Gaming in the Big Smoke: July 2023

In 2016 Id Software took their resurrection powers towards one of the most iconic 'Boomer Shooters' of the gaming industry and brought it back to startling vitalisation through one of the most intense, visceral, intuitive and flowing First Person Shooters of all time. DOOM totally rewrote the book on how to capture and conceptualise level design, enemy encounters, battlefield tactics and enemy design. It was a masterpiece of several distinctions, excelling in some many new areas that even the original Doom games had become dated examples of, once again putting the DOOM franchise on top of the pack in terms of quality gaming shooting majesty. And I totally loved that original 'New DOOM' experience in that special sort of way that clings to you more than just any old good game does.

That DOOM came to me at a time where everything in my life felt disorganised and spiralling out of control, and provided me with the perfect encapsulation of the 'power fantasy shooter' to help set my heart back in rhythm whilst in life I worked on everything else. Tight challenge that demands as much for you to put in as you want to get out of it, a cavalier 'screw the story let's just kill demons' attitude that felt like a breath of fresh air in an industry that was starting to drown in it's overbaked over-elaborate narratives for games that don't need them and a light replay value softly calling towards the allure of 'mastery' that kept me hooked long enough to become actually pretty good at the game. Clear the thing on Nightmare, boss through the timetrials and even get a decent way through the game on a few Ultra-Nightmare runs. (essential one life playthroughs were you have to restart the entire game if you fail.) That's not the type of dedication I devote to any old game which turns up.

Which is probably why I didn't feel the need to run out and immediately scoop up the new DOOM Eternal when it hit store shelves back in 2020- not least of all for everything else that was going on that year. 2016 DOOM was pretty much everything I need out of a game like that, the ultimate evolution of arcade-like shooters, elegant in it's apparent 'pick up and play' simplicity and enthralling in it's inherent high skill-ceiling mastery. I scoped out a bit of the new ideas that DOOM Eternal played around with and found myself mildly interested, but that part of my gamer stomach was still truly satisfied with what I had- by the time I finally came around on Eternal it was 2023 on a whim as I was merely collecting titles that would show off the power of my new Current gen console. But be that as it may, this year has been my catching up to where DOOM currently rests. So how has it held up?

Firstly when I describe DOOM 2016 I call it an 'arcade shooter', and I want to describe why I evoke that label. Despite it's grit and gore, DOOM 2016 revolves not around crouching beneath waist high objects, pulling off pot-shots and clenching onto whatever slivers of health you can, but rushing the forces of your enemy, jumping and weaving around projectiles, and damaging and 'glory killing' enemies in visceral hand-to-hand finishers in order to replenish your health and keep the pace of the game going. It mimics the 'constant flow of action' approach that arcade machines would demand in order to keep the attention of a consumer that might have other options around them to draw their attention- that game boasted an experience that never let itself sag, provided everything you needed to push through every fight and demanded your constant attention to keep moving so you don't have an opportunity to cast your eye towards the next game cabinet being installed right next to this one. DOOM Eternal has not lost this heart at all, rather it's solidified and redefined what it means to be an arcade-style shooter in visual style as well as gameplay.

Visually, DOOM Eternal speaks a language much less gritty than it's direct predecessor and much more in line with the colourful floating icons and geographically unorthodox level layouts of yesteryear. 2016 had it's floating shields and green pick-ups strewn about it's levels too, but they were designed in such a manner as to blend into the dark hallways of the Mars Colony or the twisted membrane walls of Hell, they fit the colours and lighting, almost in shame of their video game-like reality. Eternal, on the otherhand, embraces these video-game pick-up items, rendering them in bright colours and luminescence to garishly stand out in any environment they're placed in. New floating platforms adorn these levels with light platforming puzzles, and they'll be covered with spinning fire wheels and procedurally firing turrets with absolutely no sensible narrative context for their existence beyond 'it's a game and this is a game thing'. In some ways DOOM Eternal feels like a whole other art team went to work on it.

Not least of all for the environments you travel through . Eternal pays a little lip service to the flickering lights and grimy industrial tech corners that 2016 loved so much, but for the most part you'll be dancing around sci-fantasy gleaming silvery towers set in fantastical alien mountaintops or bizarre scarlet forests. There's a distinct drift off into the whimsy of high science fantasy with the direction of Eternal that turns the game into something of a high budget sight-seeing trip in it's later levels rather a grim and foreboding broach into the deepest recesses of hell à la DOOM 2016. Id Software are absolute masters of visual design at this point so each location is a glittering beauty to behold, but whether or not you prefer this approach or the more thematically dire hints of the last game is going to be down to taste rather than objective quality. I felt the consequence of 2016 building in my heart more, but the grandeur of Eternal soundly surpasses it.

That shift in tone is not exclusive to the visual pick-ups either, DOOM boasted a plethora of killing implements with special alternate firing modes built for the sole purpose of ripping the various demons to shreds- every weapon could theoretically kill anything if you used it enough and situational preference ruled the roost. Of course, that would mean some weapons or power-ups for weapons would see preference over others, but gameplay variety is rarely a detriment to the gameplay cycle. Eternal, naturally, boasts a little more variety in it's guns and a lot more in it's ancillary tools, but the way the game approaches them is distinctly different. I've seem many in the community refer to this as a 'Chess combat' system or 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'. Basically, with the vast variety of Heavy Demons the game throws at you, the player will be specifically told which Demon is weak to which tool and expect you to juggle that knowledge throughout the game. Complex fights can resort to players dancing around the battlefield whilst switching to the correct counter weapon for the confronting demon, leading to a more direct 'answer/response' approach to encounters.

Of course there is still a some sense of freedom to combat encounters in the standard slate of Demons and how you take them down. 2016 introduced the vampire-like mechanic of whittling down an enemy and then Glory Killing them to burst health pick-ups out of them, and Eternal has expanded that into a whole cornucopia of abilities. Your shoulder mounted 'flame blech' flamethrower sets enemies ablaze causing them to drop armour when damaged and your slow recharge chainsaw allows you to quick-execute enemies but shoot out ammunition. There's also cluster grenades and freeze grenades, and certain abilities like the burning hook-shot of the Super Shotgun that allows you to pull yourself towards an enemy whilst setting them on fire with a double barrel surprise waiting for them giving a quick burst of armour. Essentially you have all the tools to pull yourself from the brink of disaster and back to full ammo and health if only you master all the synergies and buffs available to you- it's quite the menagerie of gameplay possibilities.

But it's also a lot. You might hear that quick run through of all the different gameplay options you have and wonder how you're supposed to juggle all that in every encounter, and the honest truth is that in the first two or three levels of the game it is honestly overwhelming. Remembering what buttons correspond to what ability, on top of where you need to flick on the weapon wheel to snap to an energy weapon against shields or a rocket launcher for the big heavies- it's stops feeding into that sense of intuitive flow of DOOM 2016 and begins to feel more like a tense management game. God knows I wasn't expecting to get 'Paper's Please' vibes from my DOOM game! It doesn't help that the game presents no natural solution for introducing these gameplay systems beyond feeding them to you one by and one and dumping a user manual text box everytime you get a new item. There's actually too many new tools for the game to leave you to learn them naturally.

There are a few universal design rules that speak to the player in the base game. Glowing blue shields are best killed by energy weapons and an enemy that glows green before their swing can be interrupted with a shotgun blast- but the game relies on Textboxes more and more as the number of enemy variations and weapon specialties balloons to an unreasonable size. Cacodemons are weak to the Ballista gun. Why? I dunno. Does the game translate this to you in any way intuitively? Not really. Certain Demons can have their mechanical weapons blown off their body with a precision shot, but not the mini-gun toting Tyrant Demon for some reason. For Mancubus enemies you are literally told to destroy their two artillery arms before closing in for the kill, but for the Cybermancubus those appendages are indestructible. There's just a breakdown in tutorial and visual language cohesion that turns combat into more of a memory game as it stretches out.

One of the issues that the team specifically strove to repair for this sequel was the way in which half-way through DOOM 2016 the game kind of runs out of new tricks to throw your way. There's new locales, enemy density ramps up, some bosses litter the final few levels- but there's nothing wholly fresh added to the battlefield. DOOM Eternal, on the otherhand, is constantly throwing new enemies at you every level or so- or new items that require new powerups or just more content that breaks that general gameplay rhythm you were settling into by shoving something new to consider. Personally I never found the 'lack of new tricks' for late game 2016 to be a bother, because that late game was really more about mastery of the challanges you had met and testing your playstyle on increasingly large groups of enemy mobs. DOOM Eternal makes you feel like you're constantly a novice throughout your entire first playthrough and refuses to let you off the hook and give you that space to start becoming a master- you have to wait for the DLC to start that journey.

One of the more controversial changes to the layout of each level has been the structure of how enemies are presented. Before they would largely be scattered around levels in various locations, sometimes ambushing the player when they least suspect it, sometimes blocking progression until you've wiped out a 'gore nest' arena battle. DOOM Eternal bases it's entire game around those arena-style battles and it presents them as ineloquently as possible. Whereas in 2016 you would at least be fed the fiction that 'Unsafe demonic corruption' levels were locking down certain parts of the facility, in Eternal you'll just find giant sod-off energy walls forcing you to jump around the battle arena taking out waves of enemies to progress.

