC characters! I'm getting a little wacky with these ideas but this is how you need to get if you're going to make a successful Live Service with legs on it. You need to know how to stretch onwards to eternity with promise and gusto in your wake! But Nintendo didn't do that, they shut the whole thing down seemingly out of the blue.

Earlier I bought up monetisation, and I haven't harped on about it out of the blue. Though we've never been told, I maintain that monetisation is the reason that Mario Maker 2 was taken from us as it ultimately proved to be a nut that Nintendo couldn't crack. Because Mario Maker was a single purchase game. Buy once and you get access to endless USG; but at no point does that provide a viable excuse for active development to be maintained. Although Nintendo has more than enough resources to build a team capable of doing so, without a monetary incentive to maintain Mario Maker there was no way the team could justify doing it. My idea of DLC characters runs into the problem that it'll introduce frustrating walls between players and USG generators that would be sure to hurt player retention. Of course, the default move in such a stalemate is to just tack on a harmless cosmetic store, but I think we already established that Nintendo have an aversion to borrowing totally viable and workable modern industry solutions.

And so we ended up with a dead Mario Maker. A perfect framework which could have been advantaged during the pandemic, left to rot and fester as other Live Services with much shorter legs enjoyed several years of work. Marvel's Avengers is still receiving updates two years on and there were people announcing how vapid that game was at launch! Anthem may have entered hibernation early, but there were people holding out hope for that game to pull through for actual years of no content. League of Legends is building an empire out it's single Live Service origins simply because they stuck to their guns and kept growing their playerbase. Mario Maker could have been the pedestal for the next 2D main Mario game to be released in a manner as close as Nintendo will ever get to 'open source' without sacrificing their control of the IP. It could have revolutionised platforming forever as a whole new game of gimmicks, tricks and content is reworked and reimagined just as soon as it's introduced. It would have challenged the community and the developers in a meeting of creative wit never matched before in the gaming medium. But alas, it was dropped. And so we mourn, here today. For another prime and tantalising opportunity snuffed before it's time.

EA isn't *really* about to sell itself off... right?

 Prelude to pain

Ambivalence is the equivalent of room temperature when it comes to laymen interpretations of the mysteries of brain chemistry. I myself often throw up my hands and go "I don't really know how I feel about this, I guess I'm on every side", as you'll observe often on this blog unless I'm pushed into establishing a definitive on a review or some such. And it is an embarrassing state of affairs to admit to, because we do so hate a fence sitter; one who can't fall one way or the other and merely squats the high-ground as if with some self-aggrandised moral superiority. Damn them and damn the every crafty little shadow of such quandaries, called 'Nuance'. And why am I waxing poetic about ambiguity? Because for every star in the sky and twisted molten rock in Vesuvius, I cannot decide how I feel about the, currently rumour, that Electronic Arts is in the market looking to make a sale of itself.

I mean wow. Even in the stage of plausible deniability where the proposition is just floating above the surface as a dangling 'maybe', I can't help but tent my fingers and muse at the possibilities, Mr Burns style. It's as though a culmination of outrage and righteous indignation which was largely thought wasted had really boiled up into a scalding finisher we never saw coming, whilst at the same time it feels like a cop-out escape from a much grander humiliation that the sworn-enemy-of-consumers was scheduled to taste. A buyout? After everything they've done? All the ways they hurt the community, bought to life some of gaming's worst practices and then twisted and bent their audience to bray like submissive imminent lamb-chops? It doesn't feel right, and whatsmore than even that, it doesn't really feel all that real.

What are we supposed to believe, that one of the biggest games studios in the world is just throwing away the total autonomy they've lavished in (to the detriment of everybody else) for the past decade or so because, what, they grew bored? Well, we actually don't know the reason yet, and isn't that just the worst of it? Not knowing what tortures such a prevalent and pervasive antagonistic force. Seeing evidence that they're in pain and suffering, but not knowing why or how I could possibly step in to make it worse for my own sick amusement. Gah, the secrets drives me crazy! All I ask is to know why a greedy and proud beast such as EA feels the need to pawn itself, or bits of itself, off to bigger entities looking to get into gaming. I've heard the reports of how it's to 'capitalize on bigger interests' but we all know exactly how much it'll bite at those marauders over at EA to be told their schemes need to go through another layer of approval. Oh, I'll bet it'll just eat them up from the inside out!

It seems like there's a trend, one birthed from regular large movements across the business world that lie far out of my areas of expertise and so I can't really speculate on to any seriously insightful degree, wherein gaming companies are falling over themselves to be constricted into huge super groups. At least when you have herding forces like Sony and Microsoft going around doing their whole Pokemon Trainer 'gotta catch 'em all' routine, we can see the hands of competition turning. That's simple business, same as it always has been. To shore up fiefdoms that cultivate quality content and keep the starving masses satiated and position adjutants to organise directed exclusivity strikes that hit out directly at their enemy's value proposition with the sword of FOMO. It's an idiot's game of action/reaction, played out on the stage of industry economics and bathed in the burnt billions of an over funded entertainment sector. But what's happening with EA isn't that.

Reports indicate that this alleged merger is aiming itself at some of the biggest players in the entertainment industry as a whole, although obviously not Microsoft because the upset of balance can't possibly be tipped that much. You've got preliminary talks apparently being opened up between EA's head office and Disney, Apple and Amazon; which tells me at least that the interest must have spawned from EA itself and not the idle speculation of curious bit-part players in these various huge companies. Afterall, Disney used to own its own game studio and shut the thing down because they were so absorbed with their work in traditional media that they couldn't devote themselves to building a functioning and competitive game studio. Though they've actually worked quite a bit with EA to put out their properties in the time since, and it would naturally make sense for the two to seek an arrangement if, indeed, EA were looking to 'get out of the limelight'; but a merger would put Disney right back in the position of having to manage a studio whilst they're wrapped up in their biggest 'TV-cross-movie' initiative that they've ever worked on. I just don't see such an idea spawning from those very busy people.

Amazon and Apple, on the otherhand, are ambitious men. The type not only willing, but desperate to identify their own Rubicon so they can happily skip across the river on their death march directly into the heart of the gaming industry. Amazon have their own studio trucking away at scoring their first big sustainable hit, which has resulted in misses (such as the hilarious terrible Grand Tour Racing game) and meteoric hits that have then quickly faded into just moderate successes (Which would refer to 'New World' as of right now. They did about as well as you could hope for from a new untested MMO, I guess.) Would Amazon take the shortcut to glory by buying up EA? In a heartbeat. And Apple? They're trying to break into anything outside their typical purview. Streaming, gaming, probably space travel at some point in the future. They've already got MAC, but any gamer with a Macintosh PC will tell you that their computer of choice is typically a hinderance to conducting their favourite hobby, not a boon. Whereas the Apple Arcade on the phone is a rather interesting and promising initiative to scrounge indie diamonds out of the mobile market rough, with results that already have me scratching with the longing of being left out. (I still wanna play that Fantasian.) I think any developer could wiggle their way into an Apple acquisition with a strong enough sales pitch.  

But is all of this in the best interest of EA as an entity, I hasten to propose; because although I cannot speculate on the shifting nature of the large lumbering beasts of big business, I can hardly live with myself without a bit of fruitless speculation. Well I believe such a measure could, should current EA management care for such a thing, work to circumvent the seemingly inescapable aura of rightfully earned condemnation that the pariahs over at EA have earned over the years. Remember these guys were voted the worst company in America for several years running, and that was an opinion spouting from employees, customers and contemporaries; the holy trinity. People tend not to like or trust EA, and maybe it's starting to build into a problem that management want to head-off by placing themselves under a bigger company to shoulder some of the blame for their regularly-scheduled monetary incidents, so their viability as an employer doesn't suffer. That is complete supposition on my part though, as I've no evidence, either observed or incidental, to imply that EA's reputation has cost them significant sales or talent acquisition opportunities. (I'm sure some outlying examples exist, though. I'd love to see them.)

At the end of the day it's important to remind ourselves that these are vague leaked reports of preliminary discussions; meaning even if there is a kernel of truth to these stories, it could easily end up fizzling out into nothing. Recent movements in the industry has trained us all, Pavlov style, to be on guard for the next large gaming acquisition, as with the currently still fresh tens of billions pouring out of recent buy-out wounds it certainly doesn't look like anyone is safe from the sweeping scythe of consolidation. But that doesn't mean such measures are an inevitability, and I wouldn't be surprised if all this sizzles out into nothing but hot water. But what if it doesn't? What if some day soon we'll see the sudden disappearance of the industries favourite common enemy, would we celebrate the fall of titan or turn our hostilities on each other? And which ending do the sadists over at EA want to see more?

The Wake of Team Fortress 2

 Hope you prepared a speech.

When we think about what we come to know as the Legends of the video game industry, few games out there who have lived as long as Team Fortress 2 has. Team Fortress 1? Never heard of it, couldn't pick it out from a line up? Mario? The guy has some staying power, but people go back to his games out of nostalgia, not to be routinely challenged. (That's what Kaizo and Cat Mario reimaginings are for) Counter-Strike? Well that is a game with some hefty legs on it but even then, TF2 beats it in the long stride by a clear stretch of 5 or so years. We're talking an online multiplayer shooter that has remained active and played throughout the entire lifespan of some newer online games in recent years. Elder Scrolls Legends lived and died, Anthem came and went, every Call of Duty since Modern Warfare has expended countless online lifecycles (with obvious exception to Warzone), and all the while Team Fortress 2 has remained open for business, run by the enigmatic purview of what I can only assume is an obsessive yet detached online AI operating system who lives to watch humans whittle away their lives killing themselves again and again in an online infrastructure that never significantly shifts.

It seems that TF2's lifespan is a spit in the face towards all the grounding core principals that modern gaming has established to determine what makes a long lasting online game stick. Especially in recent years with the whole 'live service' movement, everyone has been brainwashed into thinking that the only way a fanbase will put up for the long haul is if the game is inundated with new content every few months so that the game they play tomorrow is not the same as the one they own today. It is the philosophy of a huge sector of the industry, with entire studios now taking it as part-and-parcel that they'll have to shave off an active part of their operating structure to nobly warden over released Live Services whilst the rest of the team move on to newer shores. A genre that began being mocked as 'MMO light' in it's inception is now one of the core tenets of the industry.

But is that all a lie? I mean, Team Fortress 2 beats out the longest spawned Live Service style game ever, and that game is practically static and has been for large chunks of it's life. Sure it enjoys a few evergreen properties, from the subject of the gameplay (competitive team deathmatch never gets old) to the ageless cartoony visuals of the characters themselves. (No amount of Unreal Engine 5 power is going to render these models any better than they already are rendered.) 'Halo: Infinite' is sputtering and dying over the fact it's team can't squeeze out new comprehensive content within a 'reasonable' time frame, Overwatch, a game fashioned off of TF2 and thus sporting a similar but better realised visual style, has lost popularity so much that a proposed sequel is meeting with unimpressed scepticism following every review event. What made Team Fortress such a timeless franchise?

