Coming back to Steam.

 Look who came crawling back!

It takes quite the gall to step away from the biggest video game marketplace in the industry in order to sell your games literally anywhere else in the world. Helped, often, by the kind influx of angel money from the platform to which you're heading, or at the very least a much better general cut of the sales you'll be making, ideally resulting in better dividends. Provided, of course, that people will be encouraged enough to seek you out on that comparatively niche and small-pond alternative in order to actually go and buy your game. Because invariably, if you aren't on Steam you're not where the visibility is. But what if you have the absolute supreme confidence to go out there and take that one step further? To actually mount your own marketplace to sell your very own video games? Why, at that point you've got to be at the top of your game, right?

I mean, having the gall to launch your own storefront is basically saying that as a company your singular brand is powerful enough to attract anyone who would want to seek out your games directly to you. You have that staying power which few other publishing houses can match, and that ability to market directly into the feeds of your user base without the help of Steam and discount sales. And- crucially, that you have the consumer trust to hang onto their bank details for long enough for the transaction to go through. That last one is a big one, because let me tell you there are plenty of times I've backed out from even considering the purchase just because I think the website looks like the kind to suffer a password breach without alerting their users for the first three months. If you can claim all of that, then why shouldn't you strike out on your own and start your own storefront?

Well, we've actually touched on this topic before and a big point of contention is the user experience on PC. Any PC player will tell you that the single most frustrating moment of buying a PC game is realising that the damn thing won't play until you download a crappy publisher-only launcher ontop of the game you just brought. Thank you so much Paradox Interactive; but I only own Stellaris, why in god's name do I need your first party software booting up everytime I play that one game of yours? Well, triple that sense of exasperation when it comes to whole actual storefronts! Now your library is in five separate applications. Just the other week I had to go on a wild goose chase to figure out which library held my PC version of Watch_Dogs 1 in it. It was the Ubisoft one. I totally forgot that Ubisoft hosted their own games through their very own service until that exact point.

The more companies who start to split off their games from Steam, the more inherently segmented their playerbase becomes. How many people out there buy their games dependent on which games get a discount? That's pretty much my entire philosophy unless it's a title I adore so much I have to support the developer with a full priced purchase. Well Steam and Epic have systems in place so you know when a discount is implemented to a game you're looking for; but games on EA Origin? On Ubisoft's store? I don't even if they do get discounted, because no body is checking out their storefronts on a daily basis. Maybe you could subscribe to the websites for that info; but do you really want the corporate shill marketing account cluttering up your inbox? Is that what anybody wants?

So what do you do when you're own hubris leads you out of turn? What happens when you've believed yourself to be strong enough to start your very own marketplace, only for that to come and bite you in the profits? Well, just ask literally anyone other than Epic who has done this over the years. GOG is it's own thing with it's own draw, but I genuinely think Epic games are the only devs who tried to copy what Steam did and bragged it off based on the sheer power of their Fortnite money, and even then there are significant market reach limitations constraining their growth. EA Origin ended up folding into Steam, and now it seems like Ubisoft is starting the arduous process of bringing all of it's modern titles to Steam to match up with their old titles, so that maybe now people can start finishing off that Assassin's Creed collection they started ten years ago.

News on this came out whilst Valhalla was getting it's very last update, because apparently some truly lost individuals still play Assassin's Creed Valhalla expecting the grind to suddenly evaporate or become worth it in the end. (There's no worthwhile endgame content; save yourself the trouble.) Assassin's Creed is coming to Steam as Ubisoft are no only happy supporting their games with only Epic and their own storefront. I myself can attest to how this effected my own buying decisions when it came to buying one of their games. Because when it came to buying Watch_Dogs Legion with Ubisoft or with Epic, I defaulted to Epic simply because I didn't trust Ubisoft to stick around and remember by purchase five years from now. And I never pick Epic if I can help it!

I suppose this prove that despite the increased value for developers to launch their games on Epic, there really is no true replacement for Steam. Because even positioned as the artesian game marketplace, free of freemium trash games which clutter Steam's ecosystem, Epic cannot hope to match the reach of their bluer competitor. It's a shame really, lack of serious competition always lends to stagnancy, and though it's looked rough here and there, I don't think Steam are taking Epic seriously anymore. Heck, Square Enix even did a same day release for Final Fantasy Crisis Core Reunion! Can you believe that? I'm still having trouble wrapping it around my head! I had to wait an entire year for the FF7R bad PC port to come to Steam; what the hell, Square?

Ubisoft, EA, Bethesda; how many more preppy so-and-so's need to be crushed under the cold heel of reality to realise that launching a market place isn't just a 'set in and make money' solution? Do you think that Valve stopped making games simply because their Steam platform made more money? Well... yes, they did; but there was a little bit more ontop of that besides! Decades of work went into making Steam the powerhouse it is today, and it's going to take more than a half-assed barely functional launcher to replace it. Yes, I called Uplay barely functional- it can't even get the Ico file right for the games it downloads! At the end of the day, as a player I just want to press play and not have to worry about all the elements in the background; and if a publisher can create a platform that manages to perform that as good as, or better than, Steam; then you'll have yourselves a competitor! 

Gamefreak pulls a dud?

 Mistakes were made

There is a certain breed of game developer out there that is condemned to make nothing but the exact same game over and over for years on end. This is the same sort of developer that will bleed and grow new employees over the space of the surrounding twenty or so years, only to stagnate as the years go by and their jobs become a repetitive task over and over. Yes, you can change the world, research new cultures to base the art off, smack into your head over and over that this time you're doing something new and interesting, but if it's going into the exact same sort of game that you were making last year, there's no real way that your end product isn't going to progressively grow worse and worse. It's fatigue, wear and tear, and artistic stagnation all rolled up in one, bound by the purse strings of corporate greed. And that is the hell that Game Freak have been in for the longest time.

Under the Pokémon Company, Game Freak have been almost single-handily tasked with ensuring the world has a Pokemon game to play almost every year since the franchise launched; keeping the property fresh in the minds of all comers as the primary source of enjoying the Pokemon world. Card collecting comes and goes in popularity, the TV show has to contend with viewership seasons, the video games are the one constant which can ensure the franchise is never far from people's minds. But as video games become bigger and more involved productions, it seems the workload of Game Freak has only increased upon itself, to the point where in this year alone Game Freak were expected to release and maintain two high quality Pokemon games of significantly different style at the beginning and end of this year.

Now we know that Legends: Arceus has actually been worked on in the background for quite some time before release and Game Freak have proven themselves to be a big enough company to create more than one project at the same time; but that doesn't mean the toil of developing two independent video games simultaneously whilst committing to an asinine bi-yearly schedule isn't going to come with short comings. Unless Game Freak have the money to create an entirely independent studio under them, which they haven't so far so I can only assume they don't have that sort of money, these development cycles are going to start feeding into one another. That's just the cost of ever increasing expectation in a market that is only becoming more complex and expectant.

Of course, this is just me explaining the raw facts of the situation. I'm not here making excuses for why it is that Game Freak are incapable of making a brilliant genre-defining Pokémon game once again.  That's for their main marketing team to brush off with a smile whilst assuring everyone that Game Freak are doing just as fine as they always were. Nor is this me trying to make excuses for the increadibly pitiful way in which Scarlett and Violet launched; to the point where many feel like they're playing the early access to a title at least six months away from a 1.0 launch. There really is no excuse for charging so much for a product like that and you lose the sympathy of me when you do regardless of the very real complications that are going to come in the way of delivering.

