We don't need a good ending for Karlach

 Yeah, I said it!

Baldur's Gate 3 spoilers- whatever. At this point if you haven't bought Baldur's Gate 3 and played the thing through, what the heck are you doing on a blog about it? Maybe you didn't know. Maybe the name 'Karlach' just sounds like the hacking-wheezing noise your neighbour makes when they're hocking a wad of phlegm out their window- but now you know she's a character from the RPG you have a choice to make, either retreat now or spoil the greatest game of the year for yourself. Okay? We're good? Great, now they're gone let's dive into the topic of today's blog where I place myself in front of the heavy ballista's which are the Baldur's Gate fandom to say the thing you just don't say. Karlach does not need a happy ending patched into the finale of Baldur's Gate 3, and though I know that some only call for it out of a joking sadness, others are very earnest and it's that latter party I want to reach out to.

So Karlach is one of the most beloved character from BG3 largely because she's one of the only characters who doesn't turn around and pull a right strop when you don't romance her. She's a Tiefling Barbarian, the best race, and a passionate friend who thirsts, beyond anything, to live life free from the enslavement to the demonic Blood War that she's know for about half her life at this point. Karlach is deeply emotional and allows that well of chaos to brew up to great effect, whether screaming bloody murder or despairing about the ticking time-bomb that is her Infernal engine for a heart, threatening to kill her if she doesn't return back to Infernus for good, forcing her back into the arms of her erstwhile master. The struggle to try and rid this infernal Engine is the driving force of her personal quest throughout the game, and it's a compelling journey to travel along.

But the big sad twist of the matter is that there is no way to repair her heart as it threatens to burst in her chest. Karlach has to go back to Avernus at the end of the game and the best the player can do is go with her or let her die on the pier rather than slip back into the hands of Zariel, her fallen-Seraphim master. Of course for such a beloved character above an extremely passionate fanbase, outpourings of desperate hope for some secret hidden path to save their beloved Tiefling soul and give Karlach what her endlessly endearing hopefulness deserves. Vindication and freedom. And upon that comes a vocal minority who ask, nay demand, that Larian pack in a secret ultra-good ending for Karlach into one of their extensive patches, thus changing the course of fate. But I'm here to tell you that even if that is something you yourselves want, it would not be for the good of the story.

What is the core emotional drive that connects pretty much every major character you ally with throughout the course of Baldur's Gate 3? It's a toughie when you overthink it, because they all want vastly different ends for themselves, Power, Freedom, Purpose, Honor- but shirk those higher ideals and bring yourself down to the root which binds the party. The Mindflayer parasite, and what drives everyone to want to be rid of it. They all desire to live. It's actually right in the name of the closing song of the entire game "I want to live, Don't let me die- there's more to do if I can only live." (Appropriately, the song is called 'I want to live.') In some way every character is faced by this most basic of drives and the way they deal with it forms the heart of this game that so many people resonate with. We get those who earn their clear break to live the lives they want, those who decide their ideals outweigh the base most desires and fall upon their swords and those that settle into compromise. Karlach, in a way, embodies all three.

Karlach is possessed by her new lease on her fresh life right from the start of her liberation and rages bitterly against the fate prescribed her way, but she's also so diametrically opposed to the idea of servitude she would rather die than return, even if that result upsets her just as much. It's the player's choice to let her die with dignity, or seek a compromise that some sort of living is better than no living at all. The compromise here is the 'good ending' for Karlach, in the conclusion that in some instances the hope of the living outshines the finality of the resting. Should you believe in that, some might say the peace of the departed overweighs the suffering of the tortured. The very existence of that debate tells the poignant nature of her ending, giving us contemplatable depth in place of a forgettable check list where everyone gets what they want and go off on their separate ways happy. Throwing in a third 'fix all' option would sully that, and one game which really highlighted this, was Cyberpunk's Phantom Liberty.

That's right, I'm on a spoiling spree today! So the ending of Cyberpunk 2077 is somewhat similar to Karlach's, in that you go on this giant adventure to win back control of your dying body only to learnt that with everything you did you've only brought a little bit more time- a few months at best. Everyone's already dead, all your options have been expended, and you've still not conquered the death sentence. (Unless you're a rube who fell for the Arasaka ending, in which case I'm sorry you're so gullible. She ain't never giving you a new body!) Phantom Liberty was marketed with a totally new ending to the base game that I was somewhat fearful of for the way it may invalidate the actually fantastic finale of the base game, such that I wanted to somewhat avoid the thing. But instead I found myself rather pleasantly surprised. And a lot more unpleasantly, for that matter.