I think a lot of that comes from it's time and place in history, because it would be straight disingenuous to divorce nostalgia entirely from this equation. When Team Fortress 2 first launched it was at the height of Valve's popularity as a video game developer and everything they put out was destined to earn a legendary status. Remember this is a game that launched with the legendary Orange Box, a game collection that also featured 'Half Life 2: Episode Two' and 'Portal'; you could have shoved 'Ride To Hell: Retribution' into that package and it would have come away with fond well wishers all these years later. Back then Valve was the 'Rockstar' developer, the industry movers and shakers who's games were coveted by the vast majority of active gamers for the time, easily. Sure, the game industry and consumer base was a mere fraction of what it is today, but that just made it easier for a hit to bleed out of it's niche into the headlights of everyone who played games. TF2 was a legend before it ever had serious competition to fight for that title.

Which is what makes it all the sadder that after all this time, that game is dying. Remember when I hypothesised that Team Fortress 2 was overseen by an apathetic AI? Well just like another AI from popular culture, GLaDOS, this is a caretaker who has happily and uncaring watched the ecosystem and viability of Team Fortress 2 rot from the inside out with a detached professionalism and utter lack of interjection. Because you see, Team Fortress 2 isn't dying because the world has moved on from it, as is is destined one day, for sure. Team Fortress 2 is dying because it is a garden without any gardeners, with pervasive weeds that have spread and embedded themselves in every nook and cranny, sucking the life out of the expected crop and strangling the remaining community until they leave. Team Fortress 2 is another one of Valve's dirty little after thoughts.

Bots have overrun the Team Fortress 2 ecosystem with a vengeance, to a point where most people literally cannot find a game free of virtual robot players hunting around the map, killing for orders long gone cold. They fill every public lobby, litter every public match, and make it impossible for players without a big enough gang to run their own matches, to have some casual fun with the game they love. And whatsmore, although Team Fortress 2 never enjoyed the breadth of regular new content that modern Live Service's demand in order to establish themselves, it did get the odd bit of small scale updates here and there, just to let the player base know that the team still cared. Maybe it would be a new set of hats for the public to hunt for and trade with, maybe it was a thematically tipped event, and if you were exceptionally lucky it might even be a rare new character, Just enough so that the game wasn't a completely forgotten liability. Until those updates dried up.

But TF2 is a monolith in the industry, and unlike many other titles who have sunk under such pressures, this is a game with community willing to band together and fight for their game. Fans of the beloved mainstay reached out to one another across the wide maw of the internet, on Twitter, Reddit and- well, mainly just those two platforms. (They're great for that whole 'reaching out' business afterall.) And they established between themselves a peaceful protest to ask Valve to return to the game they forgot and the fans they left behind. No angry picket fences, no overly verbal diatribes into the failings of the gaming giant; just a demonstrative coming together of fans across the Internet to show everyone exactly what they're missing by letting the TF2 community be drowned in this deluge of inequity. And you know what; they actually got themselves a response!

I mean it was a pitiful and non-committal sliver of a response. Valve's lazy equivalent of 'we see your feedback'; but that's better than nothing at all! And how could they not respond when a surge of another 10 000 players logged onto the game at the same time to... just stand around in the lobby, I suppose? Nah, they could probably organise some private games between them, right? Have some fun?  Regardless, the community proved that they cared about the game and Valve can see that. "We love this game and know you do, too" says the official TF2 Twitter. "We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things." So that's... well it's lip service but that's a milestone and a half. Given that this is a game that averages about 70,000 players a month according to Steam Charts, it really is quite amazing the problem was allowed to get this bad to begin with. And if this influx of interest inspires Valve to start treating TF2 as an active franchise again, then maybe there's hope for any game out there. Maybe even for Anthem! (Hah- I'm kidding of course. Anthem will always be a lost cause.)

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is real

 Tick off another one

What has been foretold has come to pass and the game with the title that we've heard testimony from certain Game's industry reporters is meant to be 'sick' has been announced but a few weeks after it was first leaked. And my very first raw reaction to the thing? 'Jedi: Survivor'? I don't know, it doesn't really sound all that imaginative to me. 'Fallen Order' was a mouthful but at least it was original. That was a name you said and instantly knew what you were talking about, but 'Survivor'? Seems generic, pastiche, uninspired. Why not call the game 'Star Wars: Fallen Order the Sequel game'? Fantastic Beasts taught us that the more of a mouthful you make the title the easier it is for the audience to forgive any narrative pitfalls you unintentionally stumble into. Well, I suppose from that logic a title as bear and unstriking as 'Survivor' is actually a statement of supreme confidence from Respawn in their ability to make this another smash hit game. They're going to make us associate the word 'Survivor' specifically with the tribulations of Cal Kestis. I can respect that Hussle.

When 'Fallen Order' first landed it became something of a hit, and though I was reluctant to try the game out for myself personally, I happened upon some content creator who likened the gameplay to a Souls-like and from that point onward my fate towards buying the game was pretty much laid out in rubble before me. And you know what? They were right! 'Fallen Order' was the first mainstream Souls-like that the world was introduced to. Call it baby steps towards the knock-out-punch-to-come when Elden Ring swept the world like a wildfire, burning up the sales charts on it's march toward total industry dominance for a time. And my what a good fit the Souls-Like formula was for a Star Wars game. Parries, Dodges, timings and flourishes; all balanced and pulled out at the exact perfect moment to score an important tip of damage before retreating back into the dance of reaction.

My general opinion of Fallen Order coming away from it, aside from what I opined in this review, was that the game hit greatness from the collaboration of some many good parts, rather than one single excelling system or design element. The combat was good and functional if not exactly revolutionary to it's own field, the storyline was good and introspective if not exactly ambitious or challenging, the world design was good and sprawling if not exactly as perfectly tipped between function and playability like some of the better Souls-games are. But when you go that far without making any big mistakes, the general competence rises all ships, and it creates hope for the future that with that solid baseline the very next game could be a revolutionary triumph now that you've the breadth to take risks. Is Survivor going to be that risk?

I've often believed that if FromSoft had made Fallen Order it would have been a masterpiece, and that's not due to some cultish reverence I have for my gothic overlords, but rather for a clear understanding in their ability to balance gameplay diversity just to the point where the average player doesn't become bored. If they had made the game, there wouldn't have been nearly as many stretches filled with canon fodder Stormtroopers, but more mixes of varied trash mob variations. There would have been more bosses, including ones that more closely resembled the variation of the Ninth Sister battle, which I still maintain was the highlight fight of the game. And maybe they would have even had the courage to do something a tad more ambitious with the narrative other than 'intergalactic scavenger hunt number 5'. Knights of the Old Republic did something but they had a twist at the fifth inning to make all the traipsing and trudging without explicit drive worth it. Alongside meaningful side quests you had to actively interact with instead of Fallen Order's side narratives which just sort of fill themselves in as you go about your own business on each planet.

What does Survivor explicitly promise us so far? Well for one we can look at this rather upsettingly sparse teaser trailer and conclude that he with one of the most regularly changing faces in the franchise is coming into the fray, The Grand Inquisitor. (Seriously, after his appearance in the cartoons, then Kenobi, and now Jedi: Survivor, all featuring distinctly different general head shapes, this guy is shaping up to be Star Wars' Chris Redfield.) I like the idea of upping the threat to the big bad of the Inquisitors rather than harping on about it being Darth Vader, a threat we know for a fact that Cal cannot even fight, let alone beat. However The Grand Inquisitor is also an enemy that Cal can't beat, isn't he? He was famously killed by Darth Maul. (At least by Darth Maul if recent news stories are to be believed...) This just makes me all the more confused why Respawn didn't keep Trilla around to be an overarching threat for their trilogy. Seems like a wasted opportunity to me.

Apart from that our little teaser appears to give us absolutely nothing to go on whatsoever. We see Cal Kestis cross blades with, and seemingly lose to, the Grand Inquisitor; watch as his Saber is made a trophy and Cal finds some corpse in a Bacta tank to stare out. Ripe ground for theory fodder perhaps, but is this really the sort of series, or franchise for that matter, with the sort of narrative richness or esoteric structure to warrant serious theory crafting? I know that a teaser trailer is supposed to do exactly that, tease; but when you're making a video game teaser surely there has to be other standards than a movie trailer. Showing us various vague scenes for a sequel everyone knew was coming isn't going to set the world on fire, give us a reveal of some sort, or perhaps even a single snippet of gameplay we haven't see before! A cool looking boss, a brand new world; anything of actual substance so that this trailer is somewhat worthy of existing as more than just a title announcement. 

But I'm not a total bore, I am capable of feeling excitement and when considering what Respawn accomplished with the first game it only stands to reason that this sequel would up the stakes. Although that doesn't mean they're going to go the distance they need to. I wonder about what we're going to get this time around, both from a story and gameplay perspective. The 'lost your lightsaber' plot point might just be for the teaser, but I suspect that's going to be the convenient explanation for losing your power level, alongside the ability to switch from a single blade to a dual blade. The companions we've already made could have a bigger purpose in the gameplay, either with them being actual AI allies in some of the battles (Which would definitely be the more difficult route to pull off well in a Souls-like framework) or maybe actual playable characters themselves! I think some developed side quests could be cool; maybe even deeper side areas with cool optional mega bosses, similar to Dark Souls. Basically I want more of everything, that would be fine.

What I'm not really fussed about is the story and Cal's journey. Kestis stopped being interesting to me as soon as he came to grips with his survivor's guilt because that was the only really compelling aspect of his character, aside from light-hearted ribbing with his droid pal. Is a sequel a perfect chance to add in some new depth to his character? Certainly. But I can't drive up the hype engine based on what might be achieved and heights the developers could reach. Maybe my scepticism spawns from my long-running lack of trust for Respawn's other current series right now, but whether it's justified or not I'm not falling over myself for this sparse teaser just yet. (Wait until they give us a snippet of gameplay.) But at the end of the day even if Respawn do literally just give us more of Fallen Order with nothing new mixed into the formula; that'll still be worth the price of commission for a single playthrough at the very least.

Is Battlefield 2042 even a real game anymore?

 Are we real?

If a tree falls down in the middle of the deep woods with no one around to here it, did it really fall at all? An asinine and feebleminded thought experiment digging at some nascent shadow of solipsism and determinism; besides I've got a better one. If you release an online focused live service designed to last several years full of regular players, content update drops and consistent community, but the game falls far enough of the map to have no more than 1 player at a point in time, then is there really anything live about the service you're providing? That example I just gave wasn't any hypothetical, although it wasn't actually about Battlefield 2042 either. In actuality that was a distant cousin of Battlefield called Babylon's Fall, another game that evacuated in the bedsheets and will never live it down, but we can definitely predict 2042 is going that direction given EA's apparent desire to just sweep this new mistake under the rug and forget about it.

