Forewarned about Forspoken

 That's something I do now.

Well, well, well, what have we here? An Isekai, huh? Phew, I'm really scared! And so I should be, considering this is the Isekai known as Forspoken which has been kicking around the gutters of video game press from the better part of the last two years just buzzing for it's chance to be set off out of it's pen to sink or swim on it's own merits. There is no doubt about it, from the word go Forspoken just rubbed the public the wrong way. Personally I took issue with it's bleach white environment scar-tissue motif which littered the world and very much seemed to have been lifted wholesale from the incredible world of Final Fantasy XV; and given the cross-over in team members I'm willing to bet that is close to what happened. Some disliked the 'please like me' dialogue, others the floaty looking movement and combat and some just took one look at the protagonist and said... "the Devs are going to make me hate this girl, aren't they?"

Isn't it funny how a whole spectrum of reactions can lead a vast swathe of people towards the exact same place; being dubiously wary of this how this Forspoken thing was going to turn out? I'm sure that at some point trending perception guided some reactions, but those first few days were pure, everybody had their own reason to find this game just off-putting. Others disliked it more than most of course, but everybody seemed geared towards the same track, with a ticket on the same thought train. It's quite surprising, especially given the somewhat similar announcement and launch of Velma. Only Velma seems to have unified the world in why it sucks, the jokes and writing, for Forspoken it really was scattergun, and some part of me feels really bad for the dev team who had the trouble of putting up with that headache of feedback, which they had to try and combat.

But the time for concerned speculation is well and truly over, Forspoken proper is here and people have played it and they have reactions and those reactions are... heavily mixed. It's rare that the affix of 'mixed' accurately applies to a game's reception, and isn't just used as a diplomatic way for more 'prim and paid for' outlets to justify their useless (7/10) review for titles they don't want to stake their reputation behind but also don't want to lose business relationships by trashing. For Forpsoken, people seem genuinely torn between a style of gameplay that isn't to everyone's tastes, a presentation of story that some found trite and unimaginative and a protagonist that- okay, there's actually little debate there. I think everyone agrees that Frey is just the worst.

A common writing trope of modern media is to subvert the typical moralistic paragon virtue of the leading protagonist by bringing their character down to the level of the ordinary man or woman, often by making them irreverent, crass and just straight rude. Now this isn't anything new per-se, the creation of character flaws to flesh out a narrative is one of the building blocks of general character creation, but the trope I'm referring always seems to generate the same character. An 'above it all' pretentious cur who seems to delight in nothing more than being prickly and unpleasant towards those around them under the vain belief that they are always superior and right. For Frey her personality is meant to be a reflection of the tough life she lived, but for an audience we find it quite difficult to wish better for Frey when she acts in a manner so wholly unworthy of the powers and opportunity dropped in front of her. Quite frankly, she's annoying and rude, why would we even want to play as her?

And of course that isn't even touching on the writing woes behind her dialogue which is so painful that it was met with wide spread mockery even in the advertising stage. Just like another Square Enix game got it's whippings for overuse of the word 'Chaos'; this game has been roasted for copious inhalation of 'Marvel Movie talk' only with a jarring 'edginess' wedged in there in an unholy concoction that just sounds frankly unnatural. Frey will cuss like a sailor in certain scenes, whilst substituting the eye-brow-raising 'freakin' for the F-bomb in others. Plus, my girl uses the word 'Gnarly' to describe a creature which is so horribly misplaced given her generation and that of the supposed target audience (millennials) that I can't help but wonder who this was actually made for. Was this the Boomer executives trying to play out their Isekai gender-swapped fantasy upon themselves under the guise of making it the next 'it' game?

But enough about the character, what about the game? Well, here's where I find myself confused. We all saw those insane system requirements to play this title which most saw as a silent admission of the title being poorly optimised. But maybe the general community has been so acclimatised to horrendously buggy or poor-preforming titles that this one isn't even worth commenting on, because I can't seem to find anyone who finds the performance at all objectionable. What I do see, however, is the actual visuals themselves which seem... just fine. This game requires some of the most advanced hardware in the industry to run at maximum settings, but for the life of me I can't figure out where that power is going. The character models teeter between fine and plain ugly, the world seems vast but largely uncluttered and spacious, the effects are glitzy in that way the Luminous engine loves to be, but not overbearingly so. What in god's name do these system requirements serve?

At the very least the parkour system appears to be getting decent responses across the board as well as the magic, which surprises me because I have to say that this game's combat looks utterly boring; but maybe this is one of those 'looks can be deceiving' sorts of situations. Altogether these reviews have coalesced into an bizzare mix of responses that seem to stretch all the way from 4/10 to 9.5/10... Yeah, I don't why anyone thought to go that high for this game either. It actually is an insult to all the masterpiece titles out there that they have now been slumped into the same peer group as 'Forspoken'. The general consensus appears to be, however, one of rank mediocrity; which is such a lack of a shock coming from modern day Square Enix it almost brings a yawn to my lips just repeating it. And I'm writing right now, which makes that even more stark!

Square Enix were once one of my favourite video game developers around, what with their amazing Deus Ex games, the iconic Final Fantasy franchise and the Nier Automata swansong; but somewhere along the way something had just switched under them and since then no studio under the Square banner has been able to hit it out of the park like they once did. Forspoken isn't quite the absolute nose-dive that I expected it to be, but once again it's just okay, and by some more critical evaluations it's even less than okay- and that seems like such a far cry from the publisher who's name was once attached to some of the greatest industry leaders we had. Perhaps this has just been an extended dry spell that will be broken with Final Fantasy XVI. In fact, we can only slap our palms together and pray that's the way things are heading, because Square needs to get some classics under it's belt again. I need them to get it together again!

The mechanisms of the boycott

 The Moon is out looking for trouble.

Ah, the humble 'Boycott'; the singular line of defence that the consumer has against the grubby hungry companies that feed upon them like carrion pigeons. Morality, empathy and even legality are mere suggestions to the ears of the money makers and shakers who rule this capitalistic world, thus as lowly buyers we can't expect laws, guidelines or even basic human decency to protect us from the claws of the preying wolves that own the things we love. Instead, if ever there comes a time when the consumer needs to bite back, we have to get dirty with our stratagems and sink to the sorts of levels that our enemies wouldn't even consider. We need to attack the only thing that these people hold dear. No, not their families, the real only thing that they love in this cold dark world of ours. Their wallets. Precious, protected, pristine. You slap a executive in their face, they'll laugh it off- slap them in their wallets, and they'll be wheezing for days. Hence, the boycott.

These days the very concept of a Boycott is not quite as ambitious or socially bold as it once was in it's inception, but as with everything else these days the concept has been diluted, digested and spat out as a 'solve all' for practically any consumer to management dispute. Unless you live in America, of course, in which case you're looking as lawsuits and class actions. But can you really blame the modern consumer for trivialising and factory reproducing what was once a supremely drastic measure? We may not be backing the plight of Rosa Parks to bravely drive a wedge inside the archaic institution of normalised segregation, but we are- nope... nothing I say is going to sound worthy or even remotely relevant in the face of the Rosa Parks thing, is it? I should have just kept her name out my mouth, how the heck am I going to raise a point now?

My point is; boycotts have become something a kneejerk reaction to pretty much anything. And to be fair, they do seem to actually work. Companies are often painfully deferential to the public anytime a single misprint makes it onto one of their store menus, or a bad translations leads to a food product being labelled a German phrase that means 'Donkey Poo', or a Waffle House Worker deflects a chair flung at her by a rowdy visitor with one arm. (Justice for her, by the way.) Because they are all just absolutely scared stiff of the little upwards angled line of their graph teetering into the dreaded flat horizontal line or, god forbid, start trending the other way downwards. They would defenestrate their own grandmothers and perform the Black Sacrament with their fresh corpse if it meant they never had to see a bad financial quarter. And that's a terror that it almost feels like the moral duty of consumers to exploit in order to get their way.

Although I do wonder if it's lost its meaning in all the kerfuffle. If the public attempt to enforce morality and order in a lawless system has instead introduced an aspect of cronyism-fuelled chaos to an already broken system. But of course, I'm getting dangerous close to approaching the fire-bed topic of 'armchair activism' with this train of thought, so I better go and correct myself before we start crossing lines we can't take back. What I'm trying to lay the groundworks for here, is to talk about two very recent, very relevant, boycotts for issues that are real to some people out there, but who's target feels like it misses the mark. A boycott for the sake of boycotting just so that someone out there can feel like they're actually effecting something, making a difference, without actually having to commit personally to the work of actually changing anything. They don't even have to actually do anything at all, just not spend money. What a sacrifice! (Uh oh, I'm talking about arm-chair activism anyway! Someone hide me before the Twitter vultures catch wind!)

First off is the topic I'm spoken about before- the Harry Potter Hogwarts Mysteries 'Boycott'. Now this is more the spirit of a boycott than an actual movement, as proven by the absolute deluge of pre-orders that the game has celebrated, but even in that spirit I find this proposed 'activist move' to be asinine at best. An attempt to aim at celebrity J.K. Rowling for her conservative views on trans rights, certain former Harry Potter fans and simple LGBTQ members and supporters looking for a fight have decided they are now supremely interested in the internet ramblings of a senile writer. Enough that they want the property she created to be burnt to the ground so that she can longer make money of it and then- presumably go destitute and die on the street? I can only assume that's the end goal. None of these people seem interested in trying to teach her and change her mind, they just want everything she's ever worked on to crumble around her. Which is... fair, I guess; let your vindictivness fly, I suppose.