Phantom Liberty does, indeed allow you to escape the ticking timer on the rest of your life, but only for the cost of robbing you of that life completely. You spend two years in a coma, ripped from the heart of the main storyline before it's conclusion, and are thrust back in the world with a scarred nervous system incapable of handling any of the combat implants which made you a legend back during the events of the game. Everyone has moved on, most suffering the rawest of deals from engaging on questlines that never got resolved by the driver of events themselves, and every bridge you built in that life is burned and shattered. Even your closest friends want nothing to do with the person who was dead for two years. It's a really confrontational finale that only really works in tandem to those that already exist, as a comparison piece to ask you what is more important- living for life's sake, or enduring the lot you have however cruel it is. You rejection of, or appeal towards, that ending can tell you a lot about what you value core-most out of life- and I for one know that while I like that it exists, I'd rather die early and bloody with the people in my life that I care about than start a new life as someone else. Although, that's something I already knew about myself from finishing Life Is Strange all those years back. I don't do take backsies.

Karlach is a tragic fiction figure, with the tragedy itself and how she handles it representing a core aspect of her characterisation. I think she's pretty much perfectly handled and portrayed and the whims of the fans threaten to put a dampener on a light that glows brightest exactly how it is in the moment. And on a much more tactile level, with Karlach as she is in most people's playthroughs, trudging around the plains of Avernus, she is perfectly poised to be a major player in the direct follow-up to BG3 tackling Zariel that Larian refuses to admit is going to happen. (But it really has to. There's no way she can't make a video game appearance after being invented specifically for Baldur's Gate 3 lore.) So I say let Karlach have her day, in the hopes that maybe we might just meet the girl again some day. Just because her ending is tragic, doesn't mean it's the last word we'll hear out of her.  

Midnight Suns: The Hero's XCom

 

I'm far from finishing the Midnight Suns game, but given that I've been playing for the last few months and recently took the step of buying the season pass, I figure I've enjoyed myself enough to talk about the XCom-style new wave game that Firaxis broke their streak of in-universe tactical games in order to create. Which I'm not at all bitter about. How could I possibly be bitter about the fact we've waited something close to seven years in order to hear some update on the cliffhanger ending for XCom 2 and in that time have received a half-sequel re-release of two, (which is a lot of fun but I can honestly say I've never finished a game of War of the Chosen) a completely bizarre cop-level spin-off game that seemed to be like an 'outsiders introduction to XCom' or something, and this- a card-based XCom game built around a Marvel brand that most people don't remember anymore.

Of course I appreciate that nobody wants to be stuck making the exact same sort of thing for their entire career, least of all creatives- and I appreciate the fact that this team at least remained with the tactical genre, knowing well their strengths and playing to them- but it's clear that nothing has landed with that same impact XCom: Enemy Unknown did. I think it's the sheer level of versatility in situation and gameplay that made those original two games (and their update DLC re-releases) so iconic. XCom are essentially story-making engines that utilise their vast network of possibilities and randomly generated scenarios to mount a desperate and daring tale of battling against the odds in a world where failure is ever present, but not always the end of the world if you know how to pick yourself up. The key to XCom, in my mind, is it's fairness. The player enjoys no plot armour. No Deus Ex Machina. They bleed and die like the bad guys do. And in that humbling mortality comes an intensity few other games can really match.

Which might be why the very prospect of playing as an unkillable superhero in Midnight Suns felt so very bizarre. Kind of like the cop-hero characters from Chimera Squad, who similarly felt more unkillable than the soldiers who won the war some several years prior- removing the mortal peril of being in combat would surely confer some sort of confident cocksureness that delineates the intensity of the tactical risks! And... well, it does. In Chimera Squad and Midnight Suns- but that is kind of the point. The intimidation factor of having the lives of everyone hang on your tactical prowess is surely a barrier of entry to the Xcom franchise for some, and there's a comfort in knowing that the worst that can happen, even on a total party wipe, is a brief relaxation period or a restart. No permanent death, and in the case of Midnight Suns- no fail state for the entire campaign whatsoever. You can fail time and time again to your heart's content. Maybe that was what influenced Firaxis' direction.