But before we look at what's up with the biggest embarrassment of 2021, I want to talk about the biggest embarrassment of 2022, Babylon's Fall. All because of some wildly firing neurons that have convinced me that this  Battlefield and Babylon's Fall  futures are linked in a downwards spiral of destruction. That 'Single player' thing? Didn't last for very long. And it was also tracked through Steam tracking charts, which means there was probably another console player someone who's activity went invisible and unnoticed, ruining the poetry of the moment. Still, even with those stipulations this is a horrifying achievement for any game to hit so soon after launch. And do you know what the game's creators are doing about it? (Aside from looking about nervously at the all the recently cleared office space within the Square Enix HQ.) They're trucking along making future chapters of content for the game. 'The spice must flow', sure; but into the machines of an average of 20 to 30 computers a day? I mean I suppose those players have to feel pretty special having an entire game studio tirelessly making content solely for their exclusive group; but I can't imagine the Platinum Games account is going to be having fun book keeping come the end of the quarter.

Things aren't that bad for Battlefield yet, Steam charts even have it's numbers seeing average daily users of around 1,800 people! (That's four whole digits!) Although that's pretty shameful against Battlefield V's 4500 and Battlefield 1's 3800. In it's 'hey day' this would be the sort of series that would average tens of thousands for it's active title, compete with the likes of Call of Duty for series activity and remain forever on the front of the public stage for the robust quality of it's gameplay. But this year even COD, which was considerably better, turned out to be a mess and all the normies got forcibly displaced into the new lands of a game that didn't care or babysit for them. They ended up refugees for Elden Ring instead. So in that sense I guess I can say that Battlefield's failure did provide some positivity for the world: it made casuals play a game absolutely not made for them and make a lot of them realise that they liked it. And it even made one certain TV reviewer out himself as a total weirdo! (It's seems like Battlefield is good at everything except being a game.)

And DICE haven't jumped ship or anything either. (Nor have they entered hibernation in order rustle together tiny 6-month long hiatuses like 343 have been trying out recently in Halo Infinite.) We've had promises from the team ensuring that they know they done goofed and are 'pretty please' hoping the audience can make enough suggestions to fix it. Of course, writing the check is one thing, but actually cashing it when we're talking about an online game that some self-respect-free people are actively playing, is another. DICE had to start adding in revamps to the map one badly placed ship-container at a time rather than just taking the whole game offline for a day and going to town. And that's probably because DICE wisely knows that the second people are reminded that there are literally any other games in the world right now, just by having Battlefield not load up for even a single day, DICE will likely have lost that active number forever. This game has no retention value. (Damn tiny gamer attention spans, the bane of enterprising grifters everywhere!)

Recently we got a great example of how little EA consider Battlefield 2042 a viable avenue for their business during a communication with investors where the game was not only completely absent from the topic list, but was also mysteriously absent from EA's list of active titles. (In it's place, they stuck 2018's Battlefield V, which makes a little sense given the numbers.) Reports say that the game is considered a 'miss' and despite lip service that the team are devoted to bringing back the "core Experience", (that was literally the sales pitch for 2042 during marketing, don't pretend you even know what that means!) it's clear that the company is really moving to just wipe that game from their memory and put their hopes on the next one. The next couple of years are just casualties of this launch, Battlefield as a franchise is hitting the mattresses. 

So what future is there for Battlefield 2042 on it's own? How is it going to serve as the apparently not-featured, non-active, face of the franchise until 2024 at the earliest? Cyberpunk 2077 is another game that fell like a comet on launch and even after all that time fans are still splitting hairs about whether the patched and improved current game worth their time right now, or if it ever will be, considering the grand unachievable dreams that we all were sold on. The question is whether the game is even ready for new content yet, and think 2042 is in much the same state. It's clear that the community have outright rejected the direction that DICE took for the game, and the company have responded by actively trying to rewrite their mistakes as quickly as they can. But in haphazardly rewiring this Battle Royale wannabe into a traditional tactical multiplayer shooter, they're burning up the precious honey moon months of a live service where the player base are smothered with enough content to reassure them that this will be their home for next two years or so.

If I were to purpose a 'worst case sceanrio' supposition: we might have to ask ourselves if its in DICE's best interests to continue with Battlefield at all. I say this because despite the growth in talents, software capabilities and player hardware, the Battlefield games of the last 7 years have been several steps down from what Battlefield 3 and 4 offered. Of course, the games themselves look prettier; but what is that worth when there's no core progression angles to encourage me to grind, no plethora of viable gunplay options to keep match-ups exciting and no distinct level-to-level gimmicks even on the same stratosphere as Battlefield 4's Leveloutions? Know that these criticisms aren't at all exclusive to Battlefield 2042, which was such a mess it hardly functioned as a game at all. Even the finished iterations of Battlefield 1 and V don't hold a candle to DICE's heyday, and I think there's enough precedent to challenge the wisdom of leaving DICE in charge of a franchise they seem increasingly incapable of keeping on top of.

Now of course I'm not suggesting scrapping Battlefield or anything. Despite recent attempts to kill it off, I think the multiplayer gaming landscape would be worse of if COD became the undisputed champions of their field. Turbulence in contested waters always leads to rising tides. But I wouldn't be distraught if EA bought someone else on board to just change up what this worn and tired series has been doing recently. I don't know exactly who that someone could be per se, but if insider reports are to be believed than Vince Zampella is a name going around a lot in the offices right now. The mind behind Respawn Entertainment's recent success with Apex Legends (Still haven't forgiven them) and Jedi: Fallen Order. Maybe Respawn can bring their Titanfall talents into Battlefield and make the franchise great again. And where exactly would that leave DICE? Well Star Wars Battlefront 2 could do with some more content...

So how is the Halo TV show going...

 Do you like the Halo TV Show?

The early episodes were a little too: 'mind numbingly dull and gut-wrenchingly off-the-mark' for my tastes. But then episode 8 came out for the penultimate episode in season one since their original tenth episode was delayed into season 2, and I think the show really came into it's own, both creatively and artistically. The whole show has this stink of cheap corner cutting with crappy low-effort scripts that demand the least amount of CGI and set dressing possible despite this show apparently being a Sci-fi, awful insert characters that contribute nothing to the overall richness of the world or narrative and exist purely to annoy the viewer, and an apparent allergy to showing off Master Chief donning his iconic armour and helmet for more than sixty consecutive seconds an episode! The show's been compared to the sensation of downing a tincture of Fluoroantimonic acid and waiting as it burns the very hydrogen out of your organs and rips apart your stomach lining like a sheet of A4 paper in a rainstorm; But I think the Halo TV Show has a much more caustic and destructive effect on the human body when consumed!

Hey, why are you giving us such a hard time for not following the story of the games despite the fact we've insisted that this is a separate silver canon totally distinct from those games? What are you, some sort of Halo fanboy? 

No Paramount.

Wait- what's that you've got in your hands. Is that 'Halo: The Master Chief Collection'?

Yes it is! I think the show's magnum opus has to be the stomach churning, vomit-inducing, 'romantic' sex scene between Master Chi- I mean John, and 'covenant spy woman' Makee; a scene so abrupt and outside the the scope of what a Halo show should be, that most people didn't even bother to pay attention to specifics of what that scene represents. But they should. Because it's not just a transparent attempt to throw in an ill-fitting love scene in order to justify the copious errant shots of various character's colons throughout this brain-rotting series; it's also a perfect demonstration of how intellectually bankrupt these writers are, to have to sink to the lowest common denominator in order to push the plot forward!

Hey Paramount?

WHY DIDN'T YOU PLAY THE GAMES YOU LAZY, IGNORANT, HACKS?

Ahem. So maybe that little performance play there will tell you exactly how the Halo show is shaping up in it's current form, with one season down and another inevitable follow-up already green-lit and on the way. And it brings me absolutely no pleasure to tell you that for some incomprehensible reason there are, presumably real, people out there in the world today who like this show. Or at least people who say things like; "I think the character interactions are good." As though they've literally never seen a scripted show before in their lives. They'll happily accept mediocre on their plates and call themselves lucky for being fed, totally ignoring the wealth of gourmet show-content available at everyone's fingertips twenty four-seven. If you like character interaction, go watch The Wire. Halo shouldn't be a show where the only thing worth a damn is that when two characters sit and down and talk to each other it doesn't always descend into a messy free-for-all of verbal projectile diarrhoea. Stick that quote on the accolades trailer! 

I just keep coming back to how obvious this disaster was before the show even launched and keep wondering why no one reached out to stop them. Should I have stopped them? How? Maybe I should have conspired to acquire the position of the Head of Streaming Content' at Paramount in the month before the show aired so I had to the chance to pull it and save the gaming community. (Darn, I really missed the boat on that one. Actually, looking at their management board I can see that I clearly wasn't white and generic enough to be a division head there anyway, some disasters can't be stopped.) There should have been an alarm bell ringing across everyone's head the second the team revealed- no, they didn't just 'reveal', they lauded the fact that they didn't play the games and represented it as some sort of inspired creative decision on the part of the 'visionaries' writing the show. Apparently, they needed to be totally free-range to pen their pure magic. Well I've seen the product of their free-range rearing; and it's just bare basic farm-variety manure. Brown and clumpy.

What comes back around to whack me in the head time and time again is just the gall of it all, wrapped on the backhand of their greeting palm. This whole play that "We're really inspired by the love and passion that the Halo franchise has evoked and we just want to capture that for the TV" which clashes neatly with this prevailing miasma of "Well these games are puerile kids stuff obviously, and by chucking out the bits we don't understand we're just making the show more mature and thus better for more evolved TV audiences." They really do think we're scum, make no mistake. Why else would they not only claim ownership of Master Chief's face from the fanbase, but go our of their way to strip our icon of the armour that defines him as much as humanely possible, to punish us for flocking to these symbols by tearing them down on a multibillion dollar budget?

But the catch is; they end up missing the point of Halo altogether. This series has focused on the most ancillary of the ancillary lore under the vain belief that they're breathing life fluid into a tragically underdeveloped part of the Halo world, the human rebellions; not realising the morbid jokey intention of those snippets of the lore being a footnote. The rebellions occurred before the events of any Halo media and act as the impetus for the secret creation of the Spartans in the first place. Tools of a fascistic ruling body that were bred to crush human dissent, it was pure cosmic coincidence that humanity would stumble upon the Covenant during this time and become the targets of a holy war. The Spartan program that was designed to be weapons for oppression suddenly became symbols of defiance against an otherworldly threat and the dark origins are just swept under the rug. That is the dark joke of this corner of the law, these noble Spartan super soldiers were meant to be a sledge-hammer to a teacup and ended up becoming humanity's last hope. That's not even something you have to play the games to pick up on, making it seem that these creatives didn't really look too much at the ancillary source materials like they claimed; you know, given how the Covenant are total footnotes and that fascism is the real threat in this series.