Oh and the game crashes. It breaks down more than a Vauxhall. Or a Tesla when you aren't in the country of the companies origin. Pokemon Scarlett and Violett sees more crashes to the home screen then any other first party game allowed on the Switch ecosystem, and if Gamefreak were literally any other company (other than Nintendo themselves, obviously) this game would never have been greenlit to be sold on their storefront. (Oh wait... unless it was an overly ambitious port of a game far too big to fit on the console. Nintendo seem to have total QA blindness in that department.) But the current state of gaming means that most just write that off as 'launch pains' destined to be ironed out within a matter of weeks. That's just the price of paying full price for an early adoption! As long as that is the extent of the issues of course...

But it isn't. How could it be? There's also just general visual bugs and oddities within the context of the world itself. Not least of all the ugly character models that seem strangely mismatched for their roles. Yes, I understand that the Academy central to the narrative of Scarlett and Violet is open to all ages, so it makes sense for there to be adult students, but horrible string monsters? Are they allowed to join the Pokemon academy too? The past few days have been filled with example after example of just ill-fitting characters in odd places. And more than that, some of the actually designed character's look overdesigned and messy; as though the character artists were still on their drafts when the concepts were finalised and modelled. 

Things are so bad that Digital Foundry issued a veritable diss-article on the game. I typically see Digital Foundry as a very mild mannered outlet, more occupied with nit-picking the finer details of graphical settings only relevant to people entire tax brackets above myself; but for Scarlett and Violett they amassed their darkest energies. They slammed the bugs, the lack of shadows, the low quality environment assets and even the 'crude' artwork. And when you see some of the side-by-sides between this game and what the spin-off 'Legends Arceus' did, the comparisons are stark. And supremely ugly, incidentally. To quote their wrap-up: "Embarrassing artwork, terrible draw distance, poor performance, mediocre image quality, and a litany of bugs plague this pair of very troubled games. Pokémon fans deserve better.”

Which leaves us at the question; is the Pokemon franchise too much for Gamefreak to handle, practically by themselves at this point? In this age of ultimatums, the calls are already going out for Gamefreak to be sacked from Pokemon entirely, but I think that's a little bit overly-vitriolic at this stage. I think there's still a charm to modern Pokemon, but it's lacking the scale to really evolve in any significant way thanks to the very tight grip of the franchise holders. Arceus made an interesting step, and SV at least attempted to do something different, but without the time and personnel to realise these dreams, the Pokemon franchise is only going to end up seeming more and more dated with every release. Which will incidentally make every game seem more and more overrpiced. There is value lost with every underwhelming entry; and the second you fool yourself into thinking your brand is too ubiquitous to sag, is the moment the wolves come to tear your pride apart.

Volition's punishment.

Almost

Consequences for one's actions are rarely a concept we see explored and highlighted outside of school life, wherein it's the be-all end-all of life discussions. Because in the real world that's not entirely true, or only part of the truth, or a straight up lie altogether. Actions can sometimes never be traced to a direct causal link and who can honestly say whether or not their downturn in life is a direct result of their own negligence or a general slippery slope maybe somewhat helped along by their own actions. It's a murky and misty mire to try and tread across where there's no real right route. Except if you happen to be a company called Volition. Because in their case; Saints Row absolutely was the reason that their company is soon having the reigns around it's independence tightened.

 

This news comes from the lips of horrible Lovecraftian amalgamation monster 'Embracer Group' as they recently turned around and cut Volition's independence. Which is quite stark because I didn't even know Embracer Group owned them. Who else does Embracer Group own? Do they own me, and I just don't know it? If so, I'd really like to start getting some cheques in the mail any day now, Embracer Senpai; maybe then I'd stop laying dirt on your companies name! Embracer has decreed that Volition to be rolled under the wing of the producer Gearbox- wait, Embracer own Gearbox as well? I thought that was Epic Games! (Wait- actually now I come to think of it I just collate those two company founders as the same person because they're both equally childish. Now I remember...)

And how can we be sure that this is the victim of the recently released Saints Row Reboot game? I mean, what if this is simply because of the terrible losses of- let me check... The last game they made before that was 2017's Agents of Mayhem? Hmm... yeah I can't really see a scapegoat for them on this one. But the punishment doesn't seem to quite fit the crime, at least; not how Deep Silver seemed to describe the reception of Saints Row.  Listen to the word of 'corporate' and all you would hear, time and time again, was how the game is absolute not a failure. They said that, whilst the game was 'divisive' critically, the commercial sales proved more than enough to break even- oh wait, now I can see the subtle hints that this game didn't perform well... huh, funny I didn't notice that until this very moment...

Still, it's a little bit screwed up for your boss to ensure you that everything is going totally fine only for your entire department to be kicked out from their purview and under the eyes of another wobbly supposedly comedic video game company within the space of a few months. (Does this mean that the several chunks of menu options in the remake that were locked away for DLC will remain forever greyed out? No, apparently Deep Silver get to handle that stuff by themselves) Heck, there were members of the Volition team that themselves felt the need to bitterly stand up to the criticism of their work as self-appointed Twitter warriors. I can understand the passion, which makes sense when your very competence is challenged on a public forum; but perhaps those individuals would have ended up feeling a bit less worthless if they hadn't fought against perceptions of their game for month only for the bosses boss to agree with the haters and strip away all autonomy your studio had for the crime of delivering a truly atrocious game.

Which is not to say that I think Saints Row Reboot wasn't bad enough to destroy the franchise. If anything, the reboot's desperate attempts to strip away the identity of Saints Row to appeal to some imaginary mass market of Saints fans that were only waiting for the game to become less crude before they could really fall in love with the franchise, just highlighted how much the series was played out and empty. Honestly, Saints Row struggled to find itself years before the Reboot came around, this was just the shuddering final nail in that coffin. And since Volition's only other franchise has been itself awol for the past eleven years; I guess that made it a nail in Volition's coffin at the same time. As twisted as it sounds, this was probably a long time coming.

But does this mean the death of Saints Row and Volition? Not necessarily. The company still exists under the producing management of Gearbox, so there might be a chance for a surprise resurgence some years down the line if Gearbox can be tricked into financing such a thing. Although the scant Saints Row Reboot fans may have to come to terms with the sobering reality that it might be with yet another reboot to the brand. Afterall, pissing off the fanbase with a low quality game is one thing, but doing that and just about making a profit at the same time is pretty much a carnal sin of commercial work. The next time Saints Row sees the light of day we'll be in a different age and it'll carry the Gearbox badge and probably their cringe as well. The real question is whether or not that Gearbox logo will mean the game will be better or worse... after New Tales from the Borderlands, that's anyone's guess... (At least it might play better.)

Until that magical day, however, I suppose all we can do is look back on the demented life of the Saints Row franchise and try to remember the good in what it was. This was supposed to be the bold new face of the franchise and it was just awful. Unfortunately it was too awful to be continued, which is a bit of a shame because I was kind of hoping they'd go crazy and make this a bi-yearly series of hilariously bad cringe games. But apparently the 'I know it's abjectly terrible but I'm a hipster so I'm going to play it anyway' crowd isn't nearly as big as it likes to pretend it is on Twitter. And considering Twitter is soon to be the way of the dodo; I guess it's not really tenable for Volition to hide behind those loud accounts as proof of their apparently broad market appeal.

Of course I feel bad for Volition. I don't particularly love any one of their recent games, and have even fallen hard out of love with Saints Row 2 in recent years, but any developer stuck making one single game franchise for over a decade is unethical in my opinion. No artist wants to reiterate on the same themes they did before again and again, they want to change it up and keep things feeling fresh and interesting. Saints Row didn't even start as something unique and everytime it's tried to make itself into anything new the end product has veered closer to 'clueless' with every step. I know shifts of the status quo like this tend to lead to lay-offs; and that is one instance where I feel unabashedly bad. It is surprising I must say, the sheer stopping power of rank mediocrity. 

Slot in Voice-Acting

 Swapsies!