But I have to admit upon playing, that my biggest concern- the removal of the tactical soul of Xcom in favour of card game tricks, was decidedly overblown on my part. Anyone who has spent time getting involved with games like 'Guild of Dungeoneering' or 'Slay the Spire' might have known that concerns this direction were foolish. Hell, I'm sure Magic the Gathering fans could also protest, but I haven't enough knowledge of that game to know. There's certainly a decent amount of decision making that goes into synergising characters, choosing when to play attacks, redrawing card and picking who to take down first. But tactical positioning is completely gone from the game. There are situational environmental attacks that are in the player's arsenal, but they are the exceptions- never the reward of carefully managed footwork. Almost like a consolation prize to all those that felt abandoned by Firaxis' newest digs.

The big rub when coming to XCom Marvel edition is the obvious fact that no one, ever dies. How could they, we're talking about immortal Superhero's here- they couldn't be killed if you ran them through with a 4x4. The lack of fatalities does intrinsically mean that as a player I'm less inclined to care about the choices I make in combat, or forgetting to do my environmental attack one turn. It's more forgiving, sure, but it's also less engaging. The worst case scenario is my A-team getting injured and having to do a couple nights of easy missions while they recover, a waste of my time but hardly anything to lose sleep over. It really comes down to a matter of taste and how hardcore you are happy with your gameplay experience being. But for a certain vintage we expect, the Midnight Suns body tastes watered down and less sharp. Not worse exactly, but unfulfilling. 

On the otherhand, Midnight Suns does feature a decent degree of enemy variety with mechanics that can't always just be punched to death. Some enemies explode on death, punishing melee players, some put up shields to guard the weaker buff providers of the match, some are summoners, others are one-hit-kill trash specifically existing to provide opportunities to proc knock-out-building abilities. With the positioning factor removed from the equation Midnight Suns really does shine as a puzzle planner game where the solutions are as complicated as you, the player, are willing to make them. This especially shines with the infuriating bosses with their special little match-changing abilities that shift the battlefield with their mere presence, it's all additive to the play experience and keeps playthroughs feeling fresh.

Something else that I think Midnight Suns does surprisingly well is the character drama between the Heroes in the Suns. I expected iconic and unimpeachable icons to the calibre of Tony Stark and Captain America to be blank pieces of cardboard similar to how they appear in Marvel's Avengers, but there's a bit of personality to them. Most of the actual depth is reserved for the B-Team however- Nico Minoru, Magik, Robbie Reyes: these are the people you'll really start digging to the route of as you hang around the abbey, get into extracurricular clubs with them and touch on the various traumas and tribulations that make them who they are. Replacing the mortality of Xcom units, the relationships you build with the other heroes goes a long way to establishing a heart behind the missions- and even make you care about the emotional swells even when the middling presentation doesn't quite pull them off to the utmost justice. No romance though. They were explicitly strict on that front for some reason. All heroes are celibate, apparently.

As I am with the game right now, I enjoy Midnight Suns as an alterative to the XCom brand, but nowhere near a replacement. It just doesn't scratch those same itches and doesn't dig anywhere near deep enough under the tissue layer to leave me satisfied. But there are some half decent new ideas that this game gets exceedingly right and those alone manage to justify it's existence. (Of course one of those good new ideas is not the focus on being more cinematic, I have to assume this team didn't even consider bringing on anyone with actual cinema-experience because it's pretty poor on everything except the quality of the animations themselves.) Still, there's something stopping me from getting as red-hot addicted to Midnight Suns as I was with XCom in it's heyday, and maybe that deficit will become more clear the deeper I delve into it.

The Real Cost of Success

 

There's a saying: "Success rides on the back of failures" which I just made up right now in order to attempt to illustrate some sort of point. Do you think it worked? I'm lukewarm on it. The point is that no one makes it anywhere without someone else falling flat on their face first- because we can't live in a world where one man's success is everyone's victory. Somewhere along the line the cosmic scales must tip in a way that knocks someone else off the board, and in some fields the greater that success is, the more dire the consequences of failure for the others involved. Which for the Games Industry, typically means loss of money and jobs, a grim and unfortunate reality of game development. So in many ways the 'real' cost of success is never paid by the successful at all, but rather by those they, intentionally or otherwise, step on in order to get where they are.