But as I'm mentioned before, turning Hogwarts Legacy into the keystone of that battle against old woman Rowling is a bit like trying to shoot down the moon in order to devalue your neighbour's beach front property- at the end of the day there's more people who would harmed than just Rowling. And even beyond that argument which such 'activists' have brushed away with the cultist mentality of 'Sacrifices must be made', (again, totally reasonable people here) this wouldn't even directly effect Rowling anyway because she's already been paid for the licence. She's not working on the game, everyone who is has denounced her to varying degrees, and as a show of solidarity the team even threw in transgender options into the character creator menu. But some people still want to boycott the game because, why not? It gives them something to do, doesn't it?

Even more recently there is the Wizards of the Coast dilemma against various forms of content creators which has led to two major boycotts I've heard about. The first is the boycott of DnD Beyond, fuelled by the inside leak that all Wizards management cares about is DnD Beyond subscription numbers, meaning that mass cancellations are a direct attack against their parameters for success. And the other is a proposed boycott of Baldur's Gate 3. Wait, so to protest Wizards making it harder for 3rd party content creators to make products off the DnD game, they want to boycott the game of a 3rd part content creator which they based off the DnD game? Okay, I'm being intentionally facetious there, obviously the relationship between Wizards and Larian goes far deeper than what the OGL is attacking. Baldur's Gate 3 is licenced, and therein lies the tricky conundrum.

From one perspective, Baldur's Gate 3 is a paid for directed representation of the DnD brand which projects the characters and world of DnD's most popular setting, further propelling the very centralised eco-system that Wizards of the Coast are trying to create for DnD. On the otherhand, it's an almost totally unrelated video game made by a team that has absolutely no part in any of this drama and no blame. I would raise the issue of 'collateral damage', but we've already established that internet activists never cared about 'Danger close'. I suppose such an issue would really fall down to where you mark down your priorities and moralities, and who you're willing to try and hurt in order to get at someone that you don't like. Which is really at the heart of all Boycotts, is it not? The balance of the necessary to reach the worthy in which the ends must justify the means. A question for philosophers to bludgeon each other's face in over, no doubt. I'll be sure to wake up Darwin and tell him about it, he's always up for a scrap or two!

China loses its Blizzard

Divine Tether Severed

There is something to be said about backing the winning horse. It's a safe bet, simple, low risk and an utterly pathetic move. I mean, come on; where's you sense of danger? Of adventure and risk? If you're going to gamble- then gamble those odds! Make something special all for yourself, defy the possibilities! And if you're an artist- then going the easy and risk-free route is the surest indicator that you've lost that edge which kicked you to the world you enjoy so much. And considering that the team at Blizzard used to be considered artists, then their pathetic move would be flushing away all their integrity, morality and empathy to guzzle up the drip-feed of their pay masters whenever a potential situation with China could reflect badly on the western audience. They never left any illusion obfuscating the horses that they backed, never failed to take a bullet for the good image of China- took the safest and surest path to mutual success. But it would seem that Karma has a way of getting to everyone who wrongs it, because somehow China has now turned around and spat away Blizzard.

The details are surprisingly vague given what a huge development this is for one of the most beloved successful developers in the world (or 'formerly beloved' as the case may be.) but I don't exaggerate on this. Blizzard and NetEase have ended their partnership just as they announced it would be happening at the end of last year- and as China refuses to allow foreign companies to operate on their soil without partnering with one of their locals- this marks an end. An end to over 10 years of World of Warcraft coverage in the country, a premature end to Overwatch 2's tenure, and a decisive end to Blizzards extensive plans to shift it's game design philosophy to better exploit the easier cajoled Chinese gaming public. Or perhaps I should say, an 'indefinite pause'; because this wasn't some seismic bout of morals that shook Blizzard free- it was cold, hard business.

As I mentioned, details are criminally sparse as to what could have ended Blizzard's extended partnership with NetEase, all we know is that both companies are slinging mud at each other where they can and neither of them have proven to be trustworthy sources of information in the far and near past. But doing the rounds is the infamous Tweet wherein one high ranking Chinese NetEase official lamented his many hours dedicated to Azeroth and ominously declared "One day, when what has happened behind the scene could be told, developers and gamers will have a whole new understanding of how much damage a jerk can make." Vague, but the popular conjecture on the 'Jerk' in question tends to trend towards the one man who can never be held accountable for his many breaches in ethics and professionalism, Bobby Kotick- CEO of Blizzard's partner Activision. Which would imply that NetEase broke off their renewal with Blizzard based on their sheer disgust of Bobby's conduct and lack of accountability; which is certainly a lot of damage for the jerk to make, if indeed the assumption holds water.

But whatever the cause the consequence is obvious. Gamers on Chinese servers have had their access to Battle.net entirely revoked with servers that, it would seem, have been totally scrapped. At least, that's the only thing I can assume given that Blizzard decided to pass the onus of keeping player character safe onto the player, but making them back-up their World of Warcraft characters locally on the 'of chance' that they manage to sneak in another deal and return. And, of course, the other consequence is that Blizzard has just lost it's biggest single market available. Now all the sacrifices in development ethics, the pivot towards ugly monetisation strategies and everything that Diablo Immortal was... well, it all feels like wasted effort now. And so it should. Blizzard deserves to feel cold and alone across the world right now, with nary a single candle flame in the blanket darkness for comfort or succor. Do not cry for them. DO NOT CRY!

And how has NetEase handled their side of the divorce? Not... gracefully. NetEase have done pretty everything they can to make it abundantly clear that they consider Blizzard solely responsible for the breakdown in communications, have disparaged Blizzard's operating methods and professionalism and got straight petty with things. I'm talking petty like livestreaming the destruction of the giant Blizzard Orc statue in the middle of a forest, for which all of the participating workers were served green tea because that's apparently a popular slang slur going around these days in China. I'd tell you what it means, but none of the sources I've read can really agree. It's just not very nice. Short of calling up all of Blizzard's new business partners and spilling dirty secrets; I don't think NetEase could possibly summon anymore 'crazed ex' energy.

But that isn't to say that Blizzard is at all squeaky clean. Beyond everything I've already discussed, alleged rumour is that when Blizzard sent their ultimatum for a six month licencing extension it coincided with their active search for a replacement studio once the deal was up. Which is certainly... pretty crappy conduct. If something like that became public during negotiations it would certainly lead to frosty relations. Frosty enough to clean break away from Blizzard in order to set all their Chinese fans against them? Perhaps. I would ordinarily say that no company would possibly be so personally attacked and petty in this day and age, but NetEase is proving to me just how different Chinese companies can be. I'm sure that both sides of this equation are at least equally terrible in their own ways if we were to compare and contrast.

Of course, this isn't by any means the only scandal that Blizzard has been caught up in, with another being the recent reveal that Blizzard is employing an archaic 'employee rating' system which not only digitises performance of humans in numbers, but apparently mandates a certain percentage of 'underperforming marks' each month in order to justify lower bonuses and promotion prospects. Which is just both insanely evil and right up the alley of a Chinese government subsidiary company- Blizzard should really look into partnering with Tencent, I bet they'd have tons in common. Of course, at it's route this ties back to the Activision influence in Blizzard, which is allegedly also responsible for the NetEase split. Wow, when it put it like that it almost sounds as though Activision's mere collusion is enough to tarnish the good names of those around them, like some sort of evil corrupting font of diseased miasma that seeps out of it's mortal bounds and sickens the earth it touches. Oh wait, no that's just a vivid description of Bobby Kotick's personal office. My bad.

At the end of the day the real victim are the Chinese players who are already being bent over the coals by the anti-gaming Chinese Government as it is. Now they have to deal with the few companies that were supplying their games cutting off and the ecosystem of entertainment in China has been cut off by one more rung. It's a sad fate to be locked in that sort of state and the players who are having to safe guard their character data on the maybe-chance of a return don't deserve this sort of treatment. But thus is probably going to become more the standard as the art of game development shifts further up into the ethereal clouds of hook-nosed executives tossing insults at one another atop thrones of broken worker bones. That's the modern world of gaming, we're just being crushed to dust in it.

Why can't I love Saints Row The Third?

 Just tell me to stay, dammit!

There was a time when the Saints Row franchise sat at a very special place in my heart and on my shelf of games to play, a time of laughs and fun, and a time that was over far before this new remake series was even a twinkle in Volition's eye. Whereas once it the total epitome of any and everything I could possibly seek out of an open world game, it wasn't long at all before I grew out of the temporary charms the property once offered and consequently grew totally out of this franchise of games. It was never a question of the crassness of the jokes, it was just the style of this approach to open world development, with irrelevant silliness and customisation given paramount importance- all that just no longer aligned with what I wanted from gaming. But that drop-off did not come around the time of Saints Row the Third either, it was definitely in the interim gap between 4 and the reboot. So if that's the case; why can't I fool myself into liking Saints Row the Third?