There is a very peculiar style of voice acting in video games that has been around for quite a while but to which myself and a lot of the rest of the world has been made aware of very recently. I'm talking about the style of VO work where a significant character, typically the protagonist, employs not only different voices depending on the character created, but different lines too. Whereas everyone else in the script remains static and responds in dialogue the same way they would to any character voice, the the inciting vocal stimuli could change from one performance to another, which is about as complicated and confusing as it sounds. Perhaps one character is providing generic affirmation responses to wildly different topics of conversation, and maybe that creates a floaty feeling to dialogue where it sounds like two conversations are being had in different rooms to different people. Who do you think handles this style of voice acting the best? Because I'll tell you straight away who's the worst.

Watch_Dogs Legion. When I said this topic had been made aware to the world, I was referencing Watch_Dogs Legion, for the way in which people reacted to learning how the 'play as anyone' feature of the game meant that NPCs would be inserted as key inciting voices that drive the narrative forward. It sticks out like a sore thumb as just about everyone fails to affirm themselves as interesting and commandeering protagonist characters, and the player is left with a personality-free husk that places pithy English colloquialisms above any meaty depth in conversation. It's actually very rare whenever there's a topic of conversation expressed that isn't just general and vague for the actually properly written characters to bounce off, but in those instances it always stands-out noticeably. Even after watching the same scene about five times, I don't think I heard a single variation performance pull of the 'I'll just jump into my quantum tunnel' back-and-forth with Bagley that was convincing.

I'm convinced that a big part of Legion's problem comes from the fact that none of the voice actors give a 'main character' performance. Which could be because they were intentionally told to act in a vague manner that could be applied over the digital faces of a dozen London citizens. All of the voices crafted best fit background NPCs that give out quests rather than front the core rebellion which drives the story, and some of the voices are literally just digital pitch-shifts of other lacklustre performances. I'm not blaming the actors, I can only imagine none of them were paid 'main character wages' for the sort of work they put in; instead I critique the entire concept for how it neuters the human element of a narrative that is supposed to be about ordinary people rising up to face injustice. Andor, this is not. 

But by happenstance, not very long after 'beating' Legion and leaving that game and it's woes far behind me; I stubbled upon a rebound game that employs something very similar. 'Solasta: Crown of the Magister' is essentially a standalone DnD 5th Edition game engine built to facilitate a very faithful digital DnD experience. One such part of that experience being choosing your character, personality and all, which means conversations can play out differently depending on the combination of voice and personality traits you employ. This becomes very obvious in scenes when your cast is interacting with one another and performances vary, key words are mis-pronounced and entire strings of dialogue capture the spirit but miss the content of the captions. And yet, I find myself looking a bit more fondly on my group of adventuring dolts than I do on the Legion gang.

I think the key to what Solasta does is A: the entire cast of Solasta is filled with less full-on character-suited voice actors, which means the slightly hammy performances fit amidst the wider cast on hand. And then B: the crew of interchangeable voices spend a lot of their time interacting with one another, in conversations that can better be warped to suit the dialogue and voices chosen. Of course these are the cherries, the base of the cake is the strength of the writing team making it so that dialogue and reactions suit together in a manner that can be respected and enjoyed. Honestly, a few play sessions in and I don't even think about the fact that my Solasta team-mates are being slotted into the hero role; the character's and their personalities work decently well together.

And as I really delved into this topic and took the time to think on it; there was one game that came screaming to mind more than any other. Saints Row. Specifically 2 onwards; how could I never consider it before? All of those games have the character customisation with the slot-in voice acting that changes the dialogue drastically during scenes. Sometimes the way the game does it is tongue-in cheek; such as the 'zombie' voice which simply replaces all the player's dialogue with undead groans whilst everyone else continues on like they can understand you fully. But other times there'll be back and forths that are witty and humorous but totally contextually different depending on which voice you pick! I always remember the first drive through Steelport with Shaundi in Saints Row 3, where the Boss teasingly mocks her until she gets a little pissed, but the topic of the mocking shifts completely depending on what voice you pick in a manner that you'd never even notice unless you started replaying levels.

For all that Saints Row gets ridden for, because it's really just a luke-warm Grand Theft Auto clone that lacked it's own swinging knock out concept once they finally broke free of that stigma, they excel in this specific front. Every game they've managed to slot-in protagonist voice roles so deftly they managed to turn it into a reoccurring joke, both with that Zombie voice I mentioned, and then with the Nolan North voice pack in Saints Row IV. (A voice in which Nolan literally breaks the forth wall as much as humanely possible.) Both through clever scripting and thoughtful performances, Saints Row manages to consistently emulate an engaged and specific character, with personality, in a totally slot-in role. I don't give Saints Row a lot of props, but to my mind they are undoubtedly the kings of that specific design role.

Having never really considered it before, today I realise that this slot-in style of voice work has to be supremely challenging to all involved. Likely invented to provide a dynamic sense of personality and breathe a little passive replay-ability into a game that is designed to be experienced many times, there are so many factors and balances that need to be accounted for just to make such a complex concept invisible. Many games present customisable voiced protagonists, but the difference between a single script read in multiple voices and a plethora of response scripts to the same prompt script can scale to orders of magnitude. which is probably why games which use slot-in voice acting don't have their players be the chattiest people in the room. Unless you're talking about the amount of voice lines in Saints Row; those devs were genuinely insane.  

Decoding the truth behind the Sonic Franchise

 Who is the true protagonist of Sonic?

Sonic Frontiers is out, some people think it's okay, but I'm unhappy. Why am I unhappy? Is it because I think the game is bad? No. Is it because I dislike the direction Frontiers is taking the franchise now that's it has been all but confirmed that Frontiers is quite literally a new frontier for the franchise? No. It's because there is a moment, in Frontiers, where Sonic Team thought it sensible to provide a single-screen call back to Tails watching a missile launch in Station Square from Sonic Adventure. Excuse me, but what? I know, that according to the very hands-off control that Sonic Team claims over this franchise, technically all Sonic games have been canon since the first except for 06 and Boom. (And Forces did retroactively make the 2d era games and Mania into an alternate universe instead of just a 'prequel' setting like it used to be.) But to outright just refer to Sonic Adventure directly in the wake of Forces, is like kicking fans in the face and telling them to deal with it, and let me explain why.

The world around Sonic is always up for debate as we're constantly struggling to understand where we even are. It's decently widely excepted that Sonic is set in the land of Mobius, but this ain't the same Mobius presented in the long running Archie comics series, nor the Sonic X cartoon. In all of those media snippets, Mobius is a largely undeveloped super continent with a few connecting island nations populated solely and exclusively by 'Mobians'; which are anthropomorphic animal people that live as humans might in cities with jobs and all that good stuff. (Eggman is the unexplainable exception that most media chooses to ignore.) Under examination, it's not the most creative or inspired Anthro universe ever created, as the creatives rarely take advantage of their character's animal traits to define who or what they are; but it's functional, it works. But the games spit all over this.

Why do I say that? Well how about because for some insane reason, the early 3D Sonic games all depicted the land of 'Mobius' (It's not always identified as Mobius in every game, but now that Frontiers has directly referenced Adventure we're just going to have to assume all 3D games occur on the same planet.) as featuring cities with humans. And I'm not talking about humans and anthros, oh no! In Sonic Adventure 1, 2 and Unleashed, Sonic and his friends are the only humanoid animal people in the entire world. For some unexplainable reason. Yet if we fast forward to Forces we can see an entire populace of furry animal people being menaced by Robotnik and Edgy Boi's pathetically mundane army. So what in the actual hell is going on here, what is the make-up of Mobius, and why can't Sonic Team just split the canons so these glaring inconsistences don't have to be addressed?