In theory this isn't so much an issue; Gore Nests were some of the best snippets of gameplay in DOOM 2016- highlights of all the skills you had built surviving the level in tense dances driven by flowing instinct and punctuated with splashes of skilful violence. In Eternal it feels like every room is a gore nest, which drag on longer and longer as the game becomes more confidant in throwing enemies at you. By the final levels the arenas you clear are genuinely exhausting as wave after wave of enemies assault you at every turn, dragging out that narrative climax as long as humanely possible. When the DLC starts up these arenas become just frankly too long. I'm talking ten to twenty minute affairs to clear every room in decently large levels, all the while requiring more effort to juggle the games dozens of combat systems and expectations in a depreciating scale of benefit. By DLC 1 I was no longer really enjoying the feeling of clearing a room, but rather basking in the frustration that it took so long and weighing that against how long the game is going to keep me in the proceeding forced areas.

In fact, DOOM Eternal's DLC seems predicated on the ideal that 'challenge and fun are perfectly linked'. I'm a lover of challenging experiences, mind you, The FromSoft games are my catnip, my typical DOOM difficulty level is Nightmare- I understand how challenge can be exciting and rewarding: I just don't see that equation bore out to it's fullest in 'The Ancient Gods' DLC. These levels are sadistically long and packed with endless rooms filthy with enemy waves and deeply frustrating enemy buffing hazards and heavy demon combinations to the point where every fight is resplendent with constant weapon switching to meet every demon with it's exact weakness. It's a strong spine for gameplay pushed beyond it's threshold into a repetitive chore, like what you would expect from a mod developer who is so deeply religiously devoted to a single game they can't understand how other people might find a single hour long boss fight with the same core mechanic flooded with nothing interesting except for 'trash mob' spam tedious because they just love doing the same thing over and over and why wouldn't anyone else? (That may or may not be directed at the final boss of The Ancient Gods.)

One honest surprise I had going into DOOM Eternal was how seriously is actually took itself from a story standpoint, especially considering how 2016 seemed to spurn the face of unwelcome narrative exposition with gusto. You start Eternal with a giant flying space fortress you've gained out of nowhere, embarking on a war against hell priests you never knew existed until just now and fighting through the deluges of broken sci-fi medieval societies illustrated with vomits of operatic speech. At first I was so assaulted by the haphazardly flung narrative and lore content that I instinctively assumed this was another sly jab at overstuffed narratives from the development team, but as the game carried on and objectives weren't getting any simpler or more neatly explained I realised that "No, DOOM Eternal has just adopted one of the most overstuffed narratives a title like this could hope for."

Eternal wants you to actively engage with it's narrative but does not quite know how to present to you a world wherein the typically hands-off story of DOOM is suddenly a lot more tied to the core experience. Eternal just throws you into the middle of a vast invasion of earth, on what feels like chapter 10 of a 30 chapter novel, expecting you to make up the difference by reading the dozens of lore text pages scattered haphazardly around each level and constructed to drip-feed the setting, characters, factions and lore as though extracted from a wikia article. Seriously, the way DOOM presents it's narrative is by literally telling you everything in small chunks from level to level in giant walls of (optional) text that are full of just enough overly verbose 'in universe poetry talk' that by level five I was basically scanning them quickly for pertinent snippets and then jumping back to the actually important action.

You can just skip past them, but the narrative cutscenes you'll be subjected to across your adventure clearly lie very heavily on the belief you're going to study all the text to figure out who everyone is, why they're talking to each other like that and why that big weapon they just announced is significant and you should care about stopping it. It's as if Dark Souls presented it's narrative exactly the way it does, but then peppered cutscenes full of situational characters and events that reference the more esoteric material as though you've already been formally introduced to all of it. Even a basic introduction paragraph at the onset of Eternal explaining where the Fortress of DOOM came from would have worked to set players in the mindset they needed to be in more.

By the time you've reached the Ancient Gods DLC you might be quite surprised to discover how the big invasion plotline of the main game has been soundly trumped in scope by what appears to be the actual finale to the DOOM narrative, for seemingly good. Whereas most franchises build themselves up for a trilogy, it appears that Id honestly looked at what they did with DOOM Eternal and realised they threw absolutely every single errant idea the team ever had at the wall with this one and there was nowhere new to push the franchise further. It almost feels intrinsically abrupt for Eternal's DLC to suddenly introduce the universe's God and Devil and place you against them in a final climatic showdown- like if Wolfenstein: New Colossus just dropped a 'Let's kill Hitler!' DLC in lieu of the third conclusion game they're presumably mid brain storming.

Then again, I guess the promise of a climatic finale is the only thing pushing people through the utterly painful DLC missions that feel constructed by one of those people who min-max overpowered builds they use to steamroll endgame content in MMOs and then turns around and demands the game produces new content specially to challenge their build because that mathematically constructed uber class they no-lifed had an easy time with the content- all other players be damned. Ancient Gods has that level of almost experimental-feeling challenge, wherein you're on minute twenty five of a single combat encounter thinking 'did any real thought go into this encounter beyond: what's the biggest mob I can fit into this arena'? The amount of waves that end in Tyrant + 'Doom Hunter' would suggest otherwise.

Summary

DOOM Eternal is the culmination of all of Id Software's talents in bringing DOOM back from the dead and on a technical standpoint, both in ambition and achievement, the game rules supreme. It looks gorgeous, it plays brilliantly and there's more combat freedom than ever before. But in the actual meat of the meal, the composition of the canvass- so to speak, Eternal lacks that dignified elegance of it's simpler yet more focused predecessor. Eternal troubles itself so much trying to throw new gadgets in the players hands, new enemies demanding different approaches and a newly centrally imperative plot at you that somewhere along the line that intrinsic pleasure of being the whirlwind of beautiful carnage that is the DOOM Slayer becomes muddied. Not lost, at all. More tarnished and rough, resulting in an ambitious sequel that seems to have piled on too many plates and feels a little clumsy and less masterful than it's father. The DLC, on the otherhand, is just a messy challenge gauntlet of endless ramping difficult lacking a satisfying finale. I enjoyed 'The Ancient Gods' to the degree that I'm glad I beat it, but I would never bring myself to play it again on future Eternal playthroughs. There was achievement in the DLC, but little genuine fun. Overall I guess that leaves me giving DOOM Eternal a respectable B + grade on my arbitrary review scale, which would have been closer to an A- before I played that DLC, which admittedly left a soul taste in my mouth. Still, I absolutely recommend the game for being a prime First Person Shooter with a great flow that many other games could learn from, and a cautionary tale about why sometimes just a little less can mean so much more.

Thursday 20 July 2023

Fans versus creators

Who wins?

In the field of creative arts the question of who's desires trumps who's is closer to a philosophical conundrum than your typically laid-out 'tug of war'. By some people's reckoning the very soul of art is designed to speak to the audience, whether to challenge who they are or simply to entertain them, making the artist a slave to the masses. Others argue that the only master of a work of art is are the hands that make them, and by catering to the whims and wants of the masses you threaten to denigrate the integrity and passion of the work. That dream began with the creator, but should it be moulded in that image or left like putty in the hands of it's audience? I suspect there's no whole sale answer to such a conundrum, nuance and context have their parts to play- still, it's worth keeping in mind when we expand the topic to include game design.

Games are products of Entertainment first and foremost, which means it is the sort of medium where one would be most expected to cater to the wants of a fickle audience- even in the times when that audience isn't exactly forthcoming about what it is they exactly want. 'You can't please everybody', as the saying goes, and with the endless genres, fandoms, niches and cult like forums it really can feel like being pulled from all sides to land somewhere in the good graces of most everybody. Games are beholden also to budget constraints which tie into strict deadlines and man power shortages and all of the plethora of issues that come between want we want to make and what we have to make. Most of the time I think it's outside factors that lead to 'creative solutions' and outcomes that don't exactly align with public interest.

A common refrain that we tend to hear, even if it's not exactly a proudly shared one, is the 'you don't know what you want' excuse. Basically it's the assumption that as creators of games, with greater personal investment and knowledge in the intricacies that go towards game creation, the makers are better poised to make decisions for the good of the player than the player are. They don't have enough information or experience to understand when decisions that feel bad are actually in their favour and when short burst of euphoria right now might sully the experience down the road. And there's some sound logic there; a barrier of jargon and development knowledge does bar the average gamer from diagnosing everything they love or would want to change about the experiences they enjoy, part of the magic is never really knowing how the sausage is cooked and just enjoying the taste- however it's not that cut-and-dry.

At the end of the day it really is the consumer who is experiencing the product in that most direct of fashions- totally blind from the outset. (Ideally) If a player tells you straight up that your game isn't fun, they don't really need to know the intricacies of game design to denote the experiencing you're trying to conduct isn't hitting the notes it should be. The intrinsic nature of quality and trash changes from person to person but it's integral to the ever-assessing human mind. Often times a player doesn't know what they want, but they know what they want to feel like- and that ephemeral value is somewhat more valuable than knowing the ins and outs of every coding language and asset databank- Every player knows what the end product should elicit out of them- that intrinsic feedback is just as valuable as step-by-step instructions if you know how to work with it.