Immortals of Aveum (I think it's called) was quite the big marketing deal when it was announced. Hailing from a studio with few credits to their name as a brand new IP, the team had to invest heavily in trailers and showcases in order to get their name out there in way that might make the heavy development costs worth it. In steps Publisher EA with their handy-dandy big marketing bucks to make sure the game gets in front of everyone's eyes at least once during the lead-up to launch and from that point the only obstacles are the idea itself and the game behind it. Now if we're being honest with ourselves, the first problems may have begun here. Was Immortals of Aveum really a strong enough concept to justify a AAA budget with marketing? I know all about 'believing in your concept', but isn't that why artists hang around with pragmatists? To tether them back to reality in times of fanciful whimsy?

Telltale developers went through hell trying to keep that company's output matching the insane degree of capital they were losing licencing everything under the sun trying to replicate the run-away successes of The Walking Dead Seasons 1 and 2- and Ascendant Studios was supposed to be the way out for all those that lost their jobs with the dissolution of Telltale as a brand. (Before it's revival not so long ago.) Aveum would be a totally different style of game, focusing on high quality true-to-life assets modelled off of real actors and motion captured, first-person high octane action that prioritised a twist on the FPS model people were used to, and a unique magic-system quirk where magical users fought not using staffs and wands, but with fanciful flicks of their wris- hang on, did they accidentally make the exact same magic system as Forspoken? That's just unfortunate. What company to keep.

What is surprising to me is learning of the Telltale background for this studio, given that Telltale produced exclusively games that relied on the strength of an intriguing and well-crafted narrative to deliver their value to the audience. Immortals of Aveum, on the otherhand, has about as bland and cookie-cutter of a narrative as possible, following an upstart wizard 'Immortal' in some sort of big bad wizard war against and mean looking evil... >snore<... There's no apparent level of depth and intrigue anywhere to be seen in the marketing. (And reportedly not in the game itself either.) Which is kind of problem given that a lot of people usually expect their AAA games to be the triple-threat. Good looking, fun to play and well written. If you can't boast all three of those at equal measure, then you need to hope to be exceptional at one of those other two to make up the deficit. Otherwise, maybe you shouldn't be planning a AAA budgeted title.

However according to the studio lead, fresh from the disastrous launch which saw the game drop interest in less than a weak and resulting in 40 employees losing their jobs, there is another cause of blame for the game slipping out of the limelight- and he's not entirely wrong. You see, part of the reason why you can't remember 'Immortals of Arkansas' is because it came out on August 22nd, whereas Baldur's Gate 3 came out on August 3rd. I'd imagine that even in the best case scenario, taking into account the beloved nature of Larian and the Baldur's Gate brand, Ascendant likely thought the hype of that release would only suck up the air of the room for about a week and a half. But as the founder and CEO Bret Robbins attests- "No one anticipated" Baldur's Gate 3 to be that popular.

Baldur's Gate fought hard and risked so much to get the success it did, and that success became huge profit in terms of money, market value and praise. Baldur's Gate 3 was a masterful achievement that made many around it look amateurish in comparison. It looked fantastic, played wonderfully and told a solid and heavily malleable narrative that people loved to go through. As such a middle-road average game like Immortals, not quite rich enough to shell out for the VR support the concept probably deserved, or funded enough to match the level of insanity that Larian Studios were looking for, got stamped down into the same league as some of this year's worst, which it honestly does not deserve. When it comes to the year's disappointments and games like Gollum are sharing breathing space with Immortals, you know something has gone topsy-turvy in the quantum continuum somewhere.

Let me be clear- 'Incandescents of Argyle' was never in it's life going to be a heavy hitter that knocked lesser titles off their tall thrones to grovel at it's feet- the setting was bland, the characters were cookie-cutter and the gameplay lacked serious enough depth to keep a player hooked- (colour coded spells really takes the oomph out of spell casting.) but we used to live in a world were middle of the road games like that could come out to some success. They are supposed to be the building blocks from which truly exceptional titles are made. Would Larian have gotten to where they are today without 'Beyond Divinity'- the worst game they've ever made by a landslide? What about Divinity 2- an objectively bad, but oddly charming action follow-up? No one starts at the top of their game. And for a first release of a studio, I think Ascendant actually laid the groundworks of a 'fantastic' career- provided they can survive the colossal failure of Immortals.