Though I recognise it's many failings and have since found a series that did the thing I once thought Saints Row was the master of ten times better than those games could ever conceive of, my boyhood love of Saints Row 2 has pretty much grandfathered it into a place of love and reverence within my heart. I couldn't possibly, as I am, bring myself to dislike Saints Row 2. But I cannot spare the same leniency towards it's direct sequel. Where as Saints Row 2 bought me this expansive and distinct open world dripping with side activities around an irrelevant action-gangster movie style plot peppered with dashes of melodrama to make the world feel grounded and thus of some small consequence- Saints Row the Third seemed to spit in the face of most all of that. The open world felt bland and uninspired, the side activities felt laborious and  uncreative and the narrative lost any and all allusion to grit, purpose and consequence and yet still expected anyone to care about it's drastic split-choice ending. I didn't and I never could.

And it's odd for me to lay all of this down when Saints Row the Third was a game I followed like a hawk during it's marketing phases. You must remember that Saints Row 2 was a masterclass of how to make a great crime action game to my inexperienced eyes; I worshipped that game enough to play it to completion no less than 5 times. That's perhaps not 'full completion', but I'm talking finishing all of the side activities, all properties purchased, all missions done, most collectables- pretty much everything of consequence I finished in those 5 playthroughs. For the time, Saints Row 2 was my easy 'forever game' that I could pick up to fulfil any wanting mood. If I wanted to roleplay, I'd go fashion shopping and force my insane games upon the residents, if I wanted to fight zombies I would load into the special zombie wave minigame mode, if I wanted to feel like a TV star I'd grind out the cop-show minigame. Anything I could ever want was in Saints Row 2. So when word started spreading about the newest entry to follow up my love, I could all but faint.

But beyond the honeymoon period of that first playthrough, I've found it truly difficult to justify picking up Saints Row The Third for a second playthrough. I've tried, again and again. I tried at the time, I tried again when I got an Xbox One through the backwards compatibility, I tried again with the Remaster on my PC, I'll probably try again at some point in the future when I forget how easily that game manages to consistently lose me. Some part of me wants desperately to like Saints Row, but the other part of me can't help but see a game that was designed specifically to exorcize all the elements of the Saints Row formula that I thought made that franchise. Because you see, I could have made any openworld game my playground- but Stillwater from Saints Row 2 was special because I felt like it mattered, I felt like it was real to some level and I was playing with that world's strings whenever I departed on my, often somewhat demented, machinations. But as the developers of The Third have been on record stating: all those grounding elements of Saints Row 2, the street-level stakes, the melodrama and the occasional threat of grime, those were considered necessary limitations towards the ultimate vision of the Saints Row franchise. That vision, for the time of it's release, was completed with Saints Row The Third.

Now to be clear, I don't think that Saints Row the Third is a bad game- hell, I think some parts, characters and missions are the best the franchise has to offer. In particular there's the flagship mission in which you infiltrate what will soon become your penthouse whilst Kanye West's 'Power' plays in the background, and it's all an increadibly hype mission. The spectacle and the action hits its vast heights, the mission doesn't overstay its welcome, and if you're fast enough it's totally possible to wrap up events by the time the song is over. But unfortunately, that mission is something of an outlier in a game full of missions that the developers desperately want to be big spectacle headliners. They detailed as much in the press tour for the game wherein Volition developers and designers claimed it was their goal to have at least one unique objective in every level- which itself seems like a fairly reasonable expectation, only for that desire to end up being achieved in technicality rather than in gameplay practice.

I think the limitations of the scale first became apparent to me on the introductory level, a level which was hyped to hell and back before the game released. Why? Because of how whacky and zany it sounded on paper, of course! The Saints, disguised as mascots of their now-celebrity selves, attempt to rob a bank and end up in a wild shootout which has them dangling the entire vault of the bank in the air by the hooks of a flying skycrane whilst it demolishes the top floors of a skyscraper. Doesn't that sound crazy and exciting beyond belief? And it would be... in a live action show. What you must remember is that the concept of 'spectacle' is handled differently in a video game than it is on a show- on TV the events themselves are what wows the audience, with the controller in hand it's how we have a direct influence on those events. That's partially why Quick Time Events never feel as satisfying as those epic in-action flourishes we get to pull off with the right skill, timing and/or luck.

Break down the first mission of Saints Row the Third into it's base gameplay components and you're looking at a mission which goes like this: Basic shooting gallery followed by a small three wave 'ambush' scene finished off by an on-the-rails shooting section against a boss helicopter. Those are the bare bones we have. Fleshing those bones out is what completes the product, but when it comes to Saints Row 3 the developers preferred to play up the wackiness of the cutscenes rather than the substance of the gameplay. Ultimately, a lot of mission end up feeling really straight forward or unintelligently bloated as the design direction gets lost in the pursuit of absurdity above all else- and if that absurdity managed to translate back to the gamepad, maybe they would have had something.

As it stands, the reason I can never find myself playing through Saints Row the Third again is because whenever I play through these opening acts, trying to rekindle something worthy in this package, I just end up getting bored. The sandbox feels inconsequential, the missions look fancy but play hollow and I don't feel anything for the progression of the plot or the story. Not that Saints Row 2 was a genius in any of these categories, but that game at least catered to each listed category somewhat. Saints Row 3 fails even that and what remains is a game that, for me and my tastes, aged like a grape. Now the shrivelled raisin that is Saints Row 3 bares more in common with the modern Saints Row franchise than the previous game I loved ever will, and despite lip service being played to fans of similar sensibilities, it's clear that the restraint of Saints Row 2 is still regarded as a prevailing weakness. As such, for better or for worse, Saints Row just isn't my type of franchise anymore. 

The Micro-Apcalypse

 Grim tidings

A lot of what we talk about on this blog is very much 'all fun and games' due to the fact that this blog primarily focuses on the art of videogames in the few times when I'm not off trying to prove that James Marsden doesn't exist or something. Rarely does that field slip into significant and terrible topics, unless we're talking about the conduct of Ubisoft and/or Blizzard, in which case it's a guarantee. Today however, if you can decipher that god-awful pun in the title you'll have deduced that we're talking about Microsoft. And what could Microsoft have gotten itself involved in that's so very terrible it's worth talking about whilst still being tangentially linked to gaming? Well, it appears that they've fallen on something of hard times. Hard enough to turn around and sack nearly ten thousand employees; which is just... yeah, that's pretty darn horrific. 

Apparently this comes on the heels of Microsoft looking into their collective crystal ball and foreseeing a lean year ahead; which is quite questionable when you remember it's Microsoft we're talking about here. What does that company even know about 'lean'? They were waving around tens of billions to buy a video game company last year, and now they're sacking ten thousand workers- talk about a whiplash in priorities. But of course this does wrap around to effect the video game industry because out of the many sectors that found themselves effected by the layoffs- a lot of the afflicted were from the plethora of gaming companies that Mircosoft spent it's past few years acquiring. (Wow, apparently the big M has been taking cues from EA on how to run their company!)

Which means that, yes, Bethesda is losing some of it's working staff whilst it's pretty much sitting on the eve of a launch so major it may decide the fate of this console generation depending on if Starfield is good or not. (Which shows you how much Microsoft favours it's video game divisions, eh?) It's all been a rough showing for Bethesda of late, as the fans are waiting around for their old beloved to kick itself back into gear and they've had to deal with set-backs and now full on chunks of their company getting forcibly ripped out to fit some vague company wide lay-off mandate. It's enough to make you wonder who's side the Microsoft team are even supposed to be on. Competitors are a challenge, no doubt; but none of them are capable of ripping the heart out of the company through layoffs. Only the big M can do that.

343 is another victim, one which appears to have been hit pretty hard by the slew of layoffs that have fallen upon them. Layoffs which come after a career of troubled releases ever since they took the helm of the Halo franchise in their inception, which recently resulted in a fan-led revolt to have them all fired. I can't help but wonder if that turn of public sentiment was taken into account when the job scythe was rolling over the company. 343 was going to lose people, just as everyone else did, but perhaps they were hurt more than they would have because of the fans. It's an idle supposition but one I can't help but keep rattling around in the back of my head. Passions flare as they always do, but I doubt anyone out there truly wanted people to start losing their jobs over the Halo situation, so it would mark a upsetting reality if any water actually held up there.

If you ask 343, or rather the more vocal members on Twitter, then this recent bout of layoffs, and the current state of Halo Infinite, is due solely down to mismanagement straight from the top of the company. Mismanagement that troubled development so much that Halo Infinite had to be delayed for a year, mismanagement that led to 343 having to break one of their core promises and pulling co-op split screen, mismanagement that has neutered the post-game support the game was supposed to rely on and now mismanagement that is seeing them be gutted in a brutal string of layoffs. Given everything that the game has gone through and how it's very much still struggling today, even with the boost that the release of Forge mode granted it, it's hard to imagine Halo Infinite lasting that 10 year life cycle that the development team wanted for.

Not least of all if the rumours are to be believed and 343 have been pulled off of Infinite entirely whilst all the single player content has been cancelled. Now to be fair this really is a 'rando online says this' kind of rumour as far as I can tell, not least of all because 343 haven't breathed a concrete word about any Single Player content being in development at all; but heeding the rumours at face value does spell a stark doom for the Halo fandom. 343 have dedicated themselves tirelessly to Halo since it's inception, and whilst it's true they've done very little to nothing successful for the brand, (Master Chief collection works today, but one could argue that Bungie were the team who originated the majority of that content) at least it's been there to work on the franchise and give fans some sense of hope that they'll nail it someday. This 'behind the barn execution' style of treatment sounds like the procedure of a parent company who has truly given up.