The most sensible, but quietly troubling answer, would be that Mobius is indeed a land walked by swathes of Humans and Mobians; only that these distinct races of people remain staunchly segregated to their separate corners of the world with such staunchness that intermingling between the races is an aberration. Sonic and his friends' various expeditions onto human lands must be seen as a great imposition upon the fragile balance of peace between the nations, and Sonic's struggle to prevent Eggman's grasp for power could very well be interpreted as a political mission to prevent a human elitist from conducting an orchestrated strike on either the humans or Mobians and kickstarting some global conflict between the two races. Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 are pretty much Sonic's Operation Snake Eater, and Eggman is Colonel Volgin. But that is a rather dour interpretation of the Sonic universe, so let me offer my alternative.

I propose that not only does Sonic Adventure's human filled city and Sonic Forces' Mobian occupied city take place within the same timeline; but they could very well be the same city, filled with the same citizens, at different points in time. (It's hard to determine exactly where Sonic Forces' city is set, considering that area is only ever referred to as 'The City' in game.) I propose that the various Mobians are not, in fact, anthropomorphic animals inexplicably evolved to resemble humanity, but rather general human citizens of the world that have inducted themselves into a global furry movement and locked themselves inside a permanent fursuit linked to their 'fursona'. Perhaps they've even gone so far as to brainwash themselves into believing they are the animals who's form they've adopted. Somehow this trend has overtaken every human being within the land of Mobius. Every human, except for Dr Ivo Robotnik.

Robotnik is an intellectual, you see. A robotic scientist, to boot! He believes in the very rigid conventions of man and thus saw no allure in the promise of 'spiritual awakening' or whatever the growing furry world dogma promised it's converts. He's just a lonely, and grumpy old man probably equally confused and annoyed by the brash personality of Sonic, the young upstart who delights in tormenting the aging Doctor and defying that man's rigid concept of the world and who exists within it. Sonic was likely the first furry of Mobius, you see. The first to don the fursuit and fully embrace the representative fursona, and stoke Robotnik's bitterness, swirling with his 'savior-complex' and narcissism to the point where he thinks he has to 'fix' everything, even 'fix' Sonic from his 'delusions'.  Afterall, Eggman is always trying to use his robotic expertise to invent vastly ambitious robotic machines, powered by woodland critters, to achieve all sorts of grand end schemes we never get to see play out because Sonic delights in destroying them. 

But Eggman is mad. At least, the Eggman we see by the late Sonic games is. This is a man who creates apparently metal machines that are inexplicably weak to Hedgehog quills, who insists on printing his face on every invention he's ever made, who once split the entire world down the middle... for some reason. These aren't the actions of a sensible man! I argue these are the actions of a desperate man, who has grown more and more scared as the world has changed around him. Think, by Sonic Adventure Eggman had to come to terms with the fact that there was an entire posse of furry lovers following the man around as his 'friends'. Then, before you know it, the otherwise fair and sensible citizens of Mobius start picking up on the trend, and now they're all wearing fursuits and pretending they're human-cats and badgers and whatever! By the time of Forces, Eggman might very well be the last human not inducted into the Fursona world religion that has captured the soul of the planet.

So Robotnik prints his face on his giant machines, hoping that visage of humanity stirs some latent recognition in the brainwashed, he roboticises the populace hoping to confer some of their lost humanity back into them, he surrounds himself with humanoid robot confidant, whom he rages at and despises for their lack of humanity, but retain by his personal cadre for their comfortingly nostalgic shape. And once he even tried to team up with anthro aliens, recognising that if humanity can't be saved of it's own accord only an extra-terrestrial force could knock a wake-up call into their number. But nothing ever worked. Every alliance he ever made turned on him. And maybe a few times the stress of being so alone in the world made him flip and blow the world in two. A little. But what would you do, as the last person living in a world that has changed so fundamentally that you don't recognise anyone, and can't draw anything from it. Isolated and alone, Eggman still chooses to try and reshape the world to the way it once was, even if to this day he can't quite remember if Sonic was indeed the original patient-zero Furry, or simply a figment of his own tortured psyche emblematic of his tendency to create his own constant downfalls.

Calling this franchise the 'Sonic Franchise' is a misnomer. These games are a soliloquous dirge mourning the purgatory of a man adrift in a sea of isolation, atop his raft of stubborn spite. A man who, as these games roll on, has come to, or will come to, sacrifice all that he can. His calm. Kindness, Kinship, Love. A Doctor who has given up all hope of inner peace. Who made his mind a sunless space. A scientist who shares his dreams with ghosts. A human who wakes up everyday to an equation he wrote thirty-one years ago to which there is only one conclusion; he is damned for what he does. His anger, his ego, his unwillingness to yield, his eagerness to fight, has set him on a path from which there's no escape. He yearns to be a saviour against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time he looks down, there's no longer any ground beneath his feet. That is his sacrifice. He's condemned to use the tools of his enemies to defeat them. He burns his decency for someone else's future. He burns his life to make a sunrise that he knows he'll never see. And the ego that started his fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. And that's what Eggman sacrifices. Everything.

Watch_Dogs Legion Review

You will die someday, best make peace with that now.

This has all been quite the wild ride, following the Watch_Dogs series all the way from waddling infancy to where it currently sits now, and though I finished Watch_Dogs Legion nearly two whole weeks ago; the time since now and then has been spent unpacking the experience I had, playing other games and rediscovering some things. (Like how to love games again.) Because I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that Watch Dogs Legion did potentially shake some fundamentals within myself that I really needed a second opinion to ratify. This was a game that utterly defied my expectations, expectations that started in one place and evolved somewhere else entirely so that what began as a seed grew into something white-hot and frothing until that growth obscured all else about the game. But in which direction did I lean? Well, that is what we're going to explore today.

When Watch_Dogs Legion was first announced, they did something which pretty much ensured attention out of my stupid brain by setting it in the city which I technically live within the purview of, and for which this blog is currently named (for the time being, I'm thinking of changing that name into something more general) London. Yes, the city of Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and the houses of Parliament. (All that nice stuff) Of course, this was by no means the first time that Ubisoft had ever stepped around this end of the world, Assassin's Creed Syndicate envisioned it's own version of practically the same playing space with their industrial take on London, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes place all across England, albeit in an even more ancient age. But for depictions of a somewhat modern London in a playable open space, this has to be the first game to do that since 'The Getaway: Black Monday'!

But of course, that was only the spice to bring in the punters. What was meant to allure the rest of the world was the brand new system which this new game was built around, a system which was clearly based off of the Nemesis System from Shadow's of Mordor; but the team couldn't admit that because the Warner Bros. Interactive developers who made Mordor recently decided to get possessive with their toys and filed to trademark the idea. (That's a whole rant I've already had.) What I'm talking about was the increadibly ambitious 'play as anyone' system wherein players could identify a completely random citizen wandering the streets of London, profile them using Watch_Dogs' signature 'profiler' mechanic, (updated now to show us their abilities and weaknesses alongside their fetishes and recent search history) save them in a recruit tab and then embark on a dynamically generated quest to unlock them as a playable character. Yes, that means dynamic and generated quests that enable the ability to play as a nearly countless number of 'unique' NPCs.

It was the flagship feature of Legion. The 'on-the-box' tagline that would suck in the dubious and alight the passions of the curious. Even in their announcement trailer, stuffed with an eye-wateringly ham-fisted and, somewhat bad taste, rendition of the poem 'First they came' to announce it; the idea of 'everyone is the protagonist' powered through the visuals. And then again in the gamplay trailer that featured everything from overly verbose swearing hooligans trying painfully hard to put on a 'genuine Londoner' accent to knobbly kneed old ladies who struggled to mount obstacles and had to use tasers instead of martial might to take down their enemies. Oh, and there was a very impressive gameplay sequence highlighting how diverse the playable characters could be, when we witnesses a 'gun-kata' skill expert who pulled off string of very cinematic up-close gun-fu takedowns clearly inspired by John Wick. There really was supposed to be an air of expansive diversity that would blossom into endless replayability potential; with the added spice being that a Permadeath mechanic would ensure each character would be a valuable and vulnerable asset that player's would grow attached to and protective of.