So I ask you- what is success but a bed built on the bones of failures? As though the very passion by which Baldur's Gate 3 willed itself to exist resulted in sucking the life directly out of all those unfortunate enough to be in it's vicinity. And in a way, Baldur's Gate was so ahead of the curve it spoiled everyone around it. Why put up with a dim-witted plot when you can enjoy a intricately woven tapestry? Why endure the average when you can dine on the exceptional? And in a world where most are average, that means the larger community will often go starving more often than they'll be fed. It seems that the way the world of gaming has trended, and in fact the world at large more recently, we're coming increasingly closer to the day when one can say with totally honesty and without a tincture of irony slathered on top: "This town ain't big enough for the both of us."

Valve: The Unicorn game developer

 Shooting stars are more regular

If we were to look at pure numbers, cold and calculating people that we are, then it would be pretty obvious to one and all that Valve, the big boys themselves, are perhaps one of the biggest game companies on the planet for how many people flock to their platform on a daily basis. They're like the solitary sparkling Oasis in the sandy dunes, set in a excruciatingly delicate garden half-weeded to eye-watering perfection, and half totally left to the brambles, weeds and asset-flip dandelions. (I hate Dandelions.) But for all their fame and size, Valve make precious little effort to really assert their position in the games industry to, you know, actually make games. In fact, Valve are pretty much content to let their library ride whilst they get rich off the backs of every other two-bit developer in the world that come scrabbling up to their doors in order to peddle some vial of snake oil. 

And this isn't because Valve themselves are solely a platform-delivery company. Sure, that's what their company has largely pivoted to after decades of supporting Steam, (I can officially say 'Decades' now, it launched on September 13th.) but their company used to make games. In fact, they used to make the best games. Titles that totally rewrote what the industry was working with at the time, the way they utilised new technology in order to craft ever-green works of art has laid the foundations of inspiration for hordes of indie to mid-level studios since. Valve is a company that never lost sight of the 'game' at the start of all gaming, and that ended up making them absolute legends in the industry, which they then utilised to make all the money in the world. At this point I honestly wonder if Steam technically has more purchasing power than even the anarchic cold terror of from the sightless seas- Embracer Group, only perhaps Valve covet the sense not to waste their funds and pointless frivolities swooping up game studios like their trying to complete a Game Dev Pokedex.

So we know how this story goes, don't we? Scrappy studio with a heart of gold struggles and pushes their way to the top of the pack through years of iteration. The devs pat themselves on the back for finally reaching the height of the swing, and then as dissatisfaction with the size of the family starts gnawing at their pride, that dream team starts drifting off into smaller indie companies- addicted to the fight for the top. Management and founders stay with what they built and try to instil the same passions and hungry exuberance from all the sparkly-eyed new developers who signed up in reverence, only to find that the well-fed mouse to lack the same 'do or die' risk-taking drive of the rats fighting for food scraps. And so the unique little spark of creativity fades into a meek settling pattern, and a company once brimming with identity and purpose becomes chained in the prison of trying to match their faded selves. That's what happened to Valve, right?

Oh wait, no. It really seems that Valve just don't want to make games. Because when they are roused from their slumber across their dragon's hoard of market dominance by the shiny new treasure, the burgeoning world of VR, Valve waste no time in getting to work showing the world how it's done. When everybody was using VR to make quaint little experience pieces or port normally non-VR games into a VR format- (which has generally been the only solid type of VR game out there) the team at Valve came back together to blow everyone away with 'Half Life: Alyx'- the undisputed king of VR that made full use of the format, rode the very cusp of the technological wave and set an example that subsequent VR games are still trying to match today! They've still got it. When they want to.

This whole topic came to mind this morning when I woke up to the truly startling news that there was going to be a prequel chapter to Portal 2 releasing in the new year. "What a gift!" I thought, "A franchise some twelve years dormant finally getting what it deserves with some love from it's parent! Who could wish for a better way to wake up!" And I, like many others, love the crisp and meticulous puzzler wrapped in the officious style of an explorative mystery game, but without losing itself to metatextual philosophy like so many of the games it would go on to inspire often do. "No offence 'Turing Test' but you seriously diminish replayability rambling on like that." Of course, I was a rube like so many others, Portal 2 is not getting a prequel from Valve and is, in fact, still in process of gathering dust in their vault, right next to Disney's.