The biggest RPG of all time appears to be on our doorstep with Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 and to the chagrin of some it was a game made lockstep with three years of customer feedback thanks to the extended early-access period. As the team were busy forming the entire sprawling game around it, fans had their chances to critique every aspect of gameplay in their slice of just the first act, dissect the problems, laud the successes and let the team know what they obsessed over and what they spent little time with. Larian took the desires of the fans very seriously to the point where we now know certain directions of development were entirely shifted in order to feed into what fans were calling for. For example, the changes to the game's 'reaction' system, to be far more detailed than what Divinity Original Sin 1 or 2 boasted, was driven and dictated by fan dissatisfaction with what was there, and we've recently heard even more on this topic.

As it turns out, one of the confined companions that we're going to recruit in the first act of the game is the Druid Halsin who has a small but memorable presence in the early access. Pretty much from the word go fans latched onto the idea of the Druid being more than just a side-character from the way he offers to guide the narrative for players who pass him, emigrating to the team's camp and reminding them what way to guide their investigations. 'Oh, he's definitely a companion' people would say, 'A morally unimpeachable foil to the otherwise dubious core cast we've thus far been introduced to, calling back halcyon memories of Baldur's Gate's glory days with diverse casts of various moral spectrums.' And as it turns out fans were right! Albeit in a 'self fulfilling prophecy' kind of way. Halsin's voice actor recently confirmed on Twitter how the original plan was very much to keep the Druid as merely a guiding NPC until Larian caught wind of how the fans reacted to him, leading to a drastic change in direction to rewrite a chunk of the game to include a fully fledged (albeit non-origin) companion out of the man, complete with a whole Romance quest path and everything! Fan satisfaction clearly guides the hand of Larian just as much as anything else.

Modern Blizzard, on the otherhand, seems driven by their own configuration of their direction even if it runs directly contrary to what it's gamer's demand. Of course, I'm talking about Overwatch which recently revealed a vast deviation in it's stated and lauded direction of making Overwatch 2 a high quality Single Player narrative game alongside a highly competitive online shooter- appealing to fans who have wanted a more comprehensive way into the colourful and promising world that it feels like the franchise has danced around the outskirts of ever since it was first announced approximately two millennia ago. That fit with the direction that Overwatch's developers had at the time, until they recently decided the health of the game precluded the more traditional single-player narrative they once promised and instead demanded a rededication towards the online elements that fans had started to fall out of love with. This actually went so far as to lead to a confrontation where the demands of community and the belief of the developers clashed in a cancellation of the Single Player content which became so massive of a story it still colours the franchise as an enemy to the consuming public. As with Baldur's Gate 3, only time will tell if cutting their own path will end up being a testament to the game or a detriment to it's success.

As with all fruitful topics of discussions there is a wealth of reasons pulling in all directions why one style of development might be more fruitful than another, and even though topics such as 'pride' and 'self belief' might enter the equation, at the end of the day it's always in the hands of the creative team where they want to divest their efforts. Maybe that leads to the mire of trying to please everyone with a project so unfocused it ends up pleasing nobody, like Anthem, and sometimes projects that shut-out the feedback of the world to come out with something utterly unexpected and wild that proves to be everything that gamers didn't know they needed, like 'Tears of the Kingdom' has proven to be. At the end of it all no-one remembers the conflicts, the arguments, who shouted loudest and why- when all that remains is the finished and finalised game in all it's glory or ignominy: all else is transient when that final moment lands.

Wednesday 19 July 2023

The Spiderverse

It's a canon event.

After putting it off for way too long I finally made the effort to go out and see the both of the 'Spider Verse' movies that have painted the animated version of the on-going Spiderman renaissance that so far remains the only aspect of modern Superhero content that hasn't fallen the way of 'stale'. (Okay, I hear good things about Guardian's of the Galaxy 3, but for the sake of this arguement let's pretend that Spiderverse and the 'Home' series are lone islands of 'quality' amidst a sea of inequity.) And in that light one might wonder why I put it off for so long... and I don't know. Haven't a clue. Guess I'm just stupid like that. Because much as how I've heard from everyone and been affirmed time and time again- Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse and Across the Spiderverse are two of the greatest works of collaborative visual art ever put to film.

As the case is with a lot of people out there, Spiderman was really the first 'superhero' I had any form of knowledge of. It seems that DC fans are either introduced to Superman first (although that's something of an older generation origin hero) or Batman (through sheer abundance of content related to the dark crusader) whereas Marvel-heads seems to almost always start with Spiderman. And why not? He's homely. Terrestrial, young, ambitious- all the things that the world expects out of you in your youth, on a silver platter in the early years, and in chain-linked silver cuffs for those latter years. So much about Spiderman's life and person is about hope and perseverance in the face of a very human darkness, the kind of personal darkness that doesn't always seem from the robes of ancient evil or invading monsters, but sometimes from everyday life and human interaction. Whereas other heroes tended to yield their limiting humanity as a gimmick, flaunting loud and tacky character flaws as one-note facets of their entire building, Peter Parker has always felt more rounded than that, more dimensional, as a kid or a man just trying to navigate who he needs to be with who he wants to be.

As you can likely imagine, I've become something of a stickler for Spiderman and the way he's portrayed in media, which might have attributed somewhat to my reticence in recent years to engage with anything that might shatter that human image I have of the Spider Mythos in my heart. Just look at my recent review of 'Spiderman PC', one of my reoccurring points of praise was for the characterisation of Peter Parker and how they didn't lose the human in the hero. Coming to Spiderverse I knew this was going to be a story about Miles Morales and though the brain in me knew better than to think that of all places would be a time to let the heart of the hero drop, I guess my brain isn't always making the decisions, now is it? But enough pre-amble; the point is that I few days ago I sat down and watched 'Into the Spiderverse' and quickly followed that up by rushing out to the cinema to watch the only movie that made money this year: 'Across the Spiderverse'. (I jest. The new Insidious movie probably took 20 bucks and a pack of smokes to make: I assume that will break even too.)

Of course the first thing that anyone talks about when it comes to Spiderverse is the visual diversity; a collage of different animation styles, more than it's possible to count, with so many on-screen techniques and quirks all joining in tandem it boggles the mind to even try and recount them. With both movies it affronts me just how visually unsafe the whole thing is, switching fluidly from style to style to blended style to visual storytelling methods. Computer animation with bubble-gum pop-art with hand-drawn 2D with cell-shaded bursts, emotional colour seeped universes and varying frame-rates of characters to convey their quality of movement. It's like a tapestry made of a thousand pulling threads of different material, hewn from different animal hairs, all threatening to rub together poorly and ruin the texture of the finished piece but somehow, increadibly, brought together with such mastery as to compliment one another and create something better than the sum of it's parts. Spiderverse would have made a spectacular static art piece; but these lunatics made it a full fledged movie instead.

Animation in movies have been in something of a path towards homogenisation ever since the 3D era of Disney fell upon us. When computer generation started to get good enough to render entire films and Disney established itself as a shining example of the highest echelon of CG, it seems every other quality animation studio has been edging to make their products look more and more indistinguishable from the Disney style. Dreamworks, WB, Universal and Sony Pictures at some points, all wanted their movies to mimic the Disney big eyes, round faces, rich colours- I'd argue that Blue Sky Animation would be the only outliers purely for the fact that their movies looked hideous. That was, until Spiderverse reminded everyone just how diverse animation can be.

That pursuit of close-to-life-but-animated really rubbed against the heart of what visual entertainment can achieve once you shake off those traditional chains, and no one was really taking advantage of the freedom of animation on a big budget scale anymore. Spiderverse reminded us of experimental visual art theory, indirect methods of narrative progression and the unreserved excitement of imperfect genre-blending fusion. It actually reminds me of some of the more unique and memorable styles of Anime out there, which will mix and match concepts to create more of a unique visual identity. Heck, I'm even pretty sure that Across the Spiderverse borrowed a bit from Jojo's style for Gwen's Universe in the use of abstract shape backgrounds during important foreground-focus events. I love those techniques that make you look at the whole canvas and just go wow.

And, of course, the actual movement of the choreography is simply insane. Dealing with various Spidermen it was obvious the movie was going to have to convey agility, but the amount of different ways that the team figured out how to express that agility is just mind boggling. There's Gwen and the way she spins through the air like a top at the apex of her swings, sometimes not even bending her legs from one arc to the other- the strange spinning top yo-yo powers of Pavtir Spiderman that seems to pull him as much as he sends it- every Spiderman has a unique way of moving, and webbing and swinging- Miles hasn't even got his glide suit wings in this iteration and he still manages to stand out simply due to the intent of the storyboarding. Across The Spiderverse in particular really does an extra fantastic job in the cohesion of heavy action scenes too, where I longer found myself getting lost in big expressive action sequences with how they visualised and spaced every location intuitively.

I don't go to the Cinema often and when I do I'm very careful about the films that I watch so that I don't come away disappointed. Most times, I'll only commit to the cinema experience if I think the product is something worthy of nothing less than the full cinematic treatment. The Spiderverse movies have proven themselves to be pure cinematic excellence in their every step and I stand in genuine wonderment trying to figure out how the artists are even going to attempt to top themselves for the next outing. There's so much more that I'm just not clever enough to talk about, such as the clever hidden nodes and musical theory hidden in the soundtrack and various themes, the effect of 2099's stabbing riff almost being akin the the spine-tingling effect of the Wolf's Whistle from The Last Wish. I'm a freshly born Spiderverse fanatic, now newly in love with a brand that has been close to me ever since I was a kid. Of course, now I have to wait six years for the next one... bugger.