But at least the executives over at Microsoft have the good graces to hobnob off-shore to attend a special concert by Sting. What? Yes, because apparently the evil-supervillain image wasn't quite complete enough, Microsoft arranged for a corporate retreat the same week as the largest layoff the company has seen in ten years. That's the sort of stuff you see play out in movies and then gawk at how over the top and unrealistic it is. If you wanna talk about bad optics, that's pretty much the king of the pile laying right there. Not to mention how this actually reflects back on Sting himself, who presumably signed up for the conference the second he heard about the apparent theme of 'sustainability'. Pretty much a cornucopia of hypocrisy over at Microsoft these days, huh?

By and large this is grim news for just about everybody, but even bringing it down to just the level of video games I find myself wondering about the tidings. If Microsoft predict a slow year and thus are playing at cutting down their own fat, what does that mean for studios who have been working for years under Microsoft without anything to show for it either physically or even in presentation. Yes, I'm of course talking about 'The Initiative' with this one; they've got themselves a blank cheque for development and just disappeared off the face of the earth. Do they even have an office space anymore? Did they take the money and run? Is Perfect Dark going back to being a dead franchise again? Why did all the other companies who actually make stuff have to suffer when Microsoft could have just burned 'The Initiative' to the ground and save everyone else their jobs?

Gotham Squad: Kills everyone's hype

 The horror, The horror!

What the hell is up with my internal 'bad game' barometer of late? I used to be able to spot this stuff from a mile away, but I guess I'm getting soft in my old age or something, because I'm giving so many things the undue benefit of the doubt. I'm sold to the Harry Potter hypetrain, enough to pre-order the thing, even though I'm about 80% sure the final product is going to disappoint me in some vast way. Callisto Protocol was one of my most hyped games of the past few years, only for it to fall short of what I needed it to be in order to fill the Dead Space shaped hole in my heart. And now we've got the bigger, supposedly badder, cousin of Gotham Knights, a game I rightfully bore down upon, only to discover that this title, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, might just be every bit as terrible as Gotham Knights was! I used to be able to spot these things coming...

When Ubisoft killed off it's three 'in progress' games that were in development earlier this year, there was a very specific reason given. They said that the games in question 'weren't what gamers wanted'. Further, decidedly more unsubstantiated, rumours declared that they were Battle Royale titles all. But the reason I'm bringing this up is to highlight the intelligence to look at your work, look at your audience and realise that they aren't meant for each other. Maybe the trend you're chasing moved on, maybe the flow of the market is against your style, maybe you're just not on the pulse of the people anymore. Whatever the case, when I read that as an internal justification from the Ubisoft paymasters, that might have been the first time I felt respect for any decision made within Ubisoft since Black Flag, which I believe turns 10 later this year. That is a self-understanding that, if leaks are to be believed, is sorely missing from Warner Bros Interactive for the games that they're publishing. (Which again, the Harry Potter title is Warner Bros published! Can you see why I'm scared?)

I'm using hedging language merely as a shield for myself to buy the benefit of the doubt in this situation. This isn't a revealed screen of the game, but rather a 'leak'; which opens up the tiny possibility that what we're seeing is a artist mock-up of a possible direction the game could have taken, or a straight up lying composite by a simple clout chaser. But the renders are too good, the UI too ugly yet professional, there's no shadow of doubt in my mind that this leaked screenshot doing the rounds is the real, mortifying, face of the 'Suicide Squad' game that the team have been keeping under wraps for fear of the obvious hatred it would accrue. The more I think about the tiny snippets of this game we've seen, scripted cutscenes split between heavy bursts of action, and the strangely twisted gameplay details they've let slip and refused to explain; (only being able to play as one of the Squad instead of switching at will) the truth becomes clear; this was a con job from the getgo.

"But what do these leaked screens contain?", I hear you ask because I'm not going to risk uploading them up here. Well, try to picture a screenshot from the menu of Gotham Knights. Seeped in dozens of currencies, endless menus for crafting slots, and take it one step further by adding a 'mission-select' screen implying there isn't even an open world for this title. And there's your game. Gotham Knights 2.0; the game built around the core fundamentals that make a live service without any reason to be one. A style of development soundly rejected by everyone who likes the Arkham style of game that this title was supposed to be a successor to, much more so than 'Gotham Knights' was pretending to be. This was the A-team, ostensibly the same people who brought us the Arkham masterpieces, making a new title after all these years! And it looks every bit as disappointing as what the B-team farted out last year as a pale imitation of the greatness this franchise once achieved.

At this point the only question is whether or not this game is just 'live service-like' in the same way that Gotham Knights was, or alternatively the full sin itself. And unfortunately I think I know the answer. Unlike Gotham Knights which draped itself in all the annoying necessities of a live service without any of the procedurally developed benefits that supposedly make up for those issues, the new screenshot of the Suicide Squad game does tease a Battle Pass. >Sigh< Which means this is probably a full blown live service game for some sickening reason. I feel like at this point, the only people who like and benefit from making these games are the publishers; because the game is never as polished, the user experience always takes liberties in order to accommodate and the replayability of the game in the future is irrevocably kneecapped. Do you think Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League is going to be repackaged into a remastered collection 8 years from now? Of course not, because the servers won't be online anymore; thank you, live services!

The worst part of this for me, however, is the unspoken impression (by the exsistence of a mission-select menu) that there won't be any open world. Just as we could start to get excited to explore Metropolis for the first time since... DC Universe Online, I believe- it seems that this game has gone another direction entirely and is going to ward itself off into tiny snippets of concentrated enemy slog missions that'll be capped off in Justice League themed boss fight. Which would actually, increadibly, make it more restrictive than Gotham Knights already is! Assuming that my reading into the game is accurate, which I can only assume it is given that literally none of the marketing has shown off open world exploration elements at all and the team have bent over backwards not to mention anything in that vein. Which begs the question; if you know the thing you're making is going to inspire backlash to the point where you have to shut up about it's features, why dedicate yourself to making it?

For what it's worth, some outlets have gone the distance to reach out and apparently confirm the validity of these screenshots, but the sources they got in contact with seem to double as hype-men because they rushed to 'damage control' in statements made at the same time. According to these insiders, the multiple currencies are skill point tallies divided between each character, making the prospect of levelling up 4 characters individually a daunting proposition right away. They've also tried to defend progression claiming that you don't start "rebuffed and weak", instead you "start off great and get ridiculous, like Arkham's Batman." Which of course calls into question- what exactly was ridiculous about Arkham's Batman? Was it his intricate and free-flowing balance will gave him a counter to every individual enemy type he fought against? What Batman game did they play to make such a statement, because I don't think it was the same one that I fell in love with.

So I'm a little distraught by all this if you can tell. Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League was supposed to be the wine to wash down the vinegar that Gotham Knights left us all with, but now it's looking like a straight shot of unrefined oil. Rocksteady have veered hard away from everything that made the Arkham franchise great whilst keeping their public face insanely hush about everything so as to not upset a base they know is going to be ruffled. I suppose this means that the spirit of the Arkham games has been soundly washed from the hands of Rocksteady, and my dream of them one day going back to that Damian Wayne starring Arkham game after this one is dead. Or even more so than it suddenly became the day that Kevin Conroy died. Oh right, at least Kevin is in this title for his last role, guess it's worth at least watching his scenes on Youtube for that. 

Callisto Impropiety

 In space, no one can hear your accountant screaming at you.

I cannot tell you how much I absolutely swooned for Callisto Protocol back when it was doing it's marketing rounds throughout all those award shows and industry trade events. In fact, I had an entire blog written up called 'I've fallen in love with Callisto Protocol' that I decided to can for being too overly fellatious- I decided that's the sort of shaft-riding that should be reserved only for games that have already come out. (Guess I did learn something from the Cyberpunk debacle) But can you really blame me? This game has to be one of the most beautiful looking titles to ever launch, (For a full gaming audience. Sorry, 'Horizon: Forbidden West' try being accessible next time.) the gore looks incredible, it was being fronted by one of the key staff members responsible for bringing Dead Space to life and it wasn't an EA title. It's really hard to get excited for the Dead Space Remake when I know it'll only run with the freakin' EA app running in the background. (I'd rather skin and fillet both my legs than navigate that trainwreck of an ecosystem again!)

So I was completely in Callisto Protocol's court all the way until launch. I didn't even have those last minute concerns like I did that time Cyberpunk delayed itself by a half a year less than two months before launch and I was the only one standing around going "Excuse me, when is the marketing wagon supposed to get here again?" Which one could perhaps argue is evidence of the scale of the respective issues, because by Cyberpunk standards the technological problems with Callisto at launch were utterly miniscule. Negligible in comparison. I mean they were annoying, stuttering in an action horror game where every missed frame could spell your demise, but the game actually functioned for the most part. The real problem was... well... underneath those bugs, the game just wasn't what a lot of fans like me wanted it to be.