Based in the near future of semi-cyberized London; Legion follows the most abrupt and po-faced turn in the franchises' narrative yet, with London gripped on the verge of a dystopia thanks to the totalitarian measures adopted by a scared and corrupted government caught in the panicked mania after- yes, a terrorist attack. (Why is it that every time a game franchise comes to London, it's just so that they can blow up bombs in public? Did we as a country do something to piss of all game developers or something?) The NHS struggles for marketshare against an exploitative private healthcare firm, all Londoners are fitted with an Optik neck-piece that threatens to expand London surveillance to a twenty-four hour stalking of our personal lives by a shadowy government, the Met police are overruled by a private military contractor called 'Albion' that seize political power over the city under the guise of 'bringing stability back to London'. Oh, and despite all of that, in this universe England is very much still a member of the EU. Putting the kibosh on all those truly deranged 'persecution-complex-addled' individuals who really believed that Ubisoft created this entire increadibly ambitious game in less than a year so that they could 'stick it to the leavers'! 

Amidst all this chaos and carnage, the player would be taking the role of the local DedSec cell, which I guess cements these hacktivists as the protagonists of the series now. (Guess we're just ignoring how Aiden Peirce from the first game actively refused to work with DedSec.) DedSec London starts a grass-roots rebellion fuelled by the people of London joining up in order to fight back against the tyranny of the cage being erected around their freedoms. By exposing the corrupt and literally fighting for the innocent, DedSec has evolved from the kiddie hacktivists of the last game to genuine terrorist freedom fighters in Legion! (Quite the reframing of intent, I must say.) Gone are the pandering allusions to 'hacker culture' and the 'counter culture' scene of DedSec San Francisco. Here are the days of hiding in alleyways as murder drones scan the streets and military police beat citizens senseless in the streets hunting for members of the very resistance you stand with. It's a huge tonal shift and not one I'm all that opposed to. (Watch_Dogs 2's style always felt a little superficial to me anyway.)

In bringing this dystopian take on London to life I have to admit that Ubisoft did an exceptional job evoking this sense of being 'on enemy soil' for the entirety of the main game. (Maybe too good of a job, actually.) Albion personnel stop and search everyone whilst their drones constantly fill the airways above you and both can somehow spot and identify the player character if they happen to wander to anywhere too close to them. Full street-roadblocks manned with automatic machine-gun turrets and missile firing drones will automatically scan your affiliation to DedSec if you pass through them, necessitating players to weave around backstreets to avoid them. And the permadeath feature, which you can actually opt in or out of from the main menu, adds this tense layer of being a single mistake away from death throughout the entire game. Which creates this very oppressive atmosphere. In fact, I might go so far as to call it a little 'too' oppressive, at times.

Exploring a typically high quality Ubisoft depiction of London caught in the grip of a semi-futuristic secret dictatorship evokes a curious mix of nostalgia and tense dread. There's so many places I get giddy seeing depicted in pixels for how often I've walked there myself. (Mostly the walk-ways along the Thames). Whilst seeing the holographic AR Albion propaganda plastered on Big Ben from miles away in the same moment, reinforces this poignant feeling that 'someone is watching' at all times in this Cyberpunk-light imagining of the near, but slightly more advanced, 'Brazil' adjacent future. Which can rob some of the fun out of carelessly exploring the world as you might in Watch_Dogs 2 or the other Ubisoft titles. Of course, at least you can sleep easy without worrying about the Online invasions sneaking upon you whilst the player is anxiously avoiding Albion, because for some reason Legion's online features are separate from the main game.

That's right. Despite Watch_Dogs games of the past having lived around their online features so integrated into the main game that people still engage with them in both previous games to this day; the Legion team recognised that their vision of London would already be too much for the player to handle ontop of fighting off online invasion events so they've been moved out of the main game mode entirely. Which, of course, means that the online scene for this game dried up almost immediately, because Watch_Dogs never fostered an 'online-only' audience. One of the many missteps which start as a small seed and gradually grew into something of a startling omission for what is supposed to be the most ambitious Watch_Dogs games to date.

But I've spent a lot of time talking about the idea and concept and context around Watch_Dogs' world; all whilst I've avoided the gameplay talk, and there's a reason for that. When I jumped into Legion I wasn't quite expecting what I got in this department at all, and I wanted to simulate that feeling for you, reader. Because the general expectation of sequels is that the core gameplay experience is added onto and improved whilst the magic box around that core experience changes in the manner best suited to the new game concept. Maybe the themes could change, or the tone and setting; but for the most part you expect the feeling of playing the game to only improve as the game's identity becomes more definite and secure. You'd think that, wouldn't you?

What happened with Legion can only be described as; a simultaneous pullback in concept and push forward in scope. Every step forward that was taken with the tech powering the game in order to allow for the players to pick any NPC they want to be their main character for a particular mission in the story, that came at the cost of how neatly the past two Watch_Dogs played. In Legion you'll find the player character has no phone with which to interact with the plethora of apps the last two games based all their key open world interaction features around. (You can still 'Profile' NPCs, of course; but that's about it.) All hacks and weapons and summonable cars are treated as 'power-ups', which come as looked-in features of the particular citizen you recruited; and aren't earned by the player or bought with experience points. Oh, and every enemy in the game now has a health bar which needs to be whittled down to kill them like this is a live service, or something.

There are no convenient or world-enriching phone apps, and no way to play music during missions (which was a really fun Watch_Dogs 2 system I quite enjoyed.) You can't call the cops on civilians, or switch the traffic lights to cause crashes during chases, or even upgrade the arsenal of a character you've been playing as for a while. There are some overall team upgrades you can unlock over the course of the game by collecting 'tech points' hidden over the game world and rarely granted for completing some missions; but these offer general boosts. Such as the ability to hack bigger and deadlier drones, cause distraction hacks in certain environmental objects, disable enemy guns temporarily, and everything else that you could do in previous Watch_Dogs games off the bat. What you can't unlock are any new weapons for characters you've recruited beyond the underpowered 'non lethal' stun weapons that DedSec employs. Meaning that characters you've earned can't actually be individually invested in; they're as useful when you get them as they'll be 10 hours in. Which kind of misses the point of a 'permadeath' mechanic, wherein the amount of time and experience investment that the player put in is the same investment that should be on the line when that character is in danger. 

Hacking has been changed so that it's no longer a game of 'botnet' resource management, which brings about a single improvement and a whole host of headaches. For the 'improvement' this means that vehicle hacks are now costless; which is great because individually hacking the steering of NPC vehicles is one of those psychotically simple pleasures in life, as you remotely jacknife a bus into a busy lane like an actual monster, but Watch_Dogs 2 made that feel like a chore with that game's annoying resource costs, in Legion you can cause as many traffic accidents as you please. On the otherhand, Legion adds a cooldown timer to every hack in the game, which means that many stealth encounters end up trucking along at a snails pace as the player is constantly forced to wait around growing stale with mind numbing emptiness after they've just pulled off one hack and then have to wait the thirty seconds cooldown until they can pull their next hack. No more chaining together hacks to cause some huge chain-reaction explosion across the enemy lines in an almost 'hacker-Batman' style flair. Just cooldowns and wait times. It is miserable.