Tuesday 18 July 2023

Microsoft's fight is over

The FTC has been beaten

In a turn of events that I think might have honestly been a shock to quite a number of people out there, the FTC lost their court case to validate the blocking of Microsoft's 70-odd billion purchase of Activision, giving the go ahead for what I think might be the biggest tech acquisition in history. Which means, of course, that Bobby can now afford to pay off the next round of lawsuits coming his way for whatever new skeletons are waiting to tumble out of that man's closet. Oh, and that by the time you read this it's very likely that Activision is the newest member of the extended Xbox family and Sony can pat themselves on the back for successful wasting nearly a year of progress that Microsoft could have embarked on with their new beau's. All in all I call this a wholly successful operation for everyone who isn't a regulation body.

In their attempt to try and prove that Microsoft were shooting for some sort of crippling monopoly that would twist the hands of consumers until they were all forced to buy an Xbox, instead FTC uncovered mountains of evidence to suggest the opposite- with a partnership in the works we'd be seeing these games on even more platforms. Heck, one leak even revealed that Call of Duty will be making it's grand return to Nintendo consoles following the wrap-up of this deal, which should fill any veterans of DS Black Ops with a piquant dreadful terror. Activision aren't going to be making any of it's existing franchises private and though the question of cloud gaming was also a raised issue, it seems this first accusation was what the judge of this case leaned heavily on to dismiss the charge.

Of course, this means that now the only governing body with the power to threaten this deal is ours, and I don't think the UK has quite as much pull as the FTC does. That being said, Microsoft managed to come to a mildly amicable middle ground whilst they try to speed along proceedings before the deal's mandatory closing date- so the small ants of a body that makes up our regulatory team can pretend they've won a small victory when Microsoft agree to ship them a Rhode Island hotdog every month or whatever equally as pointless boon our boys will attempt to squeeze out the stone. At this point the only thing that could stop the deal is Microsoft themselves getting cold feet before the altar and bailing which- my god it would actually be really funny if that happened, I kind of want it to now!

Now this means that Microsoft can finally get their hands on the one asset of the gaming market they've never been able to nail down, the one chunk of solid shining money-printing gold they were desperate to spend over 50 billion to ascertain. No, not Call of Duty- Microsoft wanted their hands on that unlimited money glitch called 'already profitable mobile games'. You can bet that mobile market was what the big M was gunning for all this time- how else do they expect to make a profit on a deal this big? I wouldn't be surprised if the next Microsoft direct is filthy with god-awful new mobile adaptations of Activision franchises. Although I will absolutely give them an ironic cheer if World of Warcraft Mobile becomes a thing. I cannot understand why it hasn't already, it seems like an absolute no brainer way to reinvigorate the game's fanbase.

Sony are ostensibly the 'losers' of this little bout, having kicked up a stink about 'anti-competitive' behaviour and showing themselves as petulant hypocrites in the process, whilst uncovering through leaked documents that Microsoft could, should they have a change in heart and morals, utterly eviscerate Sony and buy them out the market. Now it's good for everyone that Microsoft has some handle on their darker selves, but that is quite the axe to suddenly realise was dangling over your neck this whole time. I mean sure, we all knew that Xbox's paymasters were ten times bigger than Playstation's; but I think we all just assumed that Xbox weren't allowed in daddy Microsoft's pocket. Turns out they are, and that's a scary thought for the entire industry come the day that conscientious leaders like Phil Spencer are no longer around to keep the brand somewhat honest.

Of course, Nintendo have skirted all around this entire back and forth despite the very real fact that Nintendo have been peddling their oppressive pricing systems and insular game markets for time immemorial. Brands bigger than COD, such as Pokémon, live only on Nintendo hardware and no one is bothering to kick up any fuss about that! Of course, Nintendo aren't also trying to get into the Game Streaming market, but I'd bet they'd love to give it a shot if they could only figure out how to install their network cables. (I assume that's the reason why Nintendo's severs run like they're constantly on fire) Still, Nintendo gets to be a beneficiary in all this without having to lift a finger as another member of the 'impoverished' who are granted the table scraps that Playstation have been desperate to keep to themselves.

I imagine for many aspiring politicians out there, sticking it to a company as big as Microsoft would have been something of a 'white whale' moment for them, which could be why this whole back and forth dragged on for so long. I mean why else would the good of the games industry suddenly matter when Microsoft are the one's in the hotseat, and yet not worth so much as a second glance when relative nobodies like Electronic Arts were busy peddling money sucking psychologically primed lootboxes at children with nothing but a stern talking to from Parliament. They literally brought ad space in a children's comic book for Fifa Lootboxes, and then tried to turn around and pretend it was an accidental miscommunication. You know, because everyone out there has accidentally brought freakin' adspace, designed a campaign and then run with that before realising they were only out for milk that morning- what an innocent mistake!

Still, as much as the slowly rising monopolistic gaming entity known as Microsoft gives me pause, I'm glad that the big M is building itself up as more of a competitor in the bout against Sony, because right now having the most powerful console on the market isn't really much of a boast when there's nothing unique taking advantage of all those loss-leading components. If an Activision partnership can bring us one step closer to that world, then I'll begrudgingly support it. Or at least I won't cry foul when Sony are burned in a deal that is no different then something they would ravenously pursue if situations were reversed. Not that Sony are even getting burned, Microsoft have been worlds more accommodating than their competitors would be with that kind of power. Maybe that less-than-obvious approach is what's making Sony so damned anxious.

Monday 17 July 2023

Why there's no future for NFTs in games

Bury those bitcoins

Recently news dropped of a major game publisher we all know and have some varying strong emotion towards, Sega- the Sonic guys- and their thoughts on what is largely a dead and buried topic now: NFTs. Well, actually the topic was blockchain games specifically but it was the allure of constant revenue generating computer generated tokens that put NFTs in the radar of gaming and led the avaricious towards blockchain integration. We've seen Ubisoft fall for that promise, former-Lionhead director Peter Molyneux abandon his vague morals to writhe in it's filth and even Square Enix seems primed to head down into that swamp judging from how they've positioned themselves with their NFT game coming out. But then there's Sega throwing down the gauntlet and saying 'No, we won't do that. Because it sounds boring.'

And to be absolutely fair that is a perfectly valid reason to not pursue NFT and Blockchain integration because they're right- every single conceptualisation for how Blockchain integration could influence gaming has resulted in play experiences that sound indistinguishable from jobs. It's always games about resource collection and managing market places and dedicating hours to grinding every single day in the pursuit of some vague payout- not to actually achieve anything, progress a story, enjoy yourself- but to generate a revenue. And, of course, the game creator's get to seep some of that revenue for themselves because of transaction fees, platform fees, asset rental fees, and whatever other bull they can conjure up to justify leeching from the players. It sounds good in the addled minds of marketing executives but for anyone who has actually played, developed or considered the basic aspects of what makes interactive media enjoyable... well, we see things a little differently.

But doesn't that headline ring a little strange with you? 'Giant video game corporation totally refuses money making decision because it doesn't think users will enjoy it?' As though that's a deciding factor that typically buzzes around the head of executives when it comes to making decisions? Because I feel like most of us have reached a point wherein we're certain the only thoughts that such executives have is "How can I squeeze more of a profit out of fans." I mean, isn't it literally the fiduciary duty of a CEO to generate profit in whatever way they can? I think that by digging just a little bit deeper we can actually find a more sound reason as to why NFTs and Blockchain make for poor bedmates with games and it's actually because the two have no future together. Lootcrates? Battle passes? Sweet nectar to the tongues of executives. NFTs? Blockchain? Deadly Nightshade droplets, sour and lethal in high doses.

The entire premise of the 'Blockchain future' is based around the proposition that people would be willing to invest to own pieces of the game that they like under the belief that they will generate revenue by playing around in that game. This belief, however, is undercut by core logical fallacies that generate utterly incompatible profitability margins with what reality dictates is possible. NFT marketplaces simply wish to fill the place of existing marketplaces you can already find for a few games, but the revenue and profit they generate is deeply dependent on the popularity of the game and willingness of it's audience to engage. Counter Strike is one of the most popular games in the world, even today, and it's knife skins are part of an economy entirely separate of the main game itself enabled through grey markets and third parties. Would such parties be privy to having the game makers cut into such operations and taking their own 'developers' cut? The culture of gaming is deeply resistant to developer over-interference, that alone is a battleground of ideology just waiting to be sparked.

NFTs are a failing market, collapsing like a dwarf star at the end of it's final sputter, once valuable icons are shrivelling up to tenths of their original buying price and no one is buying because anyone with a brain is trying to sell right now. In fact, there's decent evidence to believe there was no genuine value in this market to begin with and any illusion to such was purely due to wash trading within the community- which makes a lot of sense when you consider the sort of people constantly going on about these pointlessly wastes of commodities were the one's who saw the financial value of one-day flipping them. If there's no intrinsic value and the extrinsic value is strictly insular, where would the multmillion dollar valuations have spawned from? Of course, what most sane people realised in a matter of minutes took the rest of the industrial world several years to cotton onto.