And yes, that is definitely as much on us as it is on the marketing for playing up the Dead Space connections for a game that only passingly resembles it's ancestral predecessor. But what I yearned for was a survival horror experience that leaned into what I consider to be the core pillars of the subgenre as laid out by classics like 'Alone in the Dark', 'Resident Evil' and 'Silent Hill'. Atmosphere as a base state, supplies as a luxury, breaks as a rarity. Callisto Protocol attempts it's hand at these but goes in it's own direction entirely on easy point, and how successful their distinction from the industry norm turned out really depends on who you ask and their tastes. The shift to melee combat eliminates the feeling of fragility which typically defines the Survival Horror protagonist, not least of all for the 'skill friendly' dodge button which feels more plodding than reactive. But my dissemination of the core gameplay failings is not, I believe, the core problem here.

Because you see, Callisto Protocol sold well. Respectable enough figures for any video game studio's first foray, but according to reports on some internal discussions, not well enough to appropriately reward the hefty 200 billion won investment that went into making the thing. Whilst being on track to make 2 million sales this year sounds incredible, the figure that the production managers were looking for was around 5 million. They were looking to make 'Resident Evil' kinds of money. (Excluding Resident Evil 2 Remake, because that was a runaway success of nearly 10 million sales for Capcom.) I'm not sure how the gaming industry chalks up a successful release, I'm not sure if it's close to the 1.5 times investment that the movie industry shoots for, but only hitting half of one's alleged sales target is a metric I can fully comprehend. That's going to make some people quite unhappy.

And by some people, I of course mean investors. They, along with myself, must have thought that Callisto Protocol was going to smash when it finally landed, what with the amount of marketing this game secured. I know that my own prejudice is tainting my recollections to some small degree, but even beyond what I have imagined in my own head, this game really was everywhere during it's marketing run. It was all over the Game Awards, whenever the 'belles of the next generation' were brought up it was never behind the zenith of the conversation and all impressions appeared to be largely, sometimes even overwhelmingly, positive. I can only imagine that the account handlers figured this was going to be bright birth of a new Horror icon. There was even talk of the next game being worked through in it's nitty-gritty planning stages already! Before the first one had even actually come out!

But those early impressions were just killers. And not just because of the bugs, but the freezing error did provide an undeniable lightning rod for everyone to lambast the game and ward people off from those all important first week sales. But even beyond that, for a lot of the nostalgic crowd the game just wasn't as special as Dead Space was back in the day; it was missing that spark which seeped all the greatness from the original Alien and mixed it up into a brand new incredible concoction all of it's own. Of course, The Callisto Protocol was a much smaller project with much leaner resources in comparison to the first Dead Space, but the ultra-slick photo-realistic presentation of the Callisto Protocol succesfully smothered that reality in the minds of gamers and rose their expectations to frankly unrealistic degrees. Which is not to say that The Callisto Protocol doesn't have it's supporters; it's a solid game and earns it's praise, but when you put a solid game up against a classic masterpiece you're just setting yourself up for failure.

I also question the idea of marketing this game as a horror title, when it seems to be more interested in being an action game with dark overtones and a lot of gore. Dead Space worked a lot with psychological horror, atmosphere building, tense crowding with restrictive melee options and jumpscares. The Callisto Protocol only really has jumpscares in it's horror arsenal. Jump scares and the most gore out of any other game out there. Which one could argue is the classical definition of what a modern horror product is, but after all the Resident Evil games, and the upcoming Silent Hill titles and the general trend towards psychological horror in media- this feels a little behind the curve from a horror perspective. I would imagine there's a fair few horror enthusiast turned off from Callisto by that inconsistency alone.

Does this mean that the plans for a Callisto franchise are dead in the water? Well I'm not in the board room so I can't say with certainty, but I think personally the Callisto brand is just going to get a re-examining. 2 million sales ain't a complete unreserved flop, and there's definitely a crowd for the style of game that Callisto has to offer, even if it wasn't the exact crowd that the team set off to market for. Whatsmore, I can see behind it's systemic jank the potential of what Callisto could have been with some more resources at it's disposal, which is exactly what the game would get come sequel time so I personally want the franchise to be continued. Just, ya know, please fix the shader issue before launch next time around, that'd be sweet.

James Marsden is not real

 I'm not crazy!

I know what you're thinking. Probably something along the lines of: James Marsden is most assuredly real you absolute windbag!- but just hold onto that thought and ask yourself... what if he isn't? The 49 year old actor still very much holding onto his baby face, what you think that's natural, you think a man can just do that? Hell, he looks about my age and he's nearly twice as old as me! And that is because... well, I could probably get a bit more sun, to be honest. And maybe do a bit more moisturising around the eyes. And get some more sleep... But it's also because James is in reality the single most advanced CGI computer rendering of a man that we've ever seen. I'm talking a rendering so good it defies that natural effect of the eye to spot the fallacies in even the most detailed picture. That would explain so very much not just about the man and how he looks that way, but also why his career trajectory has gone the way it has of late and why that fits in perfectly with selling the illusion of just another youthful faced Hollywood heartthrob. (Aside: Is James Marsden enough to be considered a 'Heartthrob'? It's not really my scene so I couldn't really say personally, I might be talking a bit out my ass with that one.)

Firstly; X-Men Franchise. Great movies, Bryan Singer did a good job. Maybe the first time superheros were treated somewhat seriously by a movie going public, largely on account of the amazing cast of actors including Patrick Stewart, Ian Mckellan and... James Marsden. Well what do you know? Playing the leader of the X-men, Scott Summers AKA Cyclops; you'd expect him to be the main character. But oh no, instead he plays second fiddle to the audience's viewpoint 'Wolverine' played by some Huge Jackedman from Australia. Now on the surface this is because just like every kid who grew up reading X-Men, Bryan and his writers became giant Wolverine stans on account of his no-nonsense 'stab 'em all and let god sort it out' attitude so they decided to front him as the lead of their entire X-Men series. (Arguably to the detriment of narrative cohesion come the third movie.) 

But let me tell you the real reason that the team lead of the X-Men isn't the lead of the actual movie. Because that cast, all famous and verifiably real actors, would all be acting around each other all day. If the lead that they were supporting never once showed up on set because he was entirely added in post, don't you think that would cause a bit of confusion among the set? Maybe ruffle a few feathers and cause the dire secret of his clandestine technological conception out before it's time? So no, instead he's just another supporting character, largely sidelined by the loner of the gang, until the third movie grew to be so ambitious that they had to unceremoniously kill off Cyclops in the first act in order to save on budget. Think about it- this makes sense, doesn't it?

Now let me fast forward to the first movie that really set this off for me: Hop. One of those 'animated character comes to the real world' stories staring James Marsden and... Russell Brand as the rabbit? No, I've got to be misreading that... Nope, there it is. Russell Brand is the... Easter bunny. Right... So the movie is trash and no one cares what it's about but the crux is that James is the real man acting alongside the CGI rabbit as he's attempting to become the new Easter bunny or something, I can't remember. He's definitely the lead for this movie, but think about his supporting cast- the family members he barely interacts with and another character who exists purely in post-processing! Just tell the real actors that he's sick on the days when he's supposed to show up and the lie gets perpetuated. All so that you can have a CGI bunny interact convincingly with a more dense and realistic cluster of 1s and 0s, selling the illusion of an otherwise somewhat complex marrying of the two genres in order to create a profitable kids movie. Bring in the kids to see the animated bunny monster, bring in the human to keep the parents from blinding themselves with boredom. And maybe there's a little bit of fund smuggling going on behind the scenes too, with producers pocketing the 'supposed' Marsden's acting pay check or something. (I haven't ironed out all the details of this conspiracy just yet.) 

Which brings us to the big and iconic one; Sonic The Hedgehog. Now let me ask you, why in the hell would Sonic, an established pop-culture icon with a proven strong enough personality to carry movies and TV shows as the sole lead, need to play second fiddle as the side kick to a human? Well for the formula, is the only possible excuse. Kids movies need the animated character to come to the human world and attach himself to a standard generic human in an unhealthily close relationship that serves as a blatant analogy for some real life conundrum he's going through. It's the bare basic make-up of the check-list plot synopsis that any aspiring Children's director is required to write down before a Disney executive will even consider reading their pitch. But then actually look past that and watch the movie, then ask yourself; how important is James Marsden to that plot? 

Sonic is always spending the majority of purposeful scenes playing games with Carrey's Eggman completely solo, often going off on his own entirely to have fun scenes totally free of his human handler's influence, Marsden's interactions are more tedious hinderances to the progression of the story. The man is of no consequence to the entire plot! Take him out and the movie wouldn't change! You think a real leading man would accept a role like that, where he plays second fiddle to his own side kick? How about where, in the sequel, he's phased out of the movie entirely after the opening set piece? Of course not, that would be degrading and humiliating for a nearly 50 year old man to commit to. But what if that wasn't a man acting there, but an algorithm designed to cater to a specific role so that this movie can be greenlit as something more market friendly before the actual content of the movie itself veers off dramatically in a direction more cinematically appealing? Food for thought.