What playing the games would have conferred onto these ignoramuses, however, is the quiet sanctity of the Master Chief character. Drunk on the hubris of imagination-devoid show runners, the Paramount executive decreed that Master Chief would take off his mask and leave it off for 80% of the runtime, mope about his tortured past which he can't really remember and fall in love with another victim of a brainwashing program that intends to use them as a weapon. I'm not a bore, I can see the obvious strings of their basic plot; it's just not anywhere near as clever as they think it is. Whatsmore, it ignores the huge potential for actually atypical storytelling which would have been available if they'd stuck more to the model of the games. In the games Master Chief is stoic, but not because he's a no-personality avatar for the player and not because he has a emotion dampening chip shoved up his rectum. He is stoic because he was fashioned to be a symbol of hope that others first rely on and later draw influence from. He carries the weight of hope, and hope doesn't need a face. As the games went on Master Chief even learned to love, in a way, his stowaway AI who also knew how it felt to carry the responsibilities of an entire species on her back and the underplayed mutuality of their relationship is exemplified in the way that the human looks and acts robotic whilst the AI mimics a lively personality together reaching deeper interpersonal insight than a traditional couple could and thus achieving a higher synthesis. (My god I'm seeing the strings of rudimentary probably totally misassigned Hegelian Dialectics again! I knew I shouldn't have tried to crash-course myself on a topic hardly anyone actually understands; I've ruined me!) In a post Mandalorian world, you'd have thought executives would have learnt the promising value of a faceless protagonist and the range of emotion which can be conveyed by the right actor in the right suit, but I guess a crappy video game adaptation project wasn't worth that small modicum of actual effort, huh.

It is astounding that Paramount thought their embarrassingly generic 'tough military amnesiac tries to uncover memory' core plot was going to be more compelling. And even more gobsmacking that the whole fascist military overarching plot is taking precedent over the namesake of the entire series! There wasn't a single Halo ring shown off in the first eight episodes; and whatsomore, in the vague exploration of the Halo rings, the writers inexplicably ruined the twist of the rings by outright telling the audience that they are weapons. Why? The mystery of the Rings is an ideal hook to draw in new comers to the franchise! It's like this show is being cobbled together by the efforts of a room of monkeys with typewriters, but even then they'd have to be on a particularly bad streak to make this many consistent dumb decisions. (Maybe they're lobotomised monkeys...) So all-in-all the show's going great, can't wait for Season 2.

The Brotherhood of Steel

 Ad Victoriam.

When we come to Fallout, is there any single faction more intrinsic to the game than 'The Brotherhood of Steel'? Surely not, given that it is their visage which adorns the cover of Fallout 1, 3, 4, 76: Wastelanders, and Brotherhood Tactics. The mean mugging face of those power armoured helmets get plastered over all the promotional material, all the game trailers and quickly become some of the most sought-out armour sets in the games. And why not? They're stylish, powerful, and give off that 'I'm a walking tank utterly untouchable by the wasteland' vibe that is just so desirable. And of course that attention naturally draws eyes to the faction who don it most, The Brotherhood themselves, making them a shoe in for favourite post apocalyptic group in most general polls. Which is interesting considering how diverse the Brotherhood themselves have been in who they are and what they represent throughout their many appearances in Fallout lore.

Whereas the high ranking of the US Military had their passage into the post-war world guaranteed through back-door antics, exclusive saftey protocols and a membership into the elusive 'Enclave'; the grunts of the United States Armed Forces had to suffer the apocalypse along with everyone else. Such was the case for those who served under Captain Roger Maxon as they served at the Mariposa Military Base, overseeing a group of West-Tek military researchers as they worked to create a virus that could counteract biological weapons that could be deployed from China. As tensions between China and America started to heat up and experiments being performed on military prisoners came to light, Captain Maxon became stuck in a conflict between his morality and his duties. Morals won out and Maxon ended up leading a rebellion to shut down the West-Tek operation and get to the bottom of who was behind it. His little coup d'état was shortlived, however; because hardly two weeks after the good Captain went rogue, the Great War ended the world on October 23, 2077.

Maxon was left in command of a disillusioned military force and their on-base families who had just lost their entire worlds, and so the responsibility fell to him to pick those soldiers up and rebuild their rigid militarism into a force dedicated to a new commanding structure; one which placed himself at the head. Perhaps taking inspiration off romantic tales of medieval chivalry and staunch adherence to strict moral values, he based his new military around the principals of medieval knighthood; an model formed less off how medieval knights would have appeared in real history, and more how they are glorified in old fantasy stories. American military ranks were abandoned in favour of medieval roles that honed on each individuals key skills that they could dedicate to his new Brotherhood. That meant scribes who studied technology and kept history, Knights who donned the salvaged military power armour and were deployed against credible threats, Paladin's who exemplified the virtues of  the Brotherhood and enforced them with the fist of order, and the Elders who would manage individual 'Chapters' stretched across America, so that the Brotherhood could operate independently on the otherside of the continent if it needed to.

But what were these principles that Maxon founded his new military under? Well he remembered well the insanity that had gripped the immoral scientists of West-Tek as they played god manipulating and re-writing the human genome; and everyone had a front-seat view to the consequences of the thoughtless, greed-driven, machinations of a ruling class with the maturity of children throwing stones, but the technology of intercontinental ballistic missiles at their fingertips. As such, Maxon formed his Brotherhood to be a bulwark over the survivors of humanity to stop another catastrophe like the Great War happening again, through whatever means necessary. In his eyes, the masters of the post-world were no better equipped than the elites who had ended the world, and thus could not be trusted with the various advanced technologies and weapons left from the Old world. Only his people, drilled as they were with military discipline and trained to study and utilise various pre-war tech weapons, deserved to inherent the power of technology. As such the Brotherhood have developed a reputation as technology-obsessed fanatics who will turn over a town to secure one errant laser pistol. 

Nearly a century later and the Brotherhood had established themselves as an enigmatic and powerful force within the Wasteland, one that rarely involved itself with the squabbles of the common people but not a passive and approachable people either. Some chapters of the Brotherhood adopt a outright xenophobic stance against the denizens of the wasteland, and often become outright hostile to those that demonstrate significant mutation such as Super Mutants and Ghouls. Concepts such as 'purity' and 'abomination' bring the Brotherhood closer in line with the fascistic government they split away from so long ago then they'd ever care to admit. Never so close, however, as the Enclave have always been; which is just one of the many reasons why when that secretive pro-American-elitism cabal resurfaced, the Brotherhood would be destined to clash with them.

On the East Coast around the date of 2277, The Brotherhood of Steel had a very different reputation. Operating in the heart of the Capital and amidst a sea of Super Mutants, the Brotherhood had adopted the role of protectors of the wastes, saving the battered locals with genuine public good works that turned them into something of a public defence force. They even worked to provide clean water to the residents there using a technological project called Project Purity; something the western Brotherhood would never have condoned. In general this really does highlight the weakness of the whole 'independently operating chapters anchored by an Elder', because all it takes is for an Elder to come along who holds a different set of values, despite his disciplined raising, and the integral values of your faction can just whittle away. Some small contingent broke off from that chapter and labelled themselves 'Outcasts', but the majority of their number assimilated to this new way of life completely.

That same branch of the Brotherhood did have a chance to make up for their transgressions in the face of their elders, in the time when they met out war against the resurfaced Enclave threat. Having battled them before and found their technological capabilities comparable, both factions had positioned themselves as sort of arch-nemesis to each other. All out warfare over the Capital Wasteland bought rise to powerful technologies the likes of which never even walked in the time of the Old world, such as the commie-smashing Liberty Prime and the Enclave's Bradley-Hercules Orbital Bombardment station. Once again, supposedly superior minds wielding doomsday weapons bought chaos and destruction to the world, betraying the cold hypocritical truth behind the Brotherhood's mantle of confiscation for preservations sake. They are just as unworthy of these weapons as those who burned the earth 200 years previously.

With their cool power armour and their slick laser weaponry, and especially with their friendly protagonistic role in Fallout 3, it's common for people to mistake the Brotherhood of Steel for the 'Goodguys of Fallout', forgetting how this is a world that's supposed to be devoid of such arbitrary positive and negatives. In truth they aren't all that different from the various factions they align themselves opposite too and context could just as easily frame them as the merciless subjugators without their number breaking a single code in their book of rules. Such is the danger of groups who err on extremes and purposely foster a perception of superiority justified on assumed universal truths. Today's saviors can so very easy be tomorrow's conquerors.

Have I ever told you the tragedy of the Squareverse?

 Do you really wanna fake it?

I can't help it; the curious conundrum of a studio called Square is keeping me up at night and I have to talk about them. Not just about where they currently are in their mission to assassinate their own reputation, future and profitability with what has to be organised strikes, but the world around them and how it's slowly moving to leave them behind even before this pivot is completed. But to summarise my last few blogs up until now I'll just say this: Recently the legendary Publisher has failed to put out a profitable new release (Their last was FF7R or something two whole years ago) and instead of trying to change up their development styles and truck away to hit their stride once again, Matsuda, their CEO, decided to take the mid-life crisis option and throw away half of their best assets in order to better chase a get-rich-quick pipe-dream, high as a kite on divorced-dad energy. Now most of Sqaure's Western studios are sold off, at a drastically undervalued rate, and Square explicitly declared in their own words that the now-free liquidity would be funnelled into NFT projects. My man Matsuda is going to be buying a Ferrari soon, he's chasing his youth.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that the man has sold off Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal in order to embezzle those funds into gambling on NFTs and investing in doomed Safe-Coin scam projects; (although he strikes me as the kind of guy who would do exactly that if he had a little less strict oversight) but rather that he's one of the self-hypnotised in the gaming community that has tricked himself into believing that the next big trend of the industry is a dead-end technology he doesn't understand. He's not alone in his belief, although thankfully recent events have made it so that he almost is. Yves Guillemot wheeled out his loyal lap dog from the Ubisoft 'Strategic Innovations lab', Nicholas Pouard to testify on the matter. (I imagine all the dust that must accumulate in a Ubisoft studio dedicated to 'innovation' must have flown up his nostrils and rotted his brain.) Nicky was adamant that it was the players that don't get it. NFTs are actually super beneficial to everyone and if players would just please invest in their NFTs and secure Ubisoft a recurrent revenue stream without any of the benefits of an actual investment; the gaming would be improved immeasurably! And of course the world mocked him for it. Wouldn't you? (Don't listen to them Nickster! The Mirror lies, the whole world's wrong but you!) 

And this disease of the brain has clearly set in on the Square CEO as well, because he's all aboard the speculative market train: choo choo! He is desperate to insist that the terms 'Metaverse' and 'NFT' are not fads like they are; and that there's a secret cabal of gamers that have gone famously underrepresented until now; those who play specifically to earn. Because that's the buzzword of this year isn't it? 'Play to Earn'. I think fellow Brit 'JoshStrifeHays' put it best when summarising this trend, and forgive as I bastardise his words: A game that you play to earn money in is a job. If it's fun then you're playing to have fun, if it's not then you're working to make money. If you are actively trying to make a game which players make an income from, then chances are you're shafting the elements of that game design process that would make the game a fun time investment, thus sacrificing the casual audience that would provide the income for the professionals to 'earn'.

Take Axie Infinity for example, I bet it's creators wish somebody would, with all the millions they lost from that hack! Even beyond the whole money messup, the core concept of the game was fuelled on an idea that seemed destined to dry up. Players were grinding and earning Axie NFTs that they squeak out a little bit of income from thorough gameplay and selling off assets. But the assets themselves had no actual value to them outside of a game which marketed itself almost exclusively as a platform to sell assets. So as people flocked to get these NFTs so that they could offload them, they found themselves wrapped up in an ecosystem full of other wannabe asset flippers, and no one on the otherend of this conga-line of speculation investors who just wanted that asset in order to play the game. That audience, who were only there to provide value to the game's economy and not earn from it, were actively discouraged from engaging, so the assets would never have their baseline value and the entire market would be destined to become a bubble. And those things tend to burst.