The sheer controls themselves also feel just bad. Much of the characteristic animation flair of the player character's moveset, when running, climbing, vaulting cover or even switching from one cover to another is missing in favour of a universal animation set which feels basic and character-devoid. (Which makes sense, given that the team where creating full animation suites for a boundless number of character archetypes. There was going to be concessions somewhere.) Shooting comes across about as weak as playing with airsoft pellets now that every enemy is a bullet sponge, most of the advanced enemies can even shrug off headshots. AI is so toned down that the team had to throw in active-camo shotgun troops who blindly charge at the player in order to force you not to just camp behind the same spot and wail from safety. And just pulling out a gun in general can oftentimes be an absolute death sentence simply because in every fire-fight you're struggling with the game's core systems just to desperately feel powerful for a scant second, or snatch that elusive snippet of actual fun.

I cannot believe it has come to this with the previously well formed franchise that was Watch_Dogs. But having quite literally just played through Watch_Dogs 1 and 2 mere weeks before Legion; there's no doubt in my mind as I say; the raw gameplay of Watch_Dogs Legion is the absolute worst in the franchise. They whittled down every dynamic flair of both previous game's combat and hacking until they collapsed into the arduous headaches they are now. Gang Hideouts used to be my favourite activity in Watch_Dogs 1, because of how robust, if simply, the stealth gameplay was and how great that gunplay felt. Legion's stealth is just about passable in that sub-standard Ubisoft way (You'd have thought the company would have developed a better universal stealthy framework by now, considering all of their games employ stealth to some fashion) and the actual nitty-gritty of the in-action gunplay is just honestly awful; they killed Watch_Dogs' best side activity! But what about the actual level design which made Watch_Dogs 2 so much superior than the first game, even if I think Watch_Dogs 1's gunplay is slightly better?

Legion follows Watch_Dogs 2's example to make the world of interactable hacking objects expansive; but it seems the raw design team were lacking in the creative intent of designing an open-approach in the way they handled situational encounters. In Watch_Dogs 2 you pretty much always felt in control of the way you approached any encounter the game presented for you. And that was because there was always a viable choice that felt catered for to feel fun. You could go in shooting and find enough well placed cover and shooting scenarios to have fun doing that. You might send in your drone to sneakily circumvent all the enemies and bypass the lock you were having trouble with, and endure the stealth section that challenge presented. Or perhaps you could just hack everyone to death and waltz in atop the piles of corpses your unfettered manipulation has wrought. In Legion, you'll constantly come up against roadblocks that insist 'you have to hack this in person', or 'you have to defend this area for a painful amount of time whilst we swarm you with annoying enemies'. You are constantly being told how you have to play, instead of being given the freedom to play how you want to. Which leads to painful, terminal, objective repetition.

But I've spoken enough about how it feels to play Watch_Dogs Legion; what about the narrative backing that gameplay up? Watch_Dogs has always struggled with how it wants to present that game's story, what with the more traditional presentation of the first title and the more gimmicky 'topic to topic' focus of the second game. Legion attempts for a balance between the two styles and what this game lands is, quite honestly, one of the worst paced narratives I've ever come across in a AAA game. I cannot understand how impressively bad this team was with how they offered plot threads and mission progression and stumbled to present an illusion of narrative progress. Now I'm going to try and keep this as spoiler free as I can, but it's going to be difficult as there's problems I want to talk about in just about every one of Legion's utterly jumbled plot threads. But if I do give away something, rest assured that you're only having a dogs-dinner of a narrative spoiled for you.

Firstly, there was a big hubub about the 'play anyone' mechanic once it was revealed that the NPCs have to carry narrative cutscenes by themselves. This is a problem given that every single NPC seems to be voiced by an actor who only seems as invested as a background character in a crowd scene. That is to say, none of the character archetypes sound great in cutscenes. Then there's the whole situation of one character starting a quest that another one carries on without a contextual connection handing off the character from one person to another. And is this a problem in the full game? It's actually one of the biggest killers of the pacing.

Because there is no main character, aside from the annoying AI 'assistant' Bagley, (Sabine is so irregularly in the game she might as well have been the wallpaper.) that means no character development, no meaningful character relationships, and no recognisable human connection between audience and character. I challenge you to care about literally any character in this entire game, and though the developers pull every hammy trick in the book to try and make you, such as literally playing sad piano music at the death of one of the only voiced characters in the game, it just comes across as laughably weak. Funnily enough the premium characters, all of whom you have to buy for real money, all have unique voice talent that actually put investment behind their role, making it easier to engage with the narrative on that base emotional level. But again, you have to buy them. (Which kind of makes it sound like Ubisoft are selling basic narrative quality Voice work.)

Now let's talk about bombs. Why are they such a common plotpoint in this game's narrative? I understand the psychological impact and symbology of a bombing and what that represents, as well as the very immediate effect it has in this story, but both along the course of the narrative and in the side quests I've seen the narrative come back to an impending bomb threat another four or five times! In fact, this game makes a habit of repeating plot points. Twice you get tasked with using your rooster of operatives to seduce a character in a romance scam; which is probably the least morally dubious thing this game tasks you with in the grand scheme of operations that DedSec undertakes. And if fumbling around with similar plot points sounds repetitive, just wait until you see the missions themselves.

No matter what you're doing, what the plot demands of you, the player is infiltrating an enemy area and hacking some station to progress the plot. Maybe there'll be a spider bot platforming section after the hack, and nearer to the end of that plot thread every single hack will start to send off an alarm which will require the player to 'defend the point' whilst the game drowns them in enemy reinforcements; even when in times when that actually doesn't even make contextual sense within the story. In fact, there's one mission in particular where you have to track down the personal device taken from a journalist so you can snatch the incriminating interview recorded on her tablet. Despite this being a piece of tech recently snatched less than hour ago and just haphazardly dumped on an Albion desk somewhere, the moment you hack that device a magical alarm goes off. (Wow, they hooked that to their alarm system quick; didn't they?) Then you have to stand there and do a 'defend the spot' mission, because that's the only way these developers know how to add challenge. Oh, and when you've acquired the file? There's no running away from the army you've amassed because then you have to review the footage on site using one of Albion's computers! Because I guess DedSec can't figure out how to install a bloody media player on their own devices! If you do leave the area, however; then the entire objective resets and you have to start downloading again from scratch. This game hates you.

As you progress through the game the story is designed to slowly peel away more and more layers of the conspiracy shackling the city of London. But because every 'chapter' lacks a narrative arc and significant conclusion, you never really get the sense that there is a developing investigation being headed by the player's group; instead the narrative plays more like a guide-free safari tour around the various factions that may or may not contribute to the overall connective goal unifying each plotthread. Ostensibly the character is driven by the goal of unmasking ZeroDay, the terrorist who framed DedSec for blowing up half of London, but most narrative arcs end with a slump. You dig into a cartoon mob boss, a crazy billionaire tech icon, and discount Rishi Sunak, (Or is Rishi discount Richard Malik?) only to come away with the empty feeling of no progress gained.

Red Dead Redemption 1 was criticized back in the day for having a narrative wherein the goal posts felt constantly shifting, such that the player kept amassing favour debt only to get stiffed on their promised reward. I felt that Rockstar deftly soothed this narrative flaw by disguising the scope of the gang, and John's true final target, so that the player did not suffer the fatigue of searching for a main villain that gets no closer to you until their 'chapter' arbitrarily kickstarts at the end. Persona games trail the players along a collection of chapters where clues and hints are unveiled along the way to point you towards a culprit, typically a side character you've come to know well. Legion tries both approaches, and fails at both. They try to throw in 'mini' bad guys at the end of their arcs to spice up the overall ZeroDay chase, but they all feel supremely one dimensional and unsatisfying to take down. Or should I say; more one dimensional than your typical Watch_Dogs character. And they hastily try to lampshade the final reveal; but considering the tiny cast of characters and the very obvious hints, the twist villain is a bit obvious. I mean, I literally guessed who it was before the first mission. But I can't go into specifics without spoilers, so let me instead hit you with a 'narrative disappointments' lighting round.