Now what about the Smurfs? "Wait, isn't the movie starring Neil Patrick Harris?" Yes! Or is it? Because you see whilst that computer rendering of a marketing executive, sharing scenes with singularly distinct blue wizard snacks, might look a hell of a lot like famed actor and comedian Neil Patrick Harris, I have serious reason to doubt that. For one, Neil Patrick Harris is an actor, Wikipedia and Google say so, even though throughout the entirety of the Smurfs his performance can best be described as 'windows screenshot of Neil Patrick Harris with mp3 audio played on top of it'. He never emotes, never acts out meaningful physical cues, never performs any of the little intricacies that make an actor's work professional. And yet he is an accomplished actor? No way; he's a James Marsden. Let me explain. Computer generated James Marsden compiles it's image as an age defying actor when it needs to fill a role without requirements, but when they need that role to be of an established actor for better marketability; all it needs to do is swap out the model. What looked likes James Marsden now looks like Neil Patrick Harris; but it's just a mask, a façade- underneath it's still a cold and emotionless AI, thus it cannot match the performance value that a real actor would bring.

And now that's been established, why stop there? Why stop when we can then point our gaze at another 'animated character meets real person' movie; 'Alvin and the Chipmunks' and it's many, obnoxious sqeek-uels. What can be said about Jason Lee's 'Dave' that already hasn't been said? Jason's performance is soundly outdone by a CGI Chipmunk on a sped-up voice machine. He sounds like he's paid a flat rate for everytime he screams "Alvin", but due to diminishing returns his payout, and thus his motivation, shrinks with every utterance. You'd be forgiven for believing that he died the moment the first movie began, and each time he shouted 'Alvin' you can mark the last vestige of the spirit of Jason leaving his body as they become weaker and weaker until it's so infinitesimal that he doesn't even appear on screen anymore by the last couple of movies. Why even hire him at all? Why indeed, when you can program an AI to give out that performance, wearing that face, and not fork over a single dime? The conspiracy runs on!

And finally let's come back around to another supposed Marsden performance. How about a performance in one of the most coldly cynical and creatively bankrupt children's franchises of the past decade? A movie franchise which is, surprisingly, not a CGI-real hybrid! (I know, I didn't know James bothered acting in those sorts of movies either!) What if I told you that James Marsden is the protagonist of the Boss Baby? Well, you would call me a liar and say that Toby Maguire plays Tim Templeton. Which would be right, except that for the older iteration of Tim they decided to cast James to replace him. (I guess the studio just didn't believe that 47 year old Toby Maguire could sound like a grown-up.) Now we have Jimmy boy stepping into another franchise where he doesn't have to act around others, doesn't need to put in much of a performance at all, (because his character is literally supposed to be soulless and drained in comparison to his younger self) and the role doesn't need to have a 'celebrity' casting at all. And it doesn't have a celebrity casting, because that would be waste of money, and why would they need to waste money when they can program an AI for free?

Together we have uncovered a perfidious and far stretching conspiracy that Hollywood has been trying to keep a lid on since the early 2000's now. Why? To get cheap labour without involving the unions and strike action that would be mandated if it ever came out they were employing CGI as actors. And all fronted by the vultures over at Fox, the X-Men creators! Oh, and Sega with Paramount for Sonic. And Illumination with Universal who made Hop... and Disney through their revamped '20th Century Studios' for Boss Baby... and Sony pictures for Smurfs and... Fox again for Alvin... Okay, either this is the point where the conspiracy gets too many cooks in the kitchen for it be possibly plausible that this would conducted without anyone hearing about it from the masses of leaks that happen everyday, or we just start believing that everyone in Hollywood is joined up in a secretive mega-cabal that preserves this one secret until death. The tipping point for any conspiracy to slip into becoming a cult! Well, I'm partial to not spending the next 5 years becoming terminally online until the point where an even bigger internet nutjob cult assimilates my own beliefs into their collective and me along with it, so I'm just going to call the whole thing off and decide that James Marsden is probably real. Which means I should probably start apologizing for calling his performances in these movies tantamount to being an AI... but I won't. He'll never read: thus I can say anything!

Improving Skyrim: Aftershock

 Fixing the squeaky wheel

Skyrim is a great game, it should be: getting updated all the way to today, with another huge game changing update later this year. (When I say 'game changing' I mean in the way that it's attempting to reintroduce paid mods back into the ecosystem against everyone's insistence.) But Skyrim is not without it's faults and set backs. If you ask the Elder Scrolls community, they'll tell you that the problem with Skyrim is exactly each and every way it does not match up exactly to what previous Elder Scrolls games were doing. If you ask me, much of what Skyrim falls flat on, every Elder Scrolls game falls flat on. Like worthwhile and meaningful side quests; don't even get me started on Bethesda and their damn side quests. Actually no, do get me started: because that is what today's blog is going to be about afterall. (Might as well talk about the topic, no?)

When I say 'Side Quests' I should probably elaborate. Every Elder Scrolls game, and open world title in general, is stuffed with side storylines and missions that are non-important to the main progression of the narrative and exist primarily to fill out the emptier corners of the world. Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind have their share of side quests of all different shapes and sizes, so if I'm going to start critiquing I need to be more specific. My problem is the 'tick box' side quests, the extra missions so empty and interest-free that later Bethesda titles would literally leave it to an AI system to create and present them for a player to delve through. Although that shouldn't be entirely crazy to hear, given that Bethesda were experimenting with AI all the way back in Oblivion for it's world generation. Crazy to think that AI assisted development was going on all the way back in 2006...

Bring us to Skyrim and I'll tell you exactly the type of quests I'm drawing issue with. I'm raising arms against the quests that have the Companions send you off to random houses in different holds to slay home invader creatures for the reward of an actual pittance of gold, the Dark Brotherhood quests that have you track down and slay some random NPC who seemed to spawn up out of the ground without anything in the way of challenge or skill being required, or even just the random hold 'bounty' quests that simply spawn a dungeon to clear despite that being an action most people do naturally whilst just living the Elder Scrolls life. The key problems with even calling these activities 'side content' is their gameplay process and their rewards. They're either too boring and uncreative to be fun to play through, or too unrewarding to bother with to any serious degree.

Which brings us to the topic of today's blog. You see, I was just playing Skyrim myself the other day. There I was, traipsing over rocky crags at the tip of the mountainous regions around the Reach, and I came across a surprise ball of magical aura identified rather suddenly as an 'magical anomaly'. Assuming myself having bumped into the activation of one of my 300 odd mods, I jumped to the task whilst trying to figure out which insane adventure I had stumbled upon. (Which proved difficult once I remembered that spawned creatures carry a temporary Ref ID in the Console that can't be traced back to the source mod in the loadlist.) Only after I finished the insanely basic and boring encounter, got a sudden quest notifciation and looked it up on the Internet did I realise; this was vanilla content, and I had accidentally just finished it. The quest was called 'Aftershock', and it's one of the endless generated 'radiant' quests awarded to players for finishing the 'College of Winterhold' guild questline.

Now before I break down the mechanics and offer a solution, I want to talk about the lore and how it's somewhat wanting. The plotline of the 'College of Winterhold' concerns a magical orb known as the 'Eye of Magnus' which is kept mysterious throughout the entire plotline as to it's true origins. We're told it predates the Atmoran settlers of Skyrim and probably even the Snow Elves kingdom before it. It lacks any signs of known construction except perhaps Aedric, but the Aedra aren't known to manifest any part of themselves physically like the Daedra do, so that alone would make it insanely unique. However, as one of the worst questlines in the game, The College of Winterhold quests only use the 'Eye of Magnus' as a magic McGuffin that forces conflict between faction over some vague and nebulous ideal of 'arcane power'. The Aftershock quest appears to be tied to an event in the climax of the quest line wherein rouge Thalmor dignitary, Arcano, manages to shoot enough magic at the orb to open it up causing magical fissures to bloom across Winterhold shooting out tiny wisps called 'Magical anomalies'. 'Aftershock' blooms more anomalous tears across the world that the player, now entitled Arch-Mage, should close as part of an endless clean-up task for Arcano's bumbling.

Now from a lore standpoint this is excessively boring, a vague 'magic entity' that opens up 'fissures' that leak 'anomalies'; there's no substantive narrative or lore value in anything here that might elucidate or reward the observant player and the gameplay value of this side content is even worse. Every iteration of this side quest plays out thusly; you get the order to visit a location, kill a few wisps, go back home. There's no variation, the gold is crap and it is repeated forever. In order to conceive fixing this side quest into something more interesting I want to highlight both the gameplay and the narrative to serve both core demographics of an Elder Scrolls audience. Also, I think that if you can serve those two sides whenever you approach any quest, you'll go a long way to buffing the value of the content proposition. 

My idea is actually rather simple, what you could do with a quest like this is to borrow from the set-up of the Thief Guild side quests in Skyrim, which are all tallied up to a coherent meta-quest line. For 'Aftershock' they could perhaps lean into the fact that magical fissures which leak out magic are frighteningly similar to the lore of Elder Scrolls stars, which are said to be holes in the sky that the gods made when they fled Nirn, all of which bleed magical energy back into Nirn from the realms of Aetherius. We could turn each fissure into their own distinct portal from which one of the elemental planes of Aetherius is leaking, which means even if you don't want to put in the effort to design distinct creatures for each individual plane, you could colour code each magical wisp to be themed to a certain school of magic. There could be destruction wisps that fire spells, conjuration wisps that summon adds and hide behind them, illusion wisps that cast reflect shields and make themselves invisible- that's the sort of basic theming that doesn't even require a lot of thought or effort. Then, as a reward, you have the individual school of fissures tally up so that once the player has closed a certain number of a specific type (5 illusion fissures, etc.) they can open a portal to that realm and have a short generated dungeon with specifically themed rewards. Perhaps random loot affix with a unique enchant property you can only get in this area. I'm just spitballing things you could do to really revolutionise a single quest chain without going crazy with resources and making new models or something. This alone would bump up the worth of doing these side quests ten fold for players.