This is the sort of game that Matsuda sacrificed his entire western development branch in order to go to bat for; although he did also simp for the 'Metaverse' too; so how is that going? Well, did you know that Facebook (Yeah. I'll not calling them that other name.) already launched their version of the thing? Of course you didn't, nobody did. And that's because their embarrassing attempt to 'evolve' social media by expanding it into a real-world MMO without any of the fun, has been a catastrophe. Horizon Worlds, as it's called, averages such little engagement that Facebook can't even justify the usual Tech-startup routine of running at a loss until year 10 just to build up a captive audience. Mark and his Zuckers are swooping down asking for a 50% cut out of virtual assets sold; making it a better deal to become an indie game developer on Steam than to develop on the ground floor of Facebook's apparent 'upcoming front page of the Internet and WEB3!'

Matsuda is circling gutter fish, struggling to stay afloat, and admiring them for their vast successes. This isn't just being oblivious; this is being absolutely delusional. And it has come to the point where even loyal mainstayers of the Square Enix machine are voicing their confusion. Yes, I'm talking about Yoshi-P, the legendary game director who totally revamped the dying Final Fantasy XIV MMO and propelled it into becoming the biggest MMO in the world for a time (I think it just squeaked back ahead of Lost Ark recently, so it currently has the title.) He's also primed to produce the upcoming PS5 exclusive, Final Fantasy XVI; so this is a guy with a future in the company that he's not going to just piss away butting heads with management. But even a man in a position like that gets to the point where he has to call a spade a spade.

In a recent hubbub Yoshi-P was accidentally involved in wherein he was primed to do an interview where he could talk about NFTs (And use that as an excuse to promote FFXIV, because even at the top of his game this man is never off from the grind) and his fans freaked out over the impression this meant he was bringing NFTs to Final Fantasy. Yoshi-P came out to calm fears and ensure this wasn't the case, he was just curious about the potential of NFTs in the future. But the experience prompted him to speak a little further around the topic when he, largely unprompted, declared that the concept of the Metaverse was not entertainment; rather contrary to the cringe-ridden Christmas crumbs Matsuda left in his last state-of-the-company address. Even your visionaries can't envision the future in your nonsense, Matsuda; that hype train you're driving has failed to board a single passenger.

But if this man is anything like the Crypto Bros who jump from scam-to-scam, totally shocked to the core each time sizable chunks of their life savings are absconded with by the same techie ne'er-do-wells with their wardrobes of novelty moustaches, he'll learn nothing from the failings of others. Not even his own failings, when his NFT and Metaverse ideas are rejected by his customers and colleges, and his personal finances and job security start to suffer, nothing will shake him from this stupor. You think the curse of the Necronomicon is persistent, try the wrought-iron shackles of speculative investments on for size! Even as Crypto crashes, and NFTs fall further out of fashion, Matsuda and his yes-men will happily drag their careers down into the sinking abyss of failure all the while thinking that if they just whether the tempest for a nautical mile more, they'll reach the mythical land of the Squareverse. So I say leave them to their fanciful delusion, waltzing down their white-tile hospital wards with invisible partners, seeing a reality very different from ours. Close the door and leave them dancing with their blinkers on, throw that dog the invisible bone.

Fallout New Vegas: The Frontier Review

This one hurt

Copious Preamble

That's right; on the tail end of my latest 'Fallout: New Vegas 'playthrough I knew that I had to rock up to that most hyped, and most controversial, of video game mods known as 'Fallout: The Frontier'. Whilst every other Fallout mod enjoyer was getting all hot and bothered about replaying 'Fallout 3: Point Lookout' in Fallout 4's engine, (That's kinda cool I guess, but I'm not head over heels about the idea) I was rocking up to try the most ambitious fan made additional content for a Fallout game ever. Which everyone had already played a year ago- yeah, I'm late to the party but that's just how I roll. I love to get in the door when the house is empty and the treat-table is empty and ready just for me, you know how it is! So after a prolonged effort of finding the mod, the original mind-you, and patching it in after learning it was too big to be worked with my mod manager, how has my experience been? That is a complicated question.

First I have to say that this the single biggest mod I have ever installed for a game, clocking in at about the same size as Fallout New Vegas itself; and that's not space taken up by sound-files and 4k texture files. Whereas the most ambitious mods before this one would stick their descriptions with that proud tag declaring their Mod to be of comparable size to a full-blown Bethesda DLC, 'Fallout: The Frontier' wants you to know that it's pretty much a whole new game. And having literally played through 'New Vegas' in order to build a character specifically for this (And 'Fallout: New California' to start my playthrough and the Someguy2000 series as garnishing. This has pretty much been my ultimate New Vegas playthrough.) I can attest to that. The mod is ungainly big, and I mean both the impressive and negative connotations of that adjective; but before I get into details there is an elephant to discuss.

So I specified 'The Original' when I mentioned sourcing this mod, and let me explain what I mean by that. Back when 'Fallout: The Frontier' was launched, after something like four years of development in the eyes of community, it was met with not exactly the grand welcome the team were hoping for. In fact there was quite a lot of controversy, some of which was directed to some of the supposedly immoral content in the mod that the community took to interpret as perverted or even sexually depraved. This led to the mod being taken off line pretty quickly whilst the team scapegoated one of their members, exorcised him, reworked the content quite a lot, and then put out a new version of 'The Frontier' so drummed back that I think even now it's still not considered a 1.0 version by the team. This I somewhat followed at the time.

Now I'm something of a hard to disturb guy, and when someone tells me I can't experience something because it's too disturbing, I'm going to want to see what all the fuss is about; so of course I sourced a mirror of the original Mod and attached a handy custom Fan Patch to incorporate the performance and bug fixes that the 'official' version of 'The Frontier' has enjoyed up until now. And what has been my takeaway of how ugly and depraved the base version is? As I expected the controversy is a nothing burger, at least in this specific respect. The 'deeply disturbing' content is either laughable or morally in-tone with much of the darkness in base New Vegas. (Remember you can sell your companion to be eaten by cannibals in the vanilla game? I think a lot of people don't.) A lot of the big sticking issues are just badly conceived and implemented, which is actually going to be one of the themes of this review. (Seriously, if people think this is perverted; don't let near some of the personalities in the brilliantly 

crafted Someguy2000 series. Remember 'The Judge'? That was a disturbingly perverted creep!)

To preface my little review here I want to remind everyone that I am an amateur writer and the quality of the storytelling is always going to be a big focal point I'll come back to in order to either praise or condemn the mod. That's something which is important to me, so I'm going to harp on it quite a bit. Also, even though this is a free Mod to a game and I typically allow a lot of lenience on account of that fact when looking at Mods; this isn't just a small project from a couple of talented creators who carved off a few months here and there on the thing. This is a huge project manned by a team that bled their full talents over multiple years to make something that was as much a statement to their skills as it was a cool thing just for the heck of it. Which is increadibly commendable and worthy of my unfiltered, no holds barred, opinion on souls and talents laid bare. Also I'm going to spoil some stuff, I'll refrain from big end-of-mod stuff.

Introduction

'Fallout: The Frontier' is one of the most frustratingly mixed experiences I've ever played through in my life and I've gone through most of 'Pathfinder: Kingmaker' on Challenging. Not because of eye wateringly unfair situations in an otherwise sweepingly great game that make you question every choice you've ever made (such as it the case with Pathfinder) but for head-scratchingly terrible directing of unbelievable technical talents that comes together in a package that should have been the single most revolutionary must-play pieces of Fallout content ever made, but just... isn't. I don't even know if I can actually recommend this mod, which is such an insane thing to say that my internal organs are screaming in protest but my brain, and what it had to endure, knows that despite everything I experienced this package was something of a huge mess. And it all comes down to direction, I have to insist, because the technical talent on this mod was godly.

My experience with this mod has imbued me with a duty to warn the curious; when you hear people say that this mod pushes the game to it's limits they mean that implicitly. Which is to say that if you are like me and are running 'Fallout: New California' and maybe a small amount of background mods (I don't have a great deal of gameplay effecting mods, I really like how New Vegas vanilla feels) the game will hit memory limit and crash- a lot. I never had a memory limit crash before I played this mod, and I've had upwards of 80 since that playthrough. The NCR airport is particularly bad for it, even when running the 'reduced NPC toggle' in the Mod manager, but certain odd spots like Junkflea, for some reason, (Which is just a Scav flea market, I thought. I don't even know what's the loading issue there) will literally crash every two or three seconds. I turned every setting to low just to get through those areas unscathed. The lowdown is that whilst this mod is increadibly expansive, offers a totally realised world space and is dripping with places to explore; the 4GB limit on memory (which is the limit after a Patcher required to play the mod) makes it really difficult to enjoy at times. I hear that a certain ENB can extend that limit to 8GB using some sort of wizardry I don't understand, but I don't play with ENBs so I was poop-out-of-luck. (Thank god 'New Vegas' boots quickly, at least!)

Wanting to experience as much as I could, and upset that I couldn't enjoy the open world to it's utmost fullest thanks to the unavoidable memory issue, I had to resort to playing the obvious main questline in The Frontier. The mod actually offers three to the player, and offers a fair bit of variety and unique routes through these questlines, but between The Northern Legion, The Crusaders and The NCR Exiles; the lionshare of the development effort clearly went into the NCR questline. It has sixteen main quests (totally ignoring the bunch of side quests) whereas the other two have nine. Plus, the NCR questline has 'Chapters' splitting the story up for some inane reason, the most technically creative sections put into it and a development story about how it was the most frustrating route to create, which makes sense considering everything they try to do in it. So I obviously played that one despite my initial compulsion to go Crusaders. (Not least of which because the Cover armour featured on the mod is only acquirable, or even viewable, in the Crusader's questline. And trust me, that's hardly even the tip of the 'that sounds short sighted' iceberg.)

Starting out

Right out of the gate the NCR questline puts an incredible foot forward by doing something so jarringly out-of-the-norm for New Vegas that it totally rocked me; on the way to The Frontier they give you a cutscene. I'm not talking about a typical 'New Vegas style' cutscene where the HUD disappears, the game takes control and the scene actors go all 'marionette' for a minute in order to stop you just shooting everything mid-speech; I'm talking multiple perspectives, different angles, scene transitions and cinematography. I can't even conceive of how this was possible aside from what I somewhat guess which is that the game is stealing the HUD and then teleporting you around the scene to serve as the camera. But its so seamless I even doubted my understanding of that until one bugged moment where I got to catch my character sheathe their gun at the start of a cutscene, but even then this is mindblowing.

Let me try and convey why I'm so enthused about this alone. First off, that bugged weapon thing literally happened once across a simply stupid amount of cutscenes, so the fact this system works as well as it does is frightening. Secondly, the mod regularly uses this to depict new scenes in different locations, which makes my head hurt to even conceive! The Gamebyro engine that Fallout New Vegas uses isn't typically adept at keeping multiple areas loaded for rapid scene transition without pop-in, but this mod pulls that off and I don't know how. Sure, proper scene transitions to new locations still require loading, but even then I was floored. Just to let you know the absolute 'high' I was on when we started this mod, so you can comprehend the height from which my mood regularly fell.