Legion repeats the infamous 'you are now the most wanted person in the city' plot-device that two also did in order to ramp up the 'stakes'; but seeing as how this has no gameplay effect whatsoever, just as it didn't in two, this cliché falls flat on it's face once again. Albion director Nigel Cass is constantly spewing his secretive evil plans in broad daylight in front of people who really shouldn't be in earshot or his even darker conspiratorial plans around his own grunts. Yet somehow he is supposed to be this super stone-nerved and buttoned-up political military figure who has cleverly and neatly paved over all of his closet skeletons. (As if.) The obvious twist villain at the end is one of those eye-rolling pastiche yawn stokers who spouts nothing but 'Reddit rhetoric' level philosophies without offering a single cohesive idea of how they got into this radical hole. ("I want to reset everything!", "But why?", "Oh poor, DedSec. Poor, unsuspecting, DedSec!"; is pretty much how every conversation with them plays out.)

Also, and this isn't so much a dig as it is a general narrative gripe; why is the hacker lingo so limp and hand-wavy in Legion? Watch_Dogs 1 kept itself impressively coherent for most of the narrative and 2 slipped into a light level of jargon that probably flew away from some less tech-savvy people (like myself) but felt at least an inch more authentic than their faux punk-rocker aesthetic choices. Watch_Dogs Legion sometimes feels written by a bad Sci-Fi Channel writer. "Whilst DedSec patched bugs, I wiped the Source Code!" boasts the main villain as they attempt a poor software-style metaphor for the events of the game in a 'You were doing what I wanted the whole time' kind of cliché. It just sounds like a tortured metaphor begging to die, doesn't it? That's what most every 'hacker style' line in the game sounds like.

The big finale literally copies the gameplay set-up of Watch_Dogs 1 where the remote controlled city tries to kill you, however because this game lacks any significant road hacks, that just means the odd car slightly drifts in your direction every now and then in a manner easily avoided. Oh, and I can't wrap up without voicing my most nagging gripe: the writers missed a huge opportunity to make Nigel Cass into a zealous, but pure intentioned, villain that challanges the audience's perception, merely by making so that he wasn't in cahoots with the main villain. A turn which would have incidentally made his compunctions and drives against DedSec correct, in a twisted manner. But that would have taken the slightest modicum of care from the writing team to spot that simple way to buff up the narrative. Not here, this is Watch_Dogs Legion; mediocrity is the passing grade!

Conclusion

In Conclusion, Watch_Dogs Legion is quite easily the worst Watch_Dogs game in the entire franchise. It plays the worst, the narrative is the most muddled and least effective, it's charm consists solely in the sassy AI Bagley who grows old very fast, the gameplay loop is repetitive and stale, the only tricks the game has up it's sleeves are the same it had when the game started and there's perhaps not a single three-dimensional character in the entire game. Except, maybe, Kaitlin Lau? She was alright, I guess. I went from being really excited to see Ubisoft's take on my home country, to dreading having to finish this absolute slog-fest of a Watch_Dogs video game as it dragged on and on for about sixty hours too long. Yes, it took me eighty hours to beat this bloody game and I hated the vast majority of that time. 

I don't rightly know what happened during the development process for this game, all I know is that a different Ubisoft division handled Legion (Ubisoft Toronto) and that I never want to play a AAA game they lead develop ever again. Maybe if they handled a smaller scale indie game with some innovative design concepts that would be interesting, but Legion was clearly more than the team could handle. They sank all their cards into a dynamic playable character system which feels just functional enough to be lightly played about with, but then they tried to build an entire massive game with that brittle base as a spine and the final product crumbles over itself as a result. I honestly do not recommend picking up Legion, even for it's innovative mechanics because they aren't utilised particularly well anyway. And my arbitrary grade may have started as high as B, but by hour 80 most of that 'good will' started to rot and I'm now coming away with a D Grade, below passing. Because taking in account all the polished and well done elements, but saddling them with the baggage of the far more numerous painful elements, the Legion experience will leave you feeling cold and emotionless. I don't know if an AI can die, like the game asks at one hilariously limp 'emotional highpoint' but it turns out my enthusiasm for a hacking themed open world franchise actually can. Thanks for that, Watch_Dogs Legion; I never want to see your face again.

Stadia is kicking from the grave

 It's claws cut!

There are few takes that the entire Internet makes which turn out be more crushingly accurate, then the one that Stadia would be killed off by Google for lack of interest before it even managed to work half of it's proposed feature slate. I suppose when you work for one of the most obvious super conglomerate waste machines in the modern world, you really do reap exactly what it is that you sow. No single person, for a single second, truly believed that Google Stadia would last the kicks and blows of an entire video game generational cycle, even as this tech was designed to usurp that very cycle in it's lifetime. Some may call it ahead of it's time, but only if they foresee a future for the Industry in which consumer standards slide so much they'll accept a god-awful financial deal just to play some slightly higher fidelity games lacking any and all personal mod support. No, a streaming future will certainly look different to the glimpse that Stadia presented to us; else it will also be not long for this world as they're undercut by everyone with an ounce of acumen under them.

But there's no point kicking Stadia on it's way to the funeral. Not because I'm some particularly moralistic or well-adjusted individual who doesn't believe in the brutality of it, but because I can't see the purpose in kicking someone who won't feel it. No, this blog is about the other side of that equation; the blows that Stadia is trying to wring out in it's dying gasps of breath, eager to hurt anyone close to them in a weak mask of basic corporate diligence. But, to their slight credit, the team did prepare the absolute utmost barest of the bare, minimum in order to feed the fans something during their passing. They did exactly what they needed to in order to not get wrapped up in a class action lawsuit or two if they scrubbed their hands completely of the tech and it's user base. And I suppose that, compunctions aside, that's worth at the very least a golf clap.

<Golf Clap.>

Now let's see where they're lacking. So the Stadia team were kind enough to actually fish out for refunds when the Stadia ship went down, which many have lauded but honestly if they didn't do this gesture, it would have been like the entire team laying out their own heads to be guillotined in the court of public opinion. They're already clowns, no need to turn themselves into shoddy thieves on top of all that. Accepting extortionate pricing for antiquated games under the pretence of being the 'endgoal of gaming that everyone is going to flock too', pretty much sealed their fate in that regard. They were never going to get to keep that money. But at least the people who did sign up were allowed to play some games for two years essentially free, right? Pretty much, but of course Google has to try and get in a little jab here so as to not be seen as fully beaten.

Because you see, as a Google product, buying Stadia games constituted to the interconnected Google ecosystem through one of those synergistic systems designed to keep consumers locked into the Google family of services: (kind of like a 'metaverse' without all the pointless faff.) in this instance; Play Points. The play store rewards users with points whenever they buy a Google product, which can then be used to redeem stuff on the play store. Books, movies, mobile games, whatever you want. And because all Stadia games were ludicrously full priced; that was a lot of Play point being dumped into people's accounts to the point where I imagine some struggled to find enough useless Play apps to spend it all on! (Actually, we're talking about Stadia adopters here; they probably sunk it all into some crappy Candy Crush derivative, didn't they?) Whatever the case, the death of Stadia was when those chickens came back to roost, because lo-and-behold; those refunds did not take into account those Play points, and those who spent theirs will now find their account several hundred points in the red. Basically meaning that if you ever want to buy anything on the Play store ever again, you need to re-spend that money you just got refunded on Google. Now ain't that cute and petty?