Of course this isn't perfect, and it won't make these quests the best in the game; but relatively small scale touch-up work like that should form the foundations of what can make great side content in an action adventure RPG. I think that as long as you can convince the player that they are making progress towards something, a reward with any sort of value to it, even if that is value purely by merit of being unique, then you are on the way to developing worthwhile side content; at least to someone's standards; instead of to noone's. That is the only way currently that ESO trounces single player games from a design standpoint, being born in the world of MMO development taught those devs how to handle an expectant online audience. Some of the those lessons could do wonders being translated down here too, if only Bethesda had the ears to listen to them.

Dungeons and Developments

 A summation.

We've touched quite a bit on the ongoing drama surrounding the world of Dungeons and Dragons as it battles with it's parent company around mildly confusing contract terms that no seems able to clearly define beyond actual lawyers themselves. And even the lawyers seem to politely disagree with one another. I hear one lawyer tell me of the seriousness of the unspoken language of their OGL licence change, and another lawyer talk about how the OGL is an entirely toothless document that has no power beyond the actual written language of the rules manual anyway. It's all very confusing and makes following the storyline of how this is progressing very difficult indeed. All I know for certain is that Wizards of the Coast were told their brand is undermonetised and is sizing up an excuse to make DnD, or certain parts of it, subscription based- which is an idea so insidious I'm almost fascinated just to see how they plan to go about it.

But there's certainly some aspects about the Dungeons and Dragons world to be celebrating at the same time, proving that everything is not as 'Doom and Gloom' as it might seem from the surface. For one, Dungeons and Dragons through the lens of Critical Role has released the second season in the 'Legends of Vox Machina', a very expedient and lovingly animated rendition of the first campaign by the legendary DnD and voice acting troupe led by Matthew Mercer. The entire series is wreathed in high-quality animation, somewhat reminiscent of a more contemporary faux-anime 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' style and voiced by the cast themselves, as is fitting given their day job is literally performing voice acting roles. Not only is the exsistence of this show a boon for the visibility of Dungeons and Dragons, but it's also technically another example of a successful game-to-screen adaptation before the Last of Us came around. Just putting it out there: that show was not the first such adaptation to be decent.

There's also the movie on the horizon which, whilst it doesn't look like the most amazing thing to ever grace the world it at least seems fun. The last Dungeons and Dragon's movies that spawned around about the early 2000's and suffered quite a bit from an identity crisis of wanting to both take the source material seriously and acknowledge the silliness of what they were actually making. Also, it was a fantasy movie from the 2000's. Everybody suffers whenever that happens. But this new movie at least seems to know it wants to be a silly adventure movie above all else- even if that does sort of put in the same realm as most of the recent Marvel movies who's unending quippiness has begun to grate even the most ardent super hero movie supporters like myself. I do wonder if that's going to have an unintended knockback on the perception of this movie when it launches.

And in general the visibility of the DnD brand is more out in the public eye then ever. Just scanning Youtube there seems to be dozens upon dozens of individual groups of DnD players who livestream their own personal, usually homebrew, campaigns out to the world, most with their own unique style of storytelling and adventure weaving which make them distinct and creatively interesting viewing experiences. Personally I'm a fan of the British Youtube Dnd Group, The Oxventures, purely for their utterly irreverently built world and lore, the odd excessively British pun or reference and the almost farcical way the team manages to slip out of any and all danger by pure accident or luck. Sometimes it's nice not to fear for the lives of your favourite characters every other week.

I think that part of the appeal of Dungeons and Dragons is it's endless appeal for being accessible to practically everyone who gives it a shot, because these are stories largely told within the mind's eye; from the words of the dungeon master to the hands of the players and the ears of the audience, in the instance of broadcast sessions. Rather than a book, which paints out a story through clever language and written presentation, I find a lot of DnD vernacular leans into a singularly verbal form of storytelling that stokes upon the expectations of a visual medium as much as the creativity of the receptive mind. And as with any good spoken tale, this allows for every adventure to come together in the mind of each listener in the audience with an entirely distinct configuration depending on the mind in quesition. DnD feeds off some of the core basic tenements of storytelling to form these endlessly accessible worlds with endless potential.

And the potential of these vast worlds is what has been most largely at threat in the eyes of the public given recent developments. Games Workshop, to contrast, famously throw out their license to anyone with a pulse which results in roughly 5-10 externally made products each and every year. The hit rate for those may be spotty, but the upside is that literally anyone can turn their considerable talents to the property and boost it. Owlcat Games making their 'Rogue Trader' game is quite literally the only way I'd ever find myself being interested in the Warhammer Universe, but now I voraciously consume pages of lore for on everything I can get my grubby mitts to, eager to catch up with the decades of work that universe has had already. And DnD has it's Baldur's Gate franchise which is a giant pull for gamers simply for the prestige of the title involved.

Wizards can't just try and put an end to all that by tightening it's reigns and shaking the audience for money, no matter how hard that it tries. So much of what makes Table Top gaming so very prolific is it's ability to worm into the crooks and crannies of every vector and just slide right the way into popular culture in ways you don't even expect or notice. Whether you're looking to kill some time with party games, lose yourself in a fresh world with singular games, enjoy passive entertainment with TV shows, go out for an event at the movies or just power-grind in a computer game; you can find something with the DnD stamped on it, advertising the Dnd name in a grass routes manner. Pathfinder's Paizo seems to have been formed by former Wizard's folk who understood the importance of that heart of the community, and even to this day they've been proving that understanding with how they've handled the very specific presentation of their own updated licence.

There's no real conclusion here, which works will in how I wish to reflect that there is no conclusion in the Dungeons and Dragons story either. The drama has begun to die down and Wizards have managed to put out a statement that wasn't too smothered with the overwhelming scent of mouth-shoe, but they've already exposed everything that they are and what they stand for when it comes to Dungeons and Dragons. They stand for chopping up and disseminating the freedom of this franchise so they can wring it out to dry and move onto the next thing. The same way that Magic The Gathering has long lost it's way from the heights of it's golden age, Wizard's want to bring that overly greedy perspective to a franchise they think is too big to fail, and if there's anything the past year in particular has taught us all, it's that nothing and no-one is too big to fail.

Avengers Down! Avengers Down!

Do believe I told you so!

I'll admit, it lasted much longer than I expected. Although even with that being said I am totally going to milk the fact that I told you so. I told everyone so. From the exact moment it became clear that Marvel's Avengers was going to be a Live Service I predicted it's colossal fall like clockwork and I was wrong and right. The prophecy was delayed, but it came true eventually. Which isn't to say the game didn't ever have anything resembling a fighting chance in it's inception; rather that, I think, lo and behold, the decision-makers totally undervalued the amount of effort it would take to first launch a Live Service and to break it into the top 3 services that rule the industry. Just like in the age of the MMO where everyone and their mother was launching a WOW clone and trying to just wing the 'post launch support' as they went; amateurish plans have led to amateurish embarrassments for the Live Service crowd time and time again. Which I do believe marks the last of every single one of Square Enix's many Live Service endeavours going the way of the Dodo. And good riddance!

If you've a perceptive mind on you, perhaps you can deduce what my self-righteous bragging is about. Just recently the Marvel's Avengers team announced they were hanging up the shield and killing support on the game from this point onwards. Or rather, they would be killing support after an upcoming update that will make all the cosmetics free for everyone to play around with, which is actually fairly nice of them. Although at this point they might as well make the game itself free as well before the servers shut down and the thing becomes unplayable outside of the singular core story missions. Marking the end of a game that was slated for death pretty much the second it revealed it's true nature to fans in a 'tail between the legs' demonstration presentation that is sure to live on in infamy. Topped perhaps only by the legendary moment when Valve announced Artifact, only to be met with a stadium full of boos when it was revealed to be another online card game. (Incidentally, Artifact is also no longer with us.)

Right from it's first mewling mumbles fresh from the hatchery, Avengers was the lightning rod for all the frustrations of a gaming public sick and tired with strong properties and solid games being irreparably warped in order to fit more 'monetarily promising' models. Titles like Anthem who's back was broken on the knee of corporate monetisation mandates, for a game that could have very well been promising as a single player or limited multiplayer title being forced into a environment it doesn't belong and won't thrive in, because Destiny made a lot of money with their Live Service once. That frustration did, admittedly, result in Avengers perhaps receiving a harder time than it deserved out of the box. The gameplay was decently fun and the visual presentation was somewhat pretty in it's environments and decent character models. And the boss fights, what few they were, proved engaging enough. But even the supremely jumped-up didn't have to poke far to come across genuine faults with the Avengers package that they could crucify the game for.