This initial introduction leads straight into the first time the game gives you a set-piece perspective shift so that you play as another character in a flash back! This one isn't quite as impressive to figure out; they just give you an outfit with a mask on and mess with your inventory and perks a bit, but it's still totally out-of-the-norm for what Fallout can typically offer you. But it's also here, right at the setting off point for the mod, that I started to pick up on that issue of 'direction' that I've mentioned a bit before. Because whilst it's all cool and everything to conceive and pull off something like this, just ask yourself for a second: Does it fit? Playing through a curated action scene as a badass military guy with regenerating health and explosions and constant gunfights- does that belong in an immersive RPG game? Am I playing this game in order to play your curated action hero, or to go on an adventure with this character I've made for myself and have already gone on all these adventures with? It's not an issue I was thinking about right away, what with the overwhelming excitement of what I was actually playing, but during the more drawn out sections where The Frontier repeats this trick multiple times, it really began to rob the immediacy and immersion from the gameplay. (You know, about as much as having a memory crash every five minutes or so.) 

Now we get introduced to the world of the Frontier and it is- oh wait, no the NCR Exiles storyline wants to keep ahold of you for the next 8 hours. And thus begins a problem I have with the mod so huge that I don't even know if I can define this as a failing in direction or more a failing in common sense. This mod will teleport you around and about the wastes for hours throughout its first act, forcing you into highly choreographed 'Call of Duty' inspired combat scenarios rather than allowing you to explore for five minutes. You need to head somewhere to do a mission? The game will teleport you there with a quick white-out screen. No need to commute and risk actually exploring this vast world that our art team worked tirelessly to create. There is a map the size of New Vegas' (Or there about) to keep the player busy, and the NCR Exiles narrative is terrified to let you out into it! They'd rather stick you doing a over blown, and considerably less fun, version of 'Exodus' from Modern Warfare 2. (The mission where you escort the Honey Badger tank through the streets. Love that mission, didn't like this iteration of it.)

And when it comes to describing the NCR Exiles narrative, something people come back to time and time again is that it feels like budget Call of Duty; because it is. You have extended, exhaustive, bouts of firefights with organised bands of... Scavengers? They're literal scavengers. And for some reason they organise into a force to try and stop a military convey carving it's way through the city with their... Howitzer gun emplacements? (Woah hold on; where are these guys getting scavving all their equipment from?) And then there's another scene where you're forced into someone else's shoes for far too long as you play through action scenes that are totally trivialised through a 'health regen' mechanic the game implants through perks. Let me repeat; they tried to emulate the health regen of COD to make the combat more fast-paced and relentless. Can you figure out the problem here?

The problem is that it's polish on a turd. Everyone knows that Fallout 3 and New Vegas' combat gameplay is utterly serviceable at best, and not particularly thrilling on its own. Instead we have the RPG systems to make things a bit more interesting with mid-fight inventory management, tracking stimpaks and other chems, using VATS and not relying on the shooting itself. This questline attempts to put the action front and centre for this beginning act and it just doesn't come together at all. Street sweeping, dug-out clearing, turret sections; it all sounds good on paper but in practice it's all just noise and tedium. Especially as it's several hours of bloated action set-piece after ill-advised hour-long boss fight between us and the incredible open world which is, I remind you, the selling point of this mod to being with! For a time I genuinely questioned myself whether or not this game had an open world or if it was all just a backdrop for some COD fanatic's dream fangame superimposed on the Fallout framework. Thankfully I was wrong.

Za Warudo

When we actually get to explore the world of Portland, otherwise known as The Frontier, my jaw hit the floor time and time again. This world space is- not what I was expecting. For some reason I expected there to be a lot more hilly wilderness areas but instead the core of this map is relatively flat, with the city of Portland taking up a huge amount of the map. (The hills and slopes are more around the outskirts.) But aside from that this map exceeds my very high expectations. It is incredible, in scale and scope and intrigue. I felt like a kid with my new company of New Vegas all over again, or stepping into that first moment of Fallout 4 (Not so much 3 because that was literally my first open world game and I was more terrified at the openness of it all.) I wanted to touch and explore everything, be everywhere, look at everything! And darn it if the random crash hotspots didn't get in the way of my burning hot passion for this worldspace.

If I've never made it clear before I simply adore ice and snow themed game worlds, and the rime encrusted ruins of Portland perfectly present all the winter wonders of my wildest dreams. The glacial blizzard chills you through the screen, the ice-chunked river makes you wince to touch (although only visually. There's no mechanic of taking damage when swimming in ice-cold waters like there should be.) and the snow covered streets and hills just make me want to jump in the gameworld so I can roll all over them, making snow angels and losing my heart in their drifts. It's quite magical what the team created here. And the winterised NCR gear is simply >Mwah< (That's how you phonetically write 'chefs kiss'.) I only wish I had more reason to wear that glorious Winterized Riot Gear with the fox skin draped around the neck piece out into the Mojave from the base game. It sort of feels out-of-place wearing thermal-tipped-equipment in a land so humid that the patrolling forces are infamous for their desire to endure a nuclear winter over one single day more of sun.

It's just a shame that the art team are the one's who bought it the most, because the writing department certainly didn't show up. Again, I'm going to hit hardest on the topic I know the most about so of course it's going to warrant a reaction out of me when the worldbuilding is bad to the point of nonsensical. The basic foundations of what makes this Mod's premise and the player's involvement in it flies right into poorly written fanfiction territory with nauseating gusto. First off, as I've mentioned quite a few times here; the faction of the NCR you interact with are NCR Exiles. An alright, if uninspired, premise if presented cleverly. (It... it isn't... they don't do it cleverly.) You'd be hard pressed pointing out these so-called Exiles, given the fact that despite their apparently limited number, having spawned from the coup of a single general, they are the single most technologically advanced outfit out of California. Bar none.

They have unexhaustive fleets of Vertibirds, (remember that the NCR only have a few in the vanilla game) fleets of working vehicles such as tanks, (No indication of that for the vanilla NCR) airstrike capabilities with seemingly unlimited strike-range (godforbid if they got their hands on a nuke) and an honest-to-goodness, totally unexplained, (unless its tucked away on some really hidden terminal somewhere) S.H.I.E.L.D Helicarrier right out of the MCU. Try to remember that the state of technology in the pre-war was to the state where Fallout 4's Prydwen, a floating zeppelin, was considered high-tec. And these jokers got themselves a Helicarrier propelled by magical plasma cell juice, as you do. And the worldbuilding gets worse.

How about the Northern Legion? Let's try to comprehend how there's even a force of Legion here to start with, shall we? Take note that this mod takes place in the heart of Orgeon, around the city of Portland. To those of you who don't know the American map that well; that is North of Nevada and the Mojave. The Legion famously spawned out of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona, to the South-East of Nevada. Caesar's Legion has been progressing across Arizona and up into Utah, scooping up tribes in it's wake to grow ever larger, until it comes across an opportunity to prove itself against the NCR at Hoover Dam. That means the bulk of the Legion is going to be at Vegas. So for some reason, whilst Casear has his full forces prepared to prove thermselves against the biggest obstacle in his way to conquering the entire Western coast, a huge contingent of his forces (technological superior to his forces waiting in the Mojave, because of course) is stationed up in the boonies 900 miles away? And believe it or not, this gets even stupider beyond the tactical analysis.

Because of course these Legion can't just be a Northern contingent that somehow pushed itself several hundreds of miles north without breaking apart despite the very concept and structure of Caesar's Legion only existing and working because of it's implicitly centralised rule around the figure of Caesar himself, (as stated by the man, in his own words) but they actually adopt technology and use it in their warfare. Again, this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the faction in question is about, because one of Caesar's core founding principals, which you'd imagine would have to be drilled into these ice-brained idiots if they're following his orders 900 miles away from his influence, is the forsaking of technology because he claims the dependence it creates weakens the men who use it. This is core principal stuff, key separating characteristic between the Legion and NCR, antithesis meeting thesis 'Hegelian dialectics' style, and these writers just forgot about it. The same way they forgot that the position of 'Legate' isn't just a mirror of 'general'. There's only supposed to be one Legate, which is why Caesar had to dispose of the Malpais Legate (Joshua Graham) before he could recruit The Monster of the East, Lanius as his Legate. If you break it down to its etomology, the 'Legion' corresponds to a single roman army, and as a Legate is the sole commander of an army, there can only be one Legate. And yet, of course, the leader of the Northern Legion is Legate Valerius, because researching the topic you're writing about with Google searching is hard, I guess. (I have no clue how I manage it.)

And the Crusaders... are alright I guess. I have no idea why the creatives behind the Frontier felt the need to revamp the Brotherhood of Steel and in doing so make them more medieval themed, with Castellans and carrying the odd real-forged sword into battle for some utterly incomprehensible reason. (You have power armour and chainsaw daggers; why do you need metal swords?) It kind of feels redundant. I understand that the inclusion of Mormonism was supposed to shake up their image, but all it really seems to amount to is Tasha Weaver spouting our vaguely ecclesiastical rhetoric in dialogue moments that never really underline the purpose of a specific scene in a powerful manner as such themes sometimes can, but more serves as general wishy-washy colouring to let you know that this character does read some scripture. Probably. Even if she doesn't know how to contextualise it.

The writing quality

You might be picking up on a few themes here and there just from me describing the ill-thought out and fan-fiction-y worldbuilding, and allow me to reiterate: this mod's writing is simplistic. Not utterly poor, at least not the whole way through, but prevailingly, frustratingly, uninspired and mediocre. It comes out most obviously in dialogue, and of course taints the NCR characters the worst. The writers seem to have substituted all the personality of the NCR as a Fallout faction with 'generic American military grunt' such that this feels like a grunt-division of the Enclave more than a NCR contingent. Their dialogue is dry and the NCR characters are all typically one-note, even the one's who you spend a considerable amount of game-time around. I think the problem might have been that there were so many of them it became hard flesh out any one person.

The story, and this part is mostly aimed squarely at the NCR questline as I only got to dip my toes in the other questlines, does absolutely nothing surprising or risky in it's hefty length, even though I think the writers really believe it does. Even when things start to pick up, around about the second and third act after that abysmal introduction slog, the story merely rises from "This hurts to endure please cut off my ears" to "I can shut off my brain and have dumb fun here"; which is an improvement, sure; but after multiple years in the oven someone could have done a lot better. And sure, I'm saying this after having enjoyed beautifully well-written mods in the same playthrough such as the gorgeous 'Autumn Leaves', the exciting 'Someguy2000 collection', and even ''Cogito Ergo Sum' boasted increadibly snappy dialogue. The comparison isn't going to be favourable unless The Frontier was rocking actual employable writers; but it shouldn't be this stale either. It also makes me think that whoever was writing the main narrative either didn't care or was trying to wrestle something salvageable against another writing force who was a total train wreck. (And whom had total control of the first chapter.)

Do you like- my car?