Yet there's one big smoking-gun reason why the NFT future is totally dead in the water before it even started, you ready for this? Because no one knows what the bloody things are! That is, outside of those dedicated money hungry wash traders we just talked about, desperately buying up their own product in a sad attempt to catch a bigger, richer fish with their bait. The amount of effort it takes to actually own one, creating a wallet with the right crypto platform, walking through the complex set-up process, trusting your bank to not cancel that shady as heck transaction- it's all beyond the headspace of your average silly punter. Which is precisely the problem when that same clueless punter is meant to be the target victi- I mean audience.

Take a look at the most profitable venue of gaming as it currently exists today, mobile gaming; why is that so popular? Is it the quality and replay value of the games? Not in the slightest. It's because they're easily accessible to even the most brain-addled rube out there. Simply download the app and run through the brightly coloured game as it plays through levels for you- as simple as gaming can get. And it scores a lot of revenue. Even a dedicated RPG maker like Bethesda will boast how their most successful game is technically Fallout Shelter, for how little it takes to maintain (and probably to develop in the first place) for the insane level of revenue it generates. (You'd think that'd be enough to earn an update or two but no...) You want money, you go for the easier access points, not the more complicated.

Grifts that are only accessible to the tech-savvy investor type still holds some potential of scoring the kind of victim one can sleep pretty soundly at night after stealing from, but it's nowhere near the grounds to launch a new platform worthy of scams. Even SEGA, who were once very excitable about the idea, have seen through the smoke and mirrors to a trend destined to die long before it makes anyone a genuine profit. Clap all you want for the developer that stood up and said what we're all thinking, but deep down there's not a single one of us who doesn't know this is yet another cold-hard business decision made by those who just want to see the gaming world as one of the coin bricks from Super Mario World. Their objectives may align with us today, but our goals will always be in other castles... I mixed up my Nintendo metaphors with Sega again, didn't I? (Dammit!)

Sunday 16 July 2023

Borderlands and the amazing vanishing movie!

Randy's magician talents are truly improving!

Games need to end

The unspoken rule.

How is No Man's Sky in 2023?

Jumping the comet

Is there ever a game that had a rough go of things quite as badly as No Man's Sky did? Essentially an indie-level project of unimaginable ambition and scope compared to what Hello Games were working with before, by anyone's reckoning as a game developer the minds behind NMS were insane, if driven by a fire rare within the industry. But alas it was that very fire which ended up heating the very waters they were placed within, because by drawing the attention of Sony, catching the eyes and hearts of the public and placing their happy-faced game director in front of interviews; they opened up their own can of worms. No Man's Sky was a game that wanted to mystify the art of ceaseless adventure for adventure's sake, but in making that they also wanted to be a survival game, with base building and online multiplayer and derelict ships and combat, you've got to have combat, and all these systems that weighed down the final product.

The No Man's Sky which released on it's chosen day was not an awful product by any stretch of the imagination, it was still ambitious and incredible beyond natural belief; but it wasn't what it sold itself as and couldn't nail the many other talents it tried it's hand at. Kind of like with Cyberpunk 2077. The Survival elements felt tedious, (Although I'd argue that Survival elements in games always do and I defy you to name a well balanced survival system in a game built to primarily offer such an experience.) the universal simulation felt hollow and bare bones, the world lacked the variety and lushness promised, online multiplayer was a bit of a bold faced lie and the combat was largely terrible. The ship-to-ship dogfighting was serviceable, but on the ground action? Just lay me down and kill me, god forbid.

In the many years since No Man's Sky become the sole devotion of Hello Games to try and create the product they always wanted to game to be, and in the eyes of the public it has completed a rehabilitation tour and come out clean on the other side. But such is the opinion of those that don't really play the game, but stop in during significant content release windows to dip their toes in the water, taste the temperature, then leave to talk about it. I, on the otherhand, have something of a thing for boundless and pointless Space Sim games. For a year or so Elite Dangerous deep space trucking was my daily night-time routine. (I may bring that back; that was so relaxing.) I played No Man's Sky; with a capital P. Not as religiously as it's devoted fanbase who never leave the game behind for more than a week, but enough to know what I'm talking about when I critique it's improvements with the base product.

I can see the changes and improvements, but also the expansions and reconfigurations; as I observe a game slowly edging its way of modern Minecraft; with systems piled atop systems of varying complex degrees that start to grate on the intuitive beauty of the base product. Yes, I think there's a sense of beauty to base No Man's Sky. It's simplicity, it's doggedness, that singular philosophical stance the game will beat you over the head with using so many unendingly abstract microcosms laced with faux intellectualism that you'll actually start doubting the rather obvious narrative deductions you'll have reached within the first five minutes. For clarities sake let me tell you what the game pains to not to: Yes, the game's universe is a simulation- no sense interpreting five years of spoon-fed sci-fi techno-jargon just to reach that limp summation.

Let me start by saying that after all this time, with all it's updates, some of which is specifically geared to address this singular aspect: No Man's Sky's combat still blow chunks. It's awful. A sad game of recoil-free attacks lacking weight on impact on the same small group of enemies that don't know how to do anything other than charge and fire/slash. The first person camera is just fiddly enough to make enemy tracking a pain, any hint of damage types or weakpoints is so minimal it might as well not even exist, and at this point I'm seriously wandering if the game would be better served without combat altogether. All it exists to do is to give threat to the annoying guardian's who relentlessly dogpile on anyone who picks up the wrong valuable resource. Enemies come again and again, kill them and more enemies spawn in response to you causing trouble, run from them and hope you have a spare half an hour because that's how long it'll take aggro to wear off, go to space and the bloody space guardians take over- it's just a sucky experience.

The base building has come a long way though, with guests that you can build facilities for and a whole power generator balance system they threw in a few years back to totally break every existing base in the same moment. (I've literally never returned back to my first base. The work it would take to get it running would be horrendous.) But as with everything that NMS covets, there's this aura of enigmatic distant navel gazing that prohibits any genuine connection these snippets of comradery might provide. You get a crew, but their personality is so muted and wrapped in layers of obtuse half-answers to half-questions; and the rewards for actually engaging with them isn't really all that worth it either. I much prefer the Flagship system.

The giant Flagships have been fleshed out here and there and how they exist today is probably the best iteration we're likely to receive. Space fortresses carrying our fleet of personal star ships, with enough room to house all the crafting stations you could want, and a little space for building if you want to go decorating crazy too. Unfortunately it's really the resource collecting heart of the game which befouls even this for me. Having to keep the ship refuelled and ensuring the fleet are fuelled and keeping them repaired and managing the missions you send them on- it's all a micromanagement hell in a game that runs best as a experience piece adventure title you turn your brain off for. When I have to keep collecting just so I can keep exploring, it starts to feel a little like a chore to engage with. I fear that update after update as No Man's Sky broadens it's activities without refining it's scope, the basic heart of what the artists wanted to initially evoke is going to fade more and more into nothingness.

People will tell you have No Man's Sky is currently the finished product the game should have release as, I think it's more rough than it ever was for sheer lack of artistic cohesion the game seems to afflict itself with. Every few months the game offers 'expeditions' which essentially serves as 'Seasons' would for a Diablo game. A fresh start with a unique narrative experience and some goodies you can take back to the rest of your saves. Honestly this is really the way to play the game and preserve it's original heart, because when you retreat back to the full free game that NMS is ostensibly built around, the weight of the piling systems crush all the fun of consequence free journeying from your heart. Perhaps that's just the inevitable end result of all games that make it big, simplicity spurned in favour of ceaseless stuff lacking that passion which made the original shine to start with. I wish I could love No Man's Sky, how it started and where it is; but I don't even recognise the game I sit down to play anymore, aside from in it's lingering flaws. Guess my relaxing space game is going to have to continue to be Elite Dangerous until September rolls around.

Thursday 13 July 2023

Avowed might have lost me

I see it in my dreams everynight

In the many years it has been since the hey day of Bethesda and the release of Skyrim, it's been like sitting on a bed of needles waiting for the next aspirant to seize the throne of western action RPG king. Sure, we get all of those ceaseless faux-RPGs that stitch together a sad levelling chart and call that 'Role Playing Mechanics' (Looking at you; Assassin's Creed) but no one really has what it takes to match up with Bethesda, which I guess tracks given how simply huge Bethesda is. Of course, some of us remember the majesty of Fallout New Vegas, a game which took the engine Bethesda built for 3 and reshaped it into a compelling world with rich factions and fertile conflicts- and that's what put Obsidian at the top of our list for the next Bethesda competitor. The Outer Worlds felt like their warm-up to one day making a proper open world RPG and the reveal of Avowed sold the world on the fact that this was it- the blow-out Obsidian game we've all been waiting for!

And it isn't. A full blown open RPG, that is. Avowed is an adaptation of the Pillars of the Eternity world and systems to an RPG more in the vein of The Outer Worlds; and to be honest that kind of sucks the excitement I had built for this game right out of the window. And I know- it's my fault for getting so worked up, but what do you expect? The pedigree of Obsidian is well know, they've been getting more and more ambitious with their games, Avowed was announced with a grand sweeping cinematic of a trailer that purposefully employed sweeping land-covering shots as though to imply our play space would be grand and open... but it seems that was all a red herring. Avowed is constrained, act based, focused with choice and consequence- nothing bad at all, to be clear- just oddly safe for a company that seems keen on pushing itself in so many aspects.