The lack of gameplay variety was a serious issue, and a major contributing factor for people getting very sick of the combat very fast. Every somewhat interesting unlockable outfit was locked behind purchasable cosmetics, which felt like a crime for a full priced title which just happened to also be a super hero game. Outside of the main quest the team didn't really know what to do with the end game to make it even remotely interesting to play with. The team tried to subtly make the EXP grind heavier in order to pad out player playtime and hopefully also retention. It was just scandal after scandal with this game. Even their good PR moments seemed to be muted or shortlived. Hawkeye was quickly overshadowed by the arrival Kate Bishop, who literally just felt like his 'shadow fighter' and whittled away at player's patience. Black Panther dropped with any big fanfare outside of this game's specific community. No matter what happened, Avengers just couldn't get a break.

And you know what? It never could have gotten that break. Not even conceptually. And do you know why they couldn't have? Because Live Services just can't function as an industry within gaming. Think of what a Live Service is and what it entails. A consistently maintained and played product providing constant grinding and reward incentives to players that demands excessive time commitments and encourages a little bit of 'on the side' spending to keep the lights on. Hook a couple of whales, milk them for the lionshare of profits; bob's your uncle, you've created an ecosystem exploiting the financially irresponsible for your own end, great! But what's the one heavily spent resource which is essential for all players in order to get the most out of these sorts of games? It isn't money, most every Live Service provides a free path. It's time. The ultimate resource.

Time, as I'm sure you're just so very fond of hearing, is limited. Increadibly so. And if every Live Service you play begs and pleads with you to spend two to three hours each and every day with no end because the game is updated so regularly, then how many such games can a single player feasibly maintain in their daily routine? Two at most? Consider also that there are large swathes of the gaming community who scoff at dedicating that much time and effort to a single game, and you've got a decently niche subsector of gamers being squeezed between dozens of games they cannot possibly juggle with any deftness. Unless you get in on the ground floor and score your lifelong fans back when the idea was novel and the overwhelming negatives of a potential forced addiction wee widely known, you'd have to compete for a table scraps worth of an player base, all the while praying that the small net you can afford to cast netted you a Whale or two. And Avengers was not a spry chicken to this game genre.

Live Services are largely cynical and bankrupt, in a manner that is so very obvious to the public by now. Pursuing such a model in this day and age is tantamount to slapping your audience around the face and telling them how you know that they know the trap your setting but you expect them to tie themselves to it anyway under the vain hope that the enjoyment of the game outweighs the crushing expectation to play incessantly. And it rarely does. Marvel's Avengers was just one of Square Enix's many attempts to secure a cash cow in this drained-dry market and it performed about as well as they deserved. Which is why I cannot but stand baffled at the fact that Square threw away all of it's western companies claiming they don't know how to work a profit out of them, considering they paid literally no attention to the flagging trends of the market and flopped each one of it's franchises on it's face in front of everyone repeatedly. (You reap what you sow, I guess.)

The Avengers game should have been a co-op multiplayer game that followed a single strong main storyline and maybe pursued a traditional DLC structure for some additional adventures; the brand was certainly big enough to score a great swathe of sales with that model and that was all Avengers had the framework to be in the first place. Not every game can become an Online megahit just by throwing some rogue strings of Netcode in the software; just look at Fallout 76- that game has struggled to do anything significant since the Wastelanders Update raised expectations apparently way too high nearly three years ago. There's something to be said for playing to your strengths and not wadding too far from your obvious specialities; and there was a perfect gap in the market for a team-based co-op title just waiting to be filled. Or at least a single-player team-based super hero game. But no, Avengers snoozed and Guardians of the Galaxy took the crown. Alas, poor Avengers... I knew them well, Matsuda-San.

2023- not looking like Ubisoft's year.

Taking to the matrasses. 

Okay, I swear I'm not victimising this one video game company with unending scathing coverage out of some deep seeded vendetta directed toward Yves Guillemot; they're just so good at getting in the news for all the wrong reasons that they all but force themselves onto this here blog! I know that sounds positively batty, but you have to hear me out; I don't want to say their name anymore than I have to. Bear in mind, please; that Ubisoft are the absolute bottom of the barrel in my eyes. Their games are trending towards getting worse, they've offered nothing but bloat and trash to the industry; I like fooling myself into believing that games are getting progressively better as talent refines itself across the board and Ubisoft is like a glaring example of why that is absolute not true. What did they announce, like 5 Assassin's Creed games at once? And they're having trouble making a single Assassin's Creed game that the community doesn't immediately turn on after a single week? Someone needs to stop them, post haste!

But to be honest it might already be too late for that. Ubisoft as it exists now are just a joke pilled ontop of other jokes in the shape of a huge industry joke. They're still inexplicably prestigious to have on one's CV, and they have to pay a decent wage, but those are literally the only reason why anyone would seek to stay or work at Ubisoft in the modern age. They don't put out quality or ambitious games that an artist could feel proud to say that they worked on, teams don't ever get the chance to work on projects that they actually want to make, because the company culture is known to be beholden to the whims of a group of people with hilariously out-dated tastes in gaming content, and their only forays into 'changing things up' throughout the past years has been an NFT collaboration so ill-timed that it killed off the already struggling Tom Clancy game it was painfully attached to. The company is a mess.

And for once this isn't just my observations saying such- Ubisoft have been forced to admit it themselves through some troubling actions they've had to take. Namely, with the cancellation of three unannounced projects that they were working on within the same stretch, just after Christmas, which is quite the killing spree for Ubisoft higher ups! Of course, we don't know what state of development any of these projects were in, and it's quite possible these were just a bunch of pre-production ideas that were still shoring up resources before the plug was pulled. But then, would such a cancellation warrant mentioning at an investors call? Plus, isn't it still pretty damning for projects with no hope of making it to maturity being cancelled during preliminary gestation? It sort of speaks to a general disorganised attitude which would go someway to explaining the Ubisoft we see today.

Plus, they've delayed Skull and Bones again which is just... come on, guys! For the love of god, the game is not going to live longer than a month. It's going to drop like a pebble with a little bit of a splash for the curious, until the general aura of any Ubisoft game whittles down the hopeful to that small core of dedicated Ubisoft fans who pain these games because, I assume, they've never played anything else in their life. No one has been waiting this long expecting the game to be good, every delay just tries us beyond our last nerve. It doesn't matter if the thing is buggy, a perfectly wrapped up bug-free experience isn't going to materialise a substantial audience where one doesn't exist! Cancellation would just be cruel at this point, but so is dragging this out, for the sixth delay!

In their own words, these set-backs come on the heels of a tough year for results under the company banner as Mario and Rabbids undersold right next to Just Dance. I don't know who relies on that all important 'Just Dance' money to feed their young, but I'm genuinely shocked that the game somehow underperformed last year. What else could people who play 'Just Dance' every year be spending their money on? Revolving shoe display cases? Actually- yeah, it probably was that, wasn't it? (Bad luck, Ubi; CES morons stole your target demo!) To the eyes of Ubisoft, the company has struggled because the industry is trending towards mega-franchises with expanded brands, not like poor Ubisoft who just has to rely on- wait a second, what is Mario then? Isn't Assassin's Creed a prospective hopeful Mega-franchise? Hasn't Ubisoft's entire brand been about falling back on big franchises ever since the Prince of Persia movie flopped?

So then, what could be the reason that Ubisoft isn't having itself a good start to 2023? Well, for one they didn't release any big title over the holiday. Mario and Rabbids may have the big M attached to it, but it's not a game made by Nintendo and fans know that, which is why they don't stick it on their 'must buy' list. That and the novelty of Mario but Xcom, has somewhat questionable staying power. I suspect this self-imposed austerity is as much in anticipation of the year to come as it is for the year that just passed. A year that will see the release of two Assassin's Creed games, and an Avatar game, and whatever other huge franchise title that Ubisoft is trying to force out of it's doors for a revenue bump. It's too much aimed at an audience they've successful managed to turn against them through the single sure way to get through to even the most market illiterate consumer- by making a bad product.

Ubisoft's reputation for boredom has surpassed into the mainstream. Assassin's Creed Valhalla had no pacing whatsover, playing Watch Dogs Legion is the only entertainment product worthy of being legally classified as torture, their Tom Clancy deluge of games is spread so thin that Tom Clancy himself is morphing into a generic military author from beyond the grave. Ubisoft's seal no longer equals quality, and they've ridden by so long for just being consistent with the amount of games they put out. Well now they're about to tip that scale in the other direction and overwhelm gamers with new titles, in a year just packed with high quality releases from other studios that still have a reputation to gamble. Is any Ubisoft game strong enough to win out against Resident Evil 4 on release? How about Starfield? The next Cod? 

Honestly, pulling back on the three unannounced projects was probably the only smart move that Ubisoft has made in the past five years; but it's only really the beginning. Ubisoft needs to start pulling back on their coming tent, give their franchises some time to breath... oh yeah- and gut the company of all the backwards and self-sabotaging executive prats who have been poisoning the brand for years now! The Ubisoft name isn't going to start meaning anything anymore until they start putting out worthwhile games again, and I think all the brands they have at their disposal are squeezed far too dry to manage that. Sinking further under the saftey of 'big brands' is only going to backfire as the creativity runs dry, the quality tapers off and Ubisoft's value dissipates entirely. But hey, at least they'll get out that Assassin's Creed Live service! (That'll solve everything, right?)