But this is getting too negative for the moment, I'm starting to hate myself. How about I pick at another positive; like the vehicles! Again, the technical team soar in to save the day; what they achieved with making working tanks and armoured cars in Fallout is actual Gandalf-level magic. There is minimal jank here. I've played the various 'driving cars'/'Mech suit' mods for New Vegas over the years, and I know the sort of quality they offer; you always know what you're playing is a haphazard wonderglue job onto a base it wasn't made for. In The Frontier, despite some fiddliness with the turret of the tank, that nagging reminder of 'this doesn't belong' is non existent. These vehicles feel natural, they control appropriately, and the vehicle combat sections- honestly go one way too long so as to overstay it's welcome as literally everything in this mod does, but they function and make up actual gameplay. Even if that gameplay does feel like another bad 'Call of Duty' level.

Unfortunately it's the stability of the game, at least with my bloated upload, which made me unwilling to engage with vehicles outside of the missions they were placed in, although the Mod does fully have that option open to you if you want. I will say that my reticence spawned from an overabundance of caution based on what the gameworld consistency was like already, and the vehicle sections, increadibly, did not seem to increase my crash rate too much if at all. Combine that with it's robustness, the ingenuity of the systems involved, and the depth stretching just enough to include several enemy vehicle types from suicide bomb cars to heavy fire-spitting trucks, and I can happily close my eyes to the canonical questionability of a city ruled by working vehicles. I'm all for 'screw the lore, this is just fun'; just so long as this is, indeed, fun.

Meet my friends

As this mod provides such a big world space to explore, and so many bullet sponge foes to battle in that space including gun emplacements and enemy vehicles, it only makes sense that The Frontier provides us with companions; and this mod has a fair few. More than there are in vanilla New Vegas in fact! And these are fully realised for the most part, with personalities and companion quests, and a sort of inconsistent framing of a couple. Unlike with the base game a few of the companions will lock themselves out of their quests if you aren't playing the faction they're involved with; I appreciate the incentive to stick to your guns with a faction, I actually played so wishy washy in my current New Vegas playthrough that Ulysses had no clue which faction I was sided to and ended up threating the guys I was antagonising. (I can only speculate at how confused he was when I stopped his nuke only to fire it at the exact target he already primed.) But whenever you tell a player they have to play a certain way and lock out content to enforce it, there's a definite bad taste being left in some mouths there.

As for the character's themselves I can happily report that they were mostly a decent bunch, although some were clearly more fleshed out than others. And unlike in the Vanilla game where the companions are mostly all laid around the critical path so you're likely to naturally run into them throughout the progression of the game, these guys are all over the place; I could have easily missed out on the entire roster if I hadn't gotten curious and looked them up. Although there are a choice few that seem almost comically barebones. Take Lot, for instance. A character who is, shall we say, atypically morally aligned; but in such an unapologetic and almost surprised-to-be-judged manner that he comes across as remarkably unlikeable once you learn the truth about him. There's a real trick to writing a character who is intentionally unpleasant in way that feels believable, as I've mentioned when talking about Pillar's of Eternity's 'Durance'; but then I'm not even sure about that. Lot's ending card slate seems to hint at a sort of redemption arc which he seemed utterly non-interested in during his entire companion quest, which makes me wonder when the writers didn't go all the way and have him continue on as an asshole.

Wrench, on the otherhand, is a perfectly executed character for what they wanted to do with her. You get a grasp for who she is, underestimate her depth and assume her to just be a mercenary before her repeated interjections on your actions imply there's something more to her going on. Eventually she opens up and reveals a bit more about herself giving the player insight into who she was before with some actually shockingly decent dialogue. (after enduring the bulk of the NCR Exiles' writing, decent is shocking.) Then the player has the opportunity to go on a quest and influence her personal journey positively affecting her life onwards. That is literally what I ask of every companion and the team actually pulled it off perfectly with her. I mean, there's no actual choice inside of the quest to change her fate, it's the doing of the quest alone that is the choice; but it's meaningful interaction and I love that!

And then there's America. Yeah, she's the big controversial point hanging over every criticism of The Frontier 1.0, isn't she. I'll be honest, I don't get it. Okay, I sort of get it; but I still think it's a bit overblown. Does she have some kind of weird ambient chatter? Yeah. She says some stuff that's not what I would have written for her to say, let's just say that. But what is she really? She's a kind of annoying girl living with the Crusaders with obnoxiously overbearing abandonment issues that she vomits all over the player in your first couple of interactions. Imagine expositing your darkest insecurity upon a stranger you literally bumped into in the lobby; that's what she does. She's below average as far as companions go, and I didn't mind ignoring her quest (completing it would have locked my out of the NCR questline) because getting her bad ending was meaningless to me. And yet there is another controversial point...

The enslaving. Here's another example of bewildering implementation. The act of enslaving your companion is not, in itself, out of left field for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and it's tone. Remember: you can feed your companions to cannibals in vanilla. But for me it's just the abruptness of meeting this girl through a pretty forced interaction as part of the Crusader's introductory questline, having her life story unceremoniously dumped on you, having her become your companion and from that exact moment onwards being able to enslave her. Just out of the blue. She joins the player and you'll forever have the dialogue options to try and trick a slave collar around her neck from the supply of explosive collars that you have on you magically for some reason. It's not as if this is a theme or something, you can't enslave any other companions, or anyone else for that matter. (Outside of some choice moments in the Legion campaign.) Why America? Why so abruptly? I know you don't always need a reason to be evil in these games, the spontaneousness is part of the fun; but this particular action feels so spontaneous that it almost feels like an undue expectation. Am I supposed to want to enslave her? Why? Did I miss the memo on why she'd make a good slave? I don't really like having America hanging around me of her own volition, she's kind of whiny and she says weird stuff about her feet smelling, why would I want to force her to be around me more? Chalk this up to yet another reason why a mod of this size really needed a director.

But if there is one critique I have about the companion system overall, one huge missed opportunity; it's that the companions feel totally superfluous to the events of the main story. I mean you'll get the odd comment here and there, a warning that they'll leave if you continue working with this faction, but they aren't actually integrated into any questlines. Which is fine, doing that would be going above and beyond anyway. But The Frontier goes one step further. You're actually not allowed to bring your companions on most missions. In the same moment that the game likes to teleport you from main objective to main objective like you're freakin' Steven Grant hitting a fugue state between commutes, the game slips your companions out of reality and gives them back when your done. So all the cool set-pieces and big battles, I have to have them with my crappy faction squadmates and not the companions who carry my burdens about the place. I assume it's a question of balancing, the same reason why the mod asks to confiscate all your items when you start. (And doesn't give them back to you when it finishes, it makes you go and find them.) But it feels kind of belittling that these mod authors didn't trust us to manage our own gameplay balancing. Hey Frontier Team, you realise all your players are on PCs, right? If we want to cheat, we can console command 'kill' anything; we know how to exercise restraint. Besides, blocking off all companions from any important story beat, even just to show up for emotional support, makes their existence feel superfluous.

Above the clouds

When I came to cementing the campaign I wanted to play, I had a choice between NCR and the Crusaders. The imbalance of content is what shifted me the NCR's way, as I knew from glancing at the questlist that the NCR Exiles' questline was the only route to getting aboard the absolutely giant space station level. Yes, there is a space station level in 'Fallout: The Frontier' and it is an incredible spectacle. I'm talking, 'highlight of the mod' tier set-piece; and you only get to see it with the NCR. It kind of makes you think that the other questlines were a bit of an afterthought, huh. It was a bit of a shame because to be honest I was kind of feeling the Crusaders a bit more at that time; not least of all because I didn't crash at their headquarters every 5 minutes along with the undeniable fact that the odd desultory scripture quote in dialogue packs a pinch more flavour than milquetoast military cliché drivel all day long. But how could I pass up a trip to space? If I did that I'd be no better than Pete Davidson; and then where would I be?

The reason that there's a space station in this mod would classify as a big spoiler but given how utterly generic this writing is I'm 100 percent sure that if you've even played a single Fallout game since the first one before you can probably figure it out at a guess. Take a single second to think of how a space station would be introduced into this world, and literally your first guess is right. Incredible, how did you do it? Heck, they even introduce the concept of the space station through a nearly identical scene to how the orbital platform in Fallout 3 is shown off; only this time it makes no sense because the scenario writer favoured sceptical over coherence. (Why would these guys reveal themselves, and their capabilities, getting involved in a small scale skirmish with a bunch of scavs that they had no stake in? It's literally like they were just saying 'this plot feels kind of dull, can we come over to shake it up a bit?')

But here the ribbing stops. I fully shut my mouth because the space station is jus- wait, hold on I can't move on without making fun of the concept Vertishuttles for a second. (Verishuttles? Really? VTOL shuttles? I thought the entire point of a VTOL craft was for rapid deployment; you're going to rapidly deploy attack fleets from freakin' space? It's really going to take 12 hours for every attack team to hit the surface; the backup will arrive by the time everyone's gone to sleep!) Ahem. So- the space station is a marvel. Truly incredible. Right out of a sci-fi movie and not in a basic retexture of Mothership Zeta or something. This environment is almost totally custom, with glowing LED stripes lining the hallways and custom animation airlock doors that take 3 seconds too long to cycle for how many there are, and even bright neon lattice tucked away here and there and even on some enemy armours! Oh, and inexplicable barricades on the inside of the ship hallways, which is actually a concept nicked from Mothership Zeta. (Woah, these guys were really prepared for a completely unpredictable invasion, weren't they?)

As exciting as it looks, the station makes an even better playspace. I mean sure, it's a shooting gallery for the most part. But a shooting gallery with remarkable visuals, a smattering of differing enemy types with amazing custom skins, bunches of superbly high-quality custom guns to shoot them with, and a distinct lack of interaction with your terminally boring NCR spacemates. (For the most part. They swoop in to ruin your day here and there when they feel like it.) I had so much fun exploring this zone, mostly crash free, that I able to actually forget some of those initial pains that felt insurmountable to begin with. This single, bloated, several hours too long, mission thread saved a lot of this mod for me when I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue at times! (I was that on the ropes!) A lot of it was really fun bar one fiddly set-piece section that seemed to have wanted me to sprint in order to avoid a scripted death, which is strange because there is no sprint button in vanilla Vegas and I certainly don't remember seeing a sprint-enabling mod on the list of required mods.

However, if there is one thing I might critique: I seriously cannot tell if the 'references' in this particular part of the mod count as funny referential humour classic to the Fallout games, or just bad plagiarism in the vein of 'Hunt down the Freeman'? (Okay I'm exaggerating there. Little could be as bad as 'Hunt down the Freeman's cringe MGSV rip-off scenes. But the fact that this mod made me remember that trainwreck at any point, is not a glowing endorsement.) Of course I refer to the machinations of the Enclave guy who- (Whoops I let it slip... meh, it wasn't a shock to anyone anyway) literally is just Deathshead from 'Wolfenstein: The New Order'. He has an inexplicable German accent, similar facial scars, and an identical scene to the 'capture' scene from that game, where the game makes you choose between two companions you hardly know to decide who's about to be spliced. Heck, the name of the cell in that this decision happens in, within the game files themselves, is literally called 'Deathshead'. Is it a 'loving send up' if you just copy the events and presentation whole hog with as minimal alterations as possible to fit Fallout lore? I genuinely have trouble answering this, please give me your opinion.