That is to say, we know they can make games like this! The Outer Worlds is already out and we know The Outer Worlds 2 is in the pipeline; so what new facet of creation will Avowed push? We've seen Obsidian cover long dead RPG subgenres and bring them back into vogue, get experimental with smaller internal projects that both saw some commercial success and pushed one simplified CRPG which to this day I argue is criminally underrated. (Justice for 'Tyranny!') Avowed kind of reminds me of Bioware or Telltale games when they were entering their 'rut' phase. It's an instance of- "Oh, it's another *insert studio here* style game. I pretty much know exactly what experience I'm going to get here, so I'll base my expectations accordingly." And no, I'm not ever going to compare such a phase with whatever terminal malaise that Ubisoft is going through right now- these studios still have some creative spirit left.

Out of everything we've heard since the gameplay trailer, none of it excites me or sells the idea that this is Obsidian's biggest project yet- if that's even an idea they want to sell to begin with. We know that the narrative isn't going to focus around a Watcher, but we're still going to be following some sort of soul-themed malady that has afflicted the living lands. Maybe it's my misgivings tainting my perception, but instinctually I hear that and roll my eyes. "Another soul-based plotline? Does anything not soul-themed ever threaten this damned world?" It's like how 'Bad Daedra' is the cause of most Elder Scrolls evils past Morrowind, or how the bad guy in every 'original' LOTR adaptation is always some incarnation of Sauron- it's taking a wide and open fictional world and limiting it down to the same few reoccurring plotthreads.

We will have companions on our journey but, curiously, they won't be optional members of our journey but mandatory appends to the adventure. In their defence Obsidian have claimed that this allows these characters to be central to the narrative, but lacking any comparative for companions so essential they can't be optional it's hard to know how to take these. Do they mean this is like Dragon Age: Inquisition wherein each companion was significantly tied to a major world faction? Or maybe like Mass Effect 2 in which the entire first act was dedicated to finding and recruiting specialists for some sort of job? Because neither of those two options preclude going solo whatsoever, although I will acknowledge that later Bioware games really did nail how to have companion interactions reinforce the idea of a familial unit. But then again, Tyranny wasn't so bad at that either and companions were still optional in that game. Strange news, I'm still processing.

But the most troubling news we've heard on the game so far comes down to the class system. Much ado was made about an action adventure based off the surprisingly in-depth character building of Pillars, but it seems that is going to serve as merely a base template for Avowed's 'flexible class' system. Yes, it's another one of those games where you build a class by picking as you go, slightly betraying the cohesion of the world space. Spell casters no longer require a lifetime of study, you can pull that off with a mild fancy to magical talent. I know several DnD adaptations over the years have played it fast and loose with classes and level building, but I really did kind of hope a property looked over by a single caretaker would have a stauncher backbone for keeping it's world sensible.

It's not that a flexible class system can't work, it's that the replay value of these fundamentally different styles of playing defined classes always feels more significant than deciding half-way through a game that you're sick of a wand and starting to beat people around the head instead. Typically this manifests as underbaked class architypes that aren't quite all-around satisfying to mainline, necessitating players to become a sort of 'jack of all trades' and for every 'build' to essentially end up roughly the same. Just like how every Fallout or Elder Scrolls character ends up with the same rough stats at some point. Cyberpunk did prove me wrong with it's more constrained approach to this ideal, but that game has some of the best action RPG combat ever made, I struggle to see a world where Avowed matches that.

I don't want to be pessimistic about Avowed, I really wanted to love this game: but it isn't what I was looking for out of a studio I expected the world from. Now to be fair, I thought the same thing about Starfield and have recently performed a full 180 on my feelings there- but I just don't think Avowed is as ambitious in the areas I wanted Obsidian to push in. I suppose it's my own fault, expecting Obsidian to expand into becoming a AAA studio out of nowhere when at this point I'm starting to see that's not only not where they're at, that's not even what the studio wants. I expected them to pick up after an infirm Bethesda flounders or bloats itself too large, but Obsidian have their hearts elsewhere, which is probably why they're reticent to take on a Fallout project. Avowed will probably still be a solid game, just like The Outer Worlds was: I just hope it leaves more of an impact on me than that game did.

Wednesday 12 July 2023

I can't finish Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. (Semi-review)

Knowing when you're beaten

My process for writing reviews on games is typical all consuming. I like to sit down and voraciously rip my way through a gameplay experience as exhaustively as possible. Typically you'll find me in the trenches, playing every game until it's final moment, taking notes about every step of the way to accurate convey it's entire package. That's typically the respect I impart upon games because they are collaborative works of art that deserve to be consumed as a whole product, rather than in parts. I eat up the story, learn what makes the characters kick, feel how the gameplay lays itself out and how far it spreads across the length of the game, and convey my own knowledge having experienced the world of games for as long as I have. But judging from the title of this blog alone you can probably tell that is a streak I am about to break, and I have some prime cut excuses to explain myself.

Let me start by talking about Ghost Recon: Wildlands. I started playing Wildlands a few years after it launched and subsequently faded from history as just another open world Ubisoft game with nothing revolutionary under it's name, and so my expectations were for a simple time-waster bargain bin experience. What I actually ended up playing surprised me with it's quality. Revolutionary? No. But solid and repayable: Yes! It was a vast open world built around tiny simply designed stealth-focused gameplay snippets splayed over the wide land of Bolivia. Sure, the world was more impressive for it's scale than the usual ascendant beauty of a Ubisoft product, and the gameplay was so easy that 'stealth' was pretty much always a choice rather than a requirement- but the game was easy to pick and get lost in, the story was simple and formulaic so you could follow along without really getting invested, (the game wasn't in-depth enough to get invested anyway) and it's fun was just intuitive to a fault.

Over my time playing Ghost Recon Wildlands, covering my two playthroughs, DLC, Online meddling and half of a third 'hardcore' playthrough I was trying out before I got bored- I sank a total of 18 Days, 17 hours and 40 minutes into my time with that game. Let that alone be my glowing endorsement of an average experience that got everything it needed to right to keep the player coming back, no doubt aided by the very light live-service skin that the game wore. I would never call Wildlands a great game, but I would go to bat for establishing it as a good one. Better than the critics who discarded it, a military-themed playground with mindless fun and decent stealth- moderate engagement and a serviceable narrative. The DLC was kind of bad though. So that was what I was expecting with Breakpoint.

Actually, I wanted Breakpoint to be a vast improvement on everything that Wildlands was, as you may have picked up from my glowing endorsement of the game's beta, but early reviews quickly dispelled that fantasy. Again, critics didn't like it, fans were lukewarm on it, and in typical Ubisoft fashion the team took that as code for "Make the game package as expensive as possible and keep throwing new price-inflating content on top!" (I guess it works for them, somehow.) But I figured at worst the game would just be another Wildlands- an average time-sink worthy of keeping around for a year or two just to waste time in when there's nothing else to do. Maybe some half-decent stealth, a decent enough story, some replayability- it should have at least hit the minimum bar that it's predecessor set, right? RIGHT?

I can't rightly identify what went wrong with this game without a time machine and a news crew. but let me try and quantify why I'm actually going to give up on playing this game with just over 15 hours of laborious playtime. (And it's not entirely the game's fault. To be fair.) And to start with I need to harp on one of the most important parts of any interactive product: the gameplay. Look how they massacred my boy! Wildlands was basic and intuitive in that way that all average games tend to be, universal and easy to pick up, friendly to casual play. Philosophies that the Breakpoint team evidently spat on. I can't believe I never realised at the time just how damaging to the gameplay cycle the haphazard and badly conceived survival elements would be.

The key feature of Breakpoint that set it apart from Wildlands was the idea that 'you are all there is, no back-up, no overwatch, just you on your own'. That meant scavenging for weaponry, picking up crafting materials and looking after yourself when your body gets shot to pieces after a fire fight. The game has a stamina meter which becomes damaged if you push it past it's limit, an injury system that requires you to sit down and expend bandages if you've been wounded or else be forced to limp around slowly, and you have no companions. (At least at first. The game added AI companions later in a really lazy way that doesn't give them any ambient chatter or personality or cutscene presence or any of the little touches that made them anything more than shoot-turrets in Wildlands.)

The problem with all of these systems is how much of a hassle they are to the casual loop of this giant game clearly not built to be a hardcore survival experience. Simply sprinting from one objective to another in this ungainly huge map will damage your stamina requiring you to expend a water bottle that needs to crafted or purchased to be replaced. Injuries are saved with checkpoints, meaning the only way to recover after every gunfight even if you catch a stray bullet is to expend a bandage which needs to be crafted or purchased, or to retreat to a camp and endure an ardours and unskippable 'patching yourself up' animation. Do you want to take a break from your routine of base infiltration to go plant picking so you can craft bandages? No? Then maybe you don't mind fast travelling back to the one vendor location in the whole game, walking the two minute journey to the vendor, and then walking back out and fast travelling back into the action? What's that? Oh right, that sounds tedious and unfun. Funny that!