And then there's the save transferring that Google randomly straddled developers with. Taking no provisions to care about what became of player's games the moment that Stadia went bust, video game developers had to go out of there way to develop save game transfer systems in order to accommodate player save games on titles that lacked it already. Which is a method of normalising cross-platform integration I suppose, but forcing the onus onto others never really leaves a good taste in the mouth. But I guess all that nitty gritty stuff is beyond Stadia's control. They never even bothered to reach out to partners to try and work out a smooth transition; they just folded and left it for others to pick up their discarded playthings once known as 'customers'. Very cynical.

Also, although this is a matter we've mentioned before, I just want to harp on how insanely out of the blue this shutdown was. We know they had just put out a UI update, and there were designers working on features the day that the full shutdown was announced, but I cannot understate how utterly unprofessional it was from a multibillion dollar company not to alert it's partners. They were all left totally in the blue and with nothing to show for their loyalty to Stadia. Some indie developers didn't have the plans for non-stadia versions of their games on hand, but had to scramble in order to not have their revenue source cut off. Of course, now their games have entered the supremely more competitive and packed Steam ecosystem wherein their talents will most definitely be drowned out in a sea of indie games releasing everyday.

Ontop of all of that, there is the inevitably oncoming vapourware. At least one indie developer has confirmed they literally can't create a non-Stadia version of their game. However it worked, that infrastructure was designed to interact with Stadia's cloud-gaming ecosystem in a way lacking an alternative. That means Stadia literally just killed a game, outright and coldly. They banished it to the shadow realm as punishment for the sheer hubris anyone would have in trusting them. And I know plenty of developers were entering the partnership knowing how short lived it was likely to be. They just wanted to secure their bag and exit out the back window before the house burnt down, but that doesn't make it any less screwed up that this is how Google handled it's recently disenfranchised ex-partners. Pull the rug out from under them, leave them to get their things in order. 

Google Stadia was a mistake by many regards. An idiot who has failed upwards his entire career being given too much money to cater to a market he very clearly didn't understand. But as with any cult, there are people who slipped under the allure of the exclusivity of it all. Mistook the robust infrastructure for a secure future, and became the newest headstones lining the Google graveyards. That seems to be a trend recently, doesn't it? Legacy tech companies trying their hands at revising their image or seeking a new market, only to stumble spectacularly. First Facebook, then Google and now Twitter. If only there weren't so many livelihoods getting ruined inbetween all of this, it would be downright hilarious to watch all these titans set fire to themselves. At least if the world remains this incompetent, Megacorps really will never become a thing.

Running a Warband

Into the ground.

I've been slowly whittling away at Watch Dogs Legion in order to get up my review on it which, if you've ever played Legion, you'll know means I need to have other games in order to keep me from growing bored with gaming altogether as a hobby. Without getting into that whole cake before it's cooked, let's just say 'diversity and excitement' runs out pretty quickly, requiring to me seek out much more dynamic and exciting video games such as, perhaps, the 2010 re-release of a 2008 sandbox MMO about Medieval combat. Yeah, there's definitely a lot more gameplay variety there! But seriously, Mount and Blade: Warband has been an actual treat to come back to and play with some degree of seriousness (as opposed to the fumbling I usually do) and though Bannerlord (the sequel) has just hit it's official big release, I think there's something special and worth coming back to even in that battered old version of this long running franchise.

As I've mentioned before, the start of Mount and Blade will pit your custom-built player as a mercenary in a fictional medieval land on the constant brink of total warfare between six very unhappy factions. Which is why the start of game is pretty much spent avoiding all the major conflicts, hiring up local mercenaries from villages and plundering bandits and looters. It is astonishing how many people in the Mount and Blade universe decided to take up a career in mugging the 'innocents 'of the world; so astonishing that I slightly wonder who it is exactly they're sticking up. Surely each other, at this point; they outnumber the villages 10 to 1 so... where else are they getting their supplies? Luckily the cycle of life dictates that their reigns of terror is always short lived by the blade of some upcoming so-and-so who's looking to cut his men's collective teeth on the bones of fodder enemies.

Being a free-agent makes it easy to shop around for opportunities worth profiting from, whether it be from accepting missions at Villages (In my recent playthrough I can't find any mission which isn't 'please bring us cattle we can't possibly pay you for'!) or from the various nobles that can't be bothered to so much as ride to the next castle over to deliver a letter, or, the most sure-fire source of employment, local guild leaders in big towns. And opportunity is the driving force of the slow rise which is this game's loop. You do jobs that get you enough money to keep running your warband and build up your 'renown' which in turn opens you up to more opportunity. The more renown you own the easier it is to prove you're someone of worth that should be taken seriously and given access to becoming a noble, or maybe even starting your own kingdom to define what 'noblehood' even is!

Of course, starting your own fledgling rebellion is pretty much 'endgame' stuff when it comes to Mount and Blade; which is why most players are stuck running errands back and forth for lazy nobles just to make ends meet. That was how I endured playing Mount and Blade for ages back when I was young, which is why it's so surprising to me to learn now that I could have completely subsidized the cost of paying my mercenaries and soldiers through the businesses system! The game did nothing to alert me to the fact that this system existed! Essentially, the player can roll up to a Guild leader that likes them just a little bit (as long as the lord of that town doesn't hate your guts for doing something crazy like eloping with his pre-betrothed daughter or something...) and pay for the land to build a business that is largely self perpetuating and will provide a consistent revenue stream that can offset troop costs pretty darn easily. Would have been nice to see that in the tutorial, and not find it randomly in a Youtube video!

Becoming more famous isn't the only means of progression in Mount and Blade, and in fact the game enjoys some decently robust RPG mechanisms within it's skin that blossoms the proficiency of the player during their playtime. (So that in the times when you make a raw judgement call and lose everything, you're never starting totally from square one.) There's plenty to level up from the bare basics stuff, like hitting harder to blocking more, to the inventory you can carry, the level of weaponry you can use, how fast you travel on the world map and how many people you can recruit to your Warband. Some skills are explained less clearly than others, however, and 'party' skills don't necessarily stack like one might expect.

Stick at it long enough and you may earn enough credentials to make it as a noble for one of the warring factions. And then it's slap bang into 'responsibilities-ville' for you because, lo and behold, now you have to manage fiefdoms, and castles, and worry about places you own being pillaged. And you'll get calls to war from the faction marshal. The more you move up in the Mount and Blade pecking order, the more plates you'll end up spinning. Personally I liked the prestige of the title but the freedom of being that 'free agent' just appealed to my style of play so-much more. Still, having friends in noble places can be helpful in the right circumstances, such as whenever you need to convince wars to be started to stopped to your benefit. Geopolitical manipulation has it's draws.

But for my money the most fun part of the Mount and Blade gameplay cycle is raiding, and what's more than that; raiding castles. Taleworlds did a great job creating the sense of blind chaos when raiding a fortification, even whilst shackled to a decently strapped engine. The AI will always bundle into the exact same kill box, and there's very little tactical options in the game to alleviate any of that mad AI dash, but being in the middle of that crush, swinging wildly whilst arrows cut down everyone around you, and bodies get thrown off the gang-planks into the courtyard, is exciting despite the hangups. Of course, Bannerlord made great strides to improve this system immensely, but even with the dated tools I've got, I can squeeze a great time out of it.

Mount and Blade is one of those games that fully realises exactly what it wants to be and hyperspecializes to fit the mould of the medieval war simulator. Is it a little crude and slapdash? In the fabric-threads perhaps, but the whole weave together is robust enough to springboard a campaign in the heart of the player, and that is the special sort of sauce that brings me back to sandbox RPGs and hungry for more. Mount and Blade is also a lot quicker to get into and start progressing in than, say, Kenshi; I genuinely would call this game largely friendly to the randomly uniformed sandbox RPG adopter or curious starter. So whilst this isn't a review, it is a recommendation to give Mount and Blade a look-in at some point, if for nothing more than to set up a custom battle in castle siege because that craziness is worth experiencing at least once.