But of course the Space station section wasn't perfect. As I mentioned it goes on way too long, (but the whole space is so remarkable that you'll kind of let it.) the area throws way too many new armours at you knowing full well that you'll never be able to carry them all back and you're not allowed to bring companions and leaving unique area gear just feels like a sin to my item-hoarder soul. (It doesn't matter that I'll never wear it; I need to own one of every armour type.) Oh, and they decided to throw in a Ubisoft-style dream sequence. Oh yeah; it's impressive from a technical level what they can do, as always, but my god is it a momentum killing time sink. I was nodding off thirty minutes in and I still had another thirty to go; it was miserable as all utterly unproductive dream sequences are. But I'll get more into that later.

And yet everytime I want to rage I come back around when remembering the variety of gameplay moments in this mod. You have straight shooting gallery scenes, as is standard in this mod, but then you have a honest-to-god open space jumping section! There's also a turret defence snippet against asteroids, and a zombie swarm area, a close range boss fight against an enemy with way-too-much health, a wave defence set-piece, and just everything you could ask to make this several hour long slog feel fresh. These didn't feel like mechanics heavy levels in the early game, where your time was wasted enduring a well made system that did not have the depth to sustain an entire level of interest; (like the tank defence mission or the vehicle mission) they feel like genuine snippets of gameplay variety chucked into a wagon train of a mission to create easily one of the best designed missions in the mod. Oh, and it has a mechanical boss fight at the end. I'm not talking about a-boss-made-from-mechanical-parts, although he is; I mean a boss with functional boss mechanics unlike anything the Fallout franchise has done before. (Once again; I stand agog.)

Boss Fights

Speaking of boss fights, The Frontier has a fair few of them and they're definitely worthy of a section all to their own. The humble boss fight is a time honoured video game design technique of rounding out a stretch of content with an exciting and sometimes challenging summation of the action, narrative or gameplay pieces. (And on a good day; all three) The boss I just mentioned, the robot aboard the space station, is easily the most incredible the Frontier has to offer. (Which is yet another reason why the NCR Exiles questline really shouldn't hold the Space station section hostage to itself.) The boss is almost worthy of a Portal game with the way it's laid out, and I mean that to be as high of praise as it sounds. What got me the most was the fact that is functioned. And I know I keep coming back to that, but New Vegas isn't the most stable game at the best of times. It was slapped together in a year by a studio who, admittedly, seems to have many priors in making something out of nothing in a year or under; but still means the game is held together by shoestrings and silly putty. The eldritch magic that the Frontier team must have deployed to get everything working this smoothly is honestly terrifying because they've definitely spelled the doom of all humanity with their profane practice. I can only hope their meddling in the old arts only shatters the dream-prison of Ln'eta, so that our final mind-shattering nightmare can at least be a pleasant one.

But not all the bosses are quite so cool as all that. In fact, one of the first bosses, at least for the NCR questline, is against the Legion's only tank; and on the hard difficulty it is the most tedious fight in the game. (And I fought Marko in the Someguy2000 mod collection.) Again, there's a mechanic to it, but it's one that moves the fight along at a snail's pace, all the while watching the clock go by and wondering why this hasn't ended yet. The fight took me twenty five minutes. For one boss. (Unbelievable.) And the only other real bosses of note are more traditional 'guy with big health bar' fight, which I find to be totally serviceable. Unless you stick me in a narrow room with no cover from them, so thanks so much for doing that on the Space station. 

Music

Before I forget, as I typically always do, it's important I touch on the music; because it is all custom. Like all of the building blocks that makes up the NCR portion of this mod, the NCR music suite is stuffed with generic lazy military rock that just does not fit the NCR as a faction. It would fit a blind reimaging of the US military, but again, the NCR have more nuance than that! As for every other track, the music ranged from pleasingly atmospheric to weird in good way. There was this one battle theme in particular which sounded nothing like something you'd expect to get you pumped for a fight but had just enough vaguely-techno beat in it to worm into my heart and become something I actively bumped to whenever it switched on. I don't physical dance to any other incidental music in New Vegas, so the Frontier can take that dubious honour for a point in it's favour, if it wants it. But it should bask in that positivity because I'm about to ping-pong back to one of my most hated aspect about amateur independent projects the world over: bad dream sequences.

Dream Sequences

Do you know what's bad about a dream sequence where it doesn't belong? Well mechanically they're an unnecessary stop-gap in the narrative that tips all impulse in the plot right out the window in favour of, typically banal, existentialism and abstract symbolism. It's an invitation for writers to put down the pens and let the creative minds of the artists take over, which in itself is a magnet for poor commentary. A concerned and perceptive artist knows that a dream sequence is not an excuse to get lazy, but a challenge to stretch the very extremities of their creative talent to weave ingenuity and exposition in a concise and sometimes even a profound way. In the same vein that it's said how art is just as much about what you leave out of the picture, carving a blank, rule-less, slate should be an exercise in informed and intuitive discipline.

Or you could just throw the audience into a ropey horror house where they regularly get attacked by faceless mannequins with names like 'Anxiety' and 'Fear' and 'Indignation'. Look, the creativity is there, and there's talent to pull off the stranger ideas, but there's no actual meaningful substance to any of it. And because this section of the game wasn't created with a purpose in mind, a point of the plot that had to be told, the sequence just goes on and on and on. It doesn't have a purpose beyond existing, afterall; so how can the team know when they've made enough to fulfil its purpose? The vault dream sequence meanders for a truly tortuous length of time, during which you have no progress in the core narrative, are learning nothing interesting about your own motives, (which is a theme that the dream sequence half-heartedly tried to pursue) and are regularly forced to partake in Fallout's notoriously under-developed melee systems in fights for your life. Everytime the spectacle threatens to deliver just enough to suspend your disbelief, you bump into a dead-faced clone of your hero who walks up to you and says "I've done it. I have defeated the bad guy. That makes me the hero." (That is verbatim, by the way.)

I mean come on, that's infantile levels of 'turning the question of morality back on the player'. The best they could come up with, on the infinite, unshackled plains of a dream sequence, was "You do things but have to kill to do them and killing is bad so maybe you bad?" Oh and don't forget "Bad things happen to you so feel emotions about them like sadness but sadness is also dream guy who try to attack you so you have to shoot sadness." It's a shame because when I say the visual creativity is on point, I mean it. If I wasn't in tears begging for the dream sequence to end because it's already gone on for an hour and a half, I was genuinely enjoying the weirdness of running around as a headless lobotomy patient or having spear-fights with giant exploding mannequin men. Either the writing team needed a shake up or, once again, the project needed a director to forcibly turn off people's computer and go "You've made enough, anymore and this section will be boring."

 

Bites Za Dusto

As I'd come to expect from the NCR Exiles narrative by this point, the resolution to the narrative is suitably action packed and awkwardly structured so that the main plotline reaches a crescendo about five times straight. (I thought I was watching Matt Reeves' 'The Batman' with all the consecutive story climaxes) But even though I think it was an increadibly bizarre mistake to deal with the factions in the order that they did, I will admit to actually liking the final act of this story worlds more than I enjoyed the introduction; both in writing and gameplay. Enough to make we wonder if separate teams put these two halves of the campaign together or if this one team just didn't know how to handle introductions. (Which would be fair; starting a story is often the hardest step if you haven't figured out the ending already.) By the tail end of the story the mod pretty much becomes set-piece after set-piece, which actually becomes a lot more tolerable when 'A.' you're constantly in control and immersed in the main character and 'B.' the team remembers that a cool gameplay section only stays cool for as long as the scene is a novelty. I was genuinely shocked when the bunker bash against the Crusaders wrapped in less than two hours. And genuinely happy too, because I got to leave that encounter just as excited as I was when I entered it.

I have to take off points for the twist, because similar to 'Hidden Agenda' by Supermassive games; the team pulled the old 'the most suspicious looking and sounding guy is the culprit' trick, only this time the sincerity of the narrative didn't manage to pull my bluff. I clocked the main villain the very second he was introduced and spent the entire time just trying to guess the moment he would strike. I mean they literally gave him the most Saturday cartoon villain name possible; how could he not have been the twist villian? And to summarize his presence and story- he was pretty mediocre. At least he wasn't ideologically driven, because everytime these NCR Exiles spouted their grade-level understanding of military discourse I felt my grey matter leaking out of my ear holes.

I actually think the prolonged final mission was suitably exciting and bullet-filled and explosive, with some different gameplay challenges sprinkled in there to keep things interesting. It wasn't quite as ambitious as the Space station, but it was still grand and appropriate enough to be a finale for such a huge mod. One scene I found to be vaguely reminiscent of 'Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots' later, and you get to have a pretty climatic final boss fight against a beefy, but not too beefy, final boss. I loved the spectacle of it all, it felt like the big budget finale of a particularly meat-brained Bond movie. But not the ending of Quantum of Solace because I actually fondly remember this sequence and I'm frankly amazed I even remembered Quantum of Solace's name without looking it up. (It took a second to get there.) Was it a finale good enough to redeem everything up until then? Not even nearly, it would have had to have been more than perfect, it would need to be legendary to pull that off. And instead it was great. But great is better than good, and leaving the player on a high note is entertainment 101.

In Summary

'Fallout: The Frontier' has a great many faces, and a lot of them are frustrating. From overambition eclipsing hard software limitation, to the odd buggy quest, to the terrible content balancing, the even worse writing, and rampant, egregious, plot holes. But it's also one of the most impressive feats of modding engineering ever made. I just keep coming back wishing that every aspect of this mod lived up to the technical talent on full display. (and visual talents. The world looks beautiful) But for every abject success on the part of the technical talent, creating working vehicular combat and multi-layered boss fights, there's a thoughtless implementation squandering the hard work. Bad decisions pile up high enough to sully the package, which is a tremendous shame given the heretofore unprecedented collection of ambitious and creative minds who poured their passion into The Frontier. I found sparks of an incredible experience tucked in the middle of this mod in the NCR playthrough, and a decent adventure closing out the end, but the rest of the package felt like a messy scramble of spectacular individual elements that just never managed to make it together. 

As a package, for the frustration it caused, I honestly wouldn't recommend playing it. But for the artistry behind the mod I'd at least say watch someone else play it so you can enjoy the spectacle without the vexations. The biggest mod in modding history deserved better than this, and the controversial reputation it has fostered is more than a little overblown. Taking this package for all of it's successes, I would have no problems fixing this review with a shiny A+ badge; but when weighed down with the technical difficulties, the poor to mediocre writing, the terrible mission layout design, the uninspired worldbuilding, weak characters and uneven pacing; I'm left somewhere nearer a D when evaluating the whole experience. But then I recall how much of a high note it left on (at least on the NCR Exiles campaign. The other two was surprisingly cut-and-dry by comparison.) and I have to squeeze that up to an D+ Grade; for good behaviour. I think it's the disappoint which weighs the most on me, both for what I know this mod could have been and for myself in not managing to like it. I just hope the talents who made this go onto develop more in the future, because the technical team have a game development future waiting for them if they want to take it, no doubt.