UI has been a big joke at Ubisoft's expense ever since Elden Ring reminded the industry how it was done by being so beautifully sparse and easy to innately grasp. Breakpoint is prime example of it at the company's worst. 3 different Quests pinned under one another with a map squeezed in one corner and class progression reminder shoved in another menu. The quest menu is an ugly mess of faction quests and main quests and DLC quests and online quests all smashed together on the world's least coherent evidence board. Even getting and using weapons is inherently complicated. Picking them up doesn't unlock them, you need to buy the blueprint then gather the parts and build the thing. Then, of course, the crappy gun is levelled: although thankfully that entire painful levelling aspect of the game is now opt-in only thanks to a year of sustained backlash forcing the developers to change course. You still have to go through the stupid 'blueprint buying' process though.

Whenever you start a game and dread the process of learning what all your menus mean, that should be a ringing red alert right there that this is a game that needs to be redesigned from the ground-up. Strip out the pages of information, declutter the player's interface, order the quest screen like a sane person would- make the act of understanding the menus as painless as possible and you'll retain players past that initial introductory hour. I mean for god sake: the game had an entire 5 quest long chain of just menu and systems tutorials, read the room Breakpoint, you're not the kind of game that demands that level of consumer focus!

The world of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is an archipelago of fictional islands with some of the most confusing geometry known to man. And whilst yes, on a very surface level the world of the game is pretty, the mountains are vast and snow-capped, the forests are bounding and heavy and the swamps are... swampy: there's a huge lack of heart and identity in any of it. Culture, personality- it's all burned away to fit this new-age aesthetic of sleek modern habitats built in largely non-descript island scenery. You'll find clean-tiled research stations and clean-tiled city scapes and maybe a little bit of a rougher-hewn military base and if you're really lucky, you might even happen across an old air-hanger or two. But even the derelicts don't appear to have any artistic impression or story to tell- they're just placed there to be there. This is perhaps one of the most artificial feeling worlds that Ubisoft has ever produced and really dulls that desire to explore and see what's out there when you know it's all designed to just be content pockets- there's nothing to really see.

And the world is big, in all the worst 'Ubisoftian' ways. Habitats, stations and bases are all spread out miles from each for no apparent reason whatsoever. Drone manufacturing hubs are slapped in the middle of nowhere, habitats are established with no connection to surrounding resources and all of it creates a world of 'scale' and nothing else. But this game in particular seems to be too big even for Ubisoft's usual 'flood the world with activities and call it a day' approach. You'll spend hours just travelling between content locations across mountains or down endless identical roads, beset with nothing but your own unending boredom as it becomes ever more apparent that there's nothing to actually do inbetween base infiltrations. Tiny patrols of enemies, the odd fly-over sky drone, flowers to pick, and walking. So much bloody walking. And when you finally take to the skies, you'll find the beauty of the world slightly tainted by the cloudy mess of signal fire campsites (the game's only fast travel points) because Ubisoft for some reason felt it necessary to make all these points visible at the same time for the naked eye, despite the fact they appear just fine and dandy on the in-game map. This game kind of feels like it was made in separate rooms with no interaction with one another.

In story Breakpoint starts somewhat strong, for the first few minutes. You are attacked on a routine check-up to the research-facility-gone-dark by a team of rogue special forces members led by Jon Bernthal that have seized control of the islands military potential and plan to... well, you see, they're going to... um... I guess actually they're still in the process of seizing, somehow. Despite the fact that these guys are the only security the island has aside from standard mercenaries who... I don't think it's ever really explained who hired the standard mercenaries but they seem to be buddy buddy with the Special Forces guys so I guess they're the same team: Jon's 'Wolves' haven't immediately seized control of the various murderous military drones and waged international world war or whatever half-assed 24-style fanfic the writer of this mess wrote on the back of his napkin the moment after he was hired before running off to get a more fulfilling role doing literally anything else.

The narrative is paper-thin and the game realises this immediately, stringing the player slong in an incessantly boring line of 'please fetch this person or this technology or this McGuffin' quests under the loose promise that it's all conjoined in a wider plot that seems ephemeral at this point. The only solid is the fact that Jon, the villain, has a connection with the protagonist's, Nomad's, past in that they both served in some middle-eastern war together. (It's probably specified which one at some point but it isn't really all that important anyway) Rather than leave this to the imagination or allude to their brotherly bond, Ubisoft will rip you away at genuinely random moments to subject you to minute long flash-back sequences of their daily antics together, frolicking around warzones hand-in-hand, to the extent that they lose their narrative oomph almost immediately. And the 'triggers' for these flashbacks are so asinine. One scientist mentions how Walker (that's Jon's character name but he's so generic I usually just call him Jon anyway) is working with some cutthroat lady, so cue a 5 minute flashback of interactions with Walker being about as sus of a soldier as humanly possible (torturing information out of prisoners with two swift stick hits to the shin. The guy works fast) and he'll off-hand mention wanting to work with a woman like that someday. Meaning we've learnt what? That the woman we were just told Walker is working with fits the description of a woman that Walker said he knew a few years ago? Wow, am I glad we got that piece of vital connecting tissue to make this narrative function! And here I was about to enter a boredom induced coma- think of the narrative complexity I would have been missing out on!

Progression feels non existent throughout this game, and I acknowledge that my own style of play is slightly to blame for that. Forgoing the asinine and painful weapon levelling and upgrade system in favour of playing this like an actual tactical stealth game apparently came at the cost of any feeling of gameplay progress whatsoever. What in previous Ghost Recon games was reinforced by coherent progress through a narrative, Wildlands even had an extremely comprehensive board of targets we worked our way up to reach the big boss, has been buried in favour of faction questlines that feel like they were written and acted by an AI that was trained on the work of other, somehow depressed, AI language models. Missions don't feel like they've progressed the narrative at all, they just kind of stop and a new one starts- and I get the feeling I could play this game all the way through and never get a sense for if I was at the beginning, middle or end of the narrative. Which in a way is impressive in itself. They've broken all tenets of solid pacing and storytelling to break new ground in generic game design, truly Ubisoft are in a league of their own.

And I have to talk about the cutscenes for a second. The only way that Breakpoint has to convey information to the player, outside of a hideously cluttered menu system packed with some of the most mind-numbingly boring lore files ever written, (And remember: I'm a guy who reads all the in-universe Fantasy books in game- I know the difference between engaging and boring lore text.) are cutscenes at the beginning, middle and end of every mission. So why did no effort go into them? Cutscene models appear to be the exact same as in-play models, with the lack of ambulatory and moving face muscles being very apparent. Model choreography is actually non-existent, characters will stand in front of each other and speak directly into each others faces with no other sign of life, yet for some reason Ubisoft thought this developed enough to justify constant shot, reverse-shot angles so we can see the lifeless conversations in all their (sometimes unskippable) glory. Oh, and the actual animated cutscenes appear to only be the flashbacks and a few extremely rare set-pieces that are largely unimpressive or drag out for way too long. (The scene of Nomad fighting off the drones set on him made me actually want to curl up and go to sleep until the game was done playing itself.)

There's more to Breakpoint, there's an online I can't bring myself to play for more than an hour a week, several islands I don't care enough to explore, and two expansions I'll never push through to reach-but what's the point? I experienced everything in the first 5 hours and the game has no new tricks to show me. I get the same kind of feeling playing Breakpoint that I did when playing Watch_Dogs Legion, that sickening tightening of the stomach when reality dawns after less than a tenth of this experience that "Oh, this is it. They ran out of ideas instantly, didn't they?" Ubisoft always gets a harsh wrap for it's bloated games, stuffed with meaningless stuff to pad out playtime, but then you get games like this: the bottom of even that low-rent barrel. AA ideas for small games stretched out and stamped into full fledged AAA length products that can't justify that size or length, bore their customers to tears and makes us wonder why we even waste time playing video games to begin with. Breakpoint isn't a video game, it's a chore- and I just don't think I can bring myself to finish a chore of a game to play. Maybe I'll inch my way through bit by bit, but it won't be to write this review, but to burn time in the most vapid way possible. There's no point in formulating a review, I've experienced everything this game is going to deliver to me already. As you can tell I absolutely do not recommend this game, even at the steepest discount. In heart, this is actually a better play experience that Legion, but I'm so disappointed in it's lack of ambition that I can't even rate this game as comparable to that. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint gets a D - grade in my review score. What little credit present is due only to the functioning game mechanics that can be fun initially, but it doesn't carry the game and doesn't carry the score to anything close to passing grade. What a sad excuse for a Ghost Recon game. Ubisoft underwhelms once again.

Tuesday 11 July 2023

Games with online requirements

You've been disconnected

The interconnectivity of the world through the power of online is a magical and wonderful tool that has revolutionised the way we live, how our societies intermingle and connect; and how much bizarrely themed Anime we can watch directly from Japan. (I saw one about a school full of gambling addicts! Them Anime makers get real crazy sometimes.) But for all of it's positives, there are some rather big negatives. Not many intrinsic negatives, mind, more circumstantial negatives that have popped up as the world has become more familiar and acclimatised to what the Internet provides us. Exploitation, scams, the very concept of the Metaverse and the addiction to the idea of being hooked to the 'forever online' pipeline and dragging everyone along for the ride.

Look, I know that fundamentally there are going to be games out there that require online connections in order to run; that's just the nature of how certain genres of games have come to be. MMOs, for example, can't exactly bring it's players into a cohesive shared online world if those players aren't sending up-to-date data packets of everything they're doing to the host server; therefore a constant connection is kind of a necessity. Same with competitive multiplayer games and pretty much anything that takes advantage of the fundamental functionality of games to provide a unique online-style of experience to it's player base. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's just the way that things are. But then there are the games that make you scratch your head and wonder.

Such as EA's Sim City. Do you remember when that abomination landed? A city builder game which necessitated an internet connection at all times for a game that largely consists of solitary city planning and late-game infrastructure troubleshooting? Why- so that some minor online gimmick of 'virtual player visitors' could be enabled? No, the real reason was obviously so that this could serve as a kind of hands-on DRM (Digital Rights Management) to ensure that the copies of the game that were being played were legitimate, which is the excuse for a lot of 'Always Online' systems around this time. Of course, not everyone has the kind of constantly secure internet, or even the bandwidth, to facilitate that kind of imposition; and thus the system, once said to be integral to the foundation of the game, was neatly exorcised in an evening. Too late though, the reputation of the franchise was forever tarnished and within a few years Cities: Skylines dropped to totally steal that entire market away from EA whilst they slept. Couldn't have happened to nicer guys.

These days it's a lot rarer to see always online systems. Or at least, it's typically not socially acceptable for a game to potentially drop it's players if they ever disconnect from some theoretical server floating in the company farm. And when such a game does exist, the backlash is loud and unrelenting. Just this year Redfall got spat at for requiring such a connection for a game that, whilst it offered 4 player co-op, fully allowed it's players to engage in an offline single player mode as well. Once again, the developers said it was essential to the heart of the game, only to figure out that there was apparently an off switch, it would just need some time to code in. (Too bad everyone will be done playing the game after one full day, because it wasn't very good.) Think that's the measure? Oh, you ain't heard nothing.

Doom Eternal is a game with Online Only requirements; did you know that? Not to the extent where you'll be kicked out of a single player campaign match for losing connection, but enough that dropping will force you into the menu to inform you of that misfortune. And why? Honestly I haven't the slightest clue. I think it may have something to do with this online persistent levelling functionality that is shared through the account like some sort of free battlepass- but why does that mean it needs to encroach on, and thus interrupt, my offline gaming? The very heart of Doom Eternal is it's single player campaign, and that the team thought it totally fine to potential sabotage the sanctity of that system with online gibberish is galling to say the least.

Elden Ring is another recent game with frustrating online components, but here it makes a lot more sense. Souls games have been messing around with online competitive and cooperative side features for as long as the genre has been fully formed. But in order to maintain that drop-in invasion style of game Elden Ring demands you log into their servers upon the start and remain logged in forever more. Should you drop that means you are kicked back to the main menu and you have to load in from scratch- the one thing worse than actually dying. Playing offline needs you to load into the game fresh from the start detailing you don't want to engage, and one of the routes to a major boss requires the invasion of three other players, forcing online play, and thus online requirements, upon you.

And then there's old faithful, Diablo 4. The latest in the Diablo franchise and the first to offer no form of offline character creation whatsoever. Here the excuse is more ephemeral as Offline characters used to be a key part of the Diablo adventure for those that wanted nothing to do with leaderboards or seasons or any of that stuff. Now, however, it's almost as though Blizzard live in constant fear of their players cheating and thus need to be watching them twenty four seven- they're willing to risk the smoothness of gameplay to keep their servers hooked to people's systems, in such a manner that has cost high performance players their hardcore characters. Punishing players is one thing, killing them in a loading screen because the severs are feeling slow today is another altogether.

In an ideal world we'd all boast fantastically consistent internet connections that allow us to link wherever we need for however long- but we're far from that world. Some of us can't manage internet connections like that, can't afford to, or plain just don't want to. The clumsiness of Always Online requirements seems to consistently undermine the potential utilities and more often than not end up riling the fanbase into a frenzy. So why are we still doing this? I think it's one of those pendulum swing issues, that the industry is trying to normalise but the world just isn't as built-up as it looks like on a map. Maybe in the days when the Internet truly is as ubiquitous as we think it is, such concepts can be snuck under the radar until it becomes a way of life. For now, however, I think most of us just want to play a game and not worry about what our modem is up to.

Monday 10 July 2023

Gollum has a body count

No, not like that... gross...

Earlier this year a crime was committed. Not a crime to the public governing laws we live under, but to the very core of good taste as it stands. A cardinal sin to the sanctity of the greater wills- a great enough sacrilege to make the Two Fingers shudder and shake the demi-gods to their very core. A bad Lord of the Rings game was released. Wait, don't leave... You don't understand, we should have been long past this stage in the game creation landscape. A bad game is one thing we will never escape but the one in question, Gollum, was a special kind of terrible. It wasn't just bad, it wasn't even just mediocre- it spawned in from the bargain bin of a whole other decade! Ugly, boring, conceptually bewildered, mechanically amateur- I could have put together a more compelling game with my own pathetic grasp of Unity- let alone the twenty five or so 'professionals' who worked on Gollum.

Although I suppose the real question is: what did anyone expect? Honestly. A game about the loathsome dung beetle of The Lord of the Rings himself? The only creature so repugnant as to be a returning foil in both The Hobbit and the Rings? A covetous, selfish, loathsome little worm looked down upon by even the gentle hobbit-folk who drag him around. Why exactly would he make a good vehicle to explore the magical world of Middle Earth? I understand the voyeuristic angle of peeking through the muddied lens of a character who inexplicably managed to 'see it all' so to speak, but this game failed to even play to that small concept. Gollum spends most of his own video game locked in a nauseatingly dull and dreary prison doing fetch quests. It's a miserable existence lived in all of its tedium.

Again, it's the kind of game that rides hope purely on the name of the brand attached to the box, but we are far past the age where people go into shops and pick up anything that looks familiar on the front cover. Games are getting way too expensive to warrant that sort of frivolous spending. Word of mouth spread quickly with Gollum, informing a trepidatious public that this game was not some unsung quiet masterpiece but a disaster of colossal proportions, which may have won the title some pity 'disaster tourism' purchases if the product wasn't so laughably expensive. £50 for the game! £60 for all the DLC which includes concept art, Sindarin VO (certain lines spoken in the authentic Elf tongue. You have to pay for background chatter.), the goddamn lore compendium and the soundtrack! The game would be a joke at £15, this price is a blatant opt-in robbery scheme.

Reviews are terrible across the board, with the only positives coming from actual career trolls who use the gift of reviewership to be ultra-contrarian with the most cookie-cutter takes imaginable. No one can honestly stomach a single nice word about this game and to be absolutely fair, I fully get it- what is there nice to say about a game like this? What is there to say at all except for... yikes! And of course, the knock-on effect meant that sales dried up super quickly. According to Gamesensor, nearly 300,000 people had this game wishlisted on Steam during the build up to launch- and after? The game sold about 10,000 in it's crucial opening few days; and given the reputation it's quickly gained as the worst title of the year, that was likely the biggest boost this game's sales are ever going to see. That would equal less than half a million dollars in revenue; I wonder if that's enough to cover buying the licence?

It's certainly not enough to keep the studio afloat. Because lo-and-behold, despite moving their efforts directly onto another Lord of the Ring game immediately following the release of Gollum, (to the horror of all the world) it seems mercy has swooped in to save us all. Daedalic entertainment has folded their development arm and ceased all creation efforts for the foreseeable future. Now the company is quite a bit bigger than their development team so this isn't the same as the entire company going under, but it is a pretty solid step back from the trajectory the company was heading in. And it means that now we can identify Gollum as being directly responsible for the death of Daedalic's development efforts for how terrible of a game that he starred in.

Now of course the human side of everyone will make us feel sad hearing this news, and trust me I know how painful it can be to have security ripped away from you. I've lived my entire life without security of any kind and it's a horrible situation to get used to. These developers wanted to make something new and the more creative minds we have working on games the better it is for the artform. Even the early missteps might be stepping stones on the road to something truly great, let's not forget that Hideo Kojima's first game as director got cancelled before it ever saw the light of day and see what heights he has gone on to reach. Any studio can contain the next auteur with the power to catapult the industry forward.

On the otherhand, Gollum really was that bad. Soulless, uninspired, uncreative, unambitious, meandering, ugly, badly written, badly designed and worst of all- severly anti consumer. The very existence of this game in the state it's in is like a black mark slathered across the hand of everyone who worked on it- as it's an admission that this is the state you think it is just fine to release games in. Not only that, but for the price of a full AAA title, and a marketing campaign slapped alongside for extra boost points- you just really can't rightly justify investing time into a studio that can't put out even the base of a good product. It's a damning indictment of literally everyone who okayed this for release, and those that worked alongside them to promote it. (Still noticing Gollum polluting banner ads on the Xbox Store, Microsoft: where's your integrity?)

At the end of the day I honestly think the blame for this comes down on the executives. They took on a project their team couldn't handle, the project obviously ran into some form of development issues and yet at no time did someone with a discerning producers eye look over the affair and realise that the game wasn't going to make it launch in any viable state. Instead shoulders were shrugged and they thought they could ride out the reputational damage, probably because it's happened so often in recent years. Bethesda and CDPR have both been high-profile perpetrator's of similar plots, but this stretches beyond them into something of a habit- companies who want to try and recoup what little they can, slapping the dregs of a bad release above the reputational save of a cancellation. Daedelic threw out their child thinking it could fly only to watch it crash and take them along with it. That's some nominative determinism for you right there

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