As you've likely guessed, this is a fans work to bring more life to the classic genre definer, and in that respect it is impressive in it's own right- but it's no Valve update. Valve actually stepping up to work on their evergreen properties is like spotting a Shiny Legendary Pokemon in a Master Ball with Perfect IVs- naturally spawned. That's what makes them Unicorn developers in my mind, you just never get the chance to see them work more than once a decade, and certain franchise lovers never get to see a follow-up. But then they aren't happy letting things lie, either. They want the mythos of their being to grow hit from longing. Why else would 'Half-Life: Alyx' contribute almost nothing to the overall narrative of 'Half Life' for all of it's runtime until the very last moment of pulling some momentous retcon that set fans ablaze. They feed the cryptid legend, keep people believing in the tooth fairy.

Now one theory I have of this; is that they are a victim of their own reputation. At this point it just really isn't possible for Valve to come out and make a straight sequel to a game like any other developer might. They came from an age of innovation constantly throughout game development, and they just happened to be equipped with a team of some of the most adventurous programmers to take advantage of that explorative developing age. Modern game dev-ing has already pushed all the limits, taking technology and manpower and funding to the very tips of possibility, and technological innovation is sparse. If Valve want to maintain their reputation, as needle pushers, they have to become so much more discerning about when they surface and which needles they want to tip. Hence the mysterious aura of the Unicorn.

So I guess that means one can both never be too sure when we'll ever seen another glimpse of their development talents, and also can't be entirely certainly they'll ever actually see them again with how the world of development stays stubbornly static with only brief stabs of excitement. Maybe once AI development becomes more robust we'll get a Portal 2.5 to warm us on cold nights, but until then we'll have to be our own friends. Of course, this does make Valve probably the worst narrative-based developers of all time- because they care more about all the details around a story rather than the story itself, but it sure does make them unendingly respected in an industry rife with old heroes living long enough to see themselves become the villains. So I guess that's worked out for the team at the very least, huh.

Advertising Advertising!

 

One of the most weirdly dystopian aspects of the world today is the concept of 'advertising' and how weirdly consuming it has become in modern culture. Everything needs to be wrapped up and sold to everyone else in as neat and persuasive a manner as possible from products to ourselves. (How often have you heard about how you need to 'advertise yourself'?) And it's the sheer over abundance of everything that makes this a necessity. How are you going to stand out from the shouting crowds if you don't make yourself known as having the best so-and-so to solve the most problems? Hence marketing becomes more essential, marketing executives become gods, and eventually we start getting them represented as the sympathetic protagonists in children's movies and have to pretend like that's not supremely weird, like it absolutely is. Hence advertising evolves to the point where it is advertising itself as a concept. What a world.

But still, we have our limits. Our thresholds past which the encroaching hand of the 'marketing infiltration' overrides our internal 'normalisation' switches and just sets people off. Advertise too hard and people start to get mad. They start to rebel. And you'll get your fame, in the form of red-hot infamy. There's nothing worse than the feeling that you are the subject of manipulation. The rat in someone else's maze, the fiddle being manhandled by some loud madman who won't get off the damn roof. And in the world of ever sought after returns, advertisers are always pushing ways to eek past that boundary in a way that shifts the needle rather than shifts people's patience thresholds. That is something we're starting to see more and more of in the world of video game advertising- and I suspect it's only going to become more of a talking point as the years go on.

Right away perhaps the biggest example I can pull from would be the very short-term attempt by Microsoft to justify their recent multi-billion dollar purchase of Activision by forcibly subjecting all of it's European players to a full-page add for 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3' in the times they chose to turn on their console. This was a dry run rather than a fresh mandate, tentatively presented to a small number of users in order to taste how bad a wider adoption might backlash for them, and they managed to make industry-wide news in a matter of minutes. Needless to say, people didn't really like the idea of being asked to buy a game fresh to turning on their very expensive consoles, and treated this like the insult it was designed to be. Microsoft quickly withdrew their attempt with the prototypical modern apology for over-stepping the bounds- lying about how this was an accident. Funny how many accidents modern advertisers get into these days, isn't it?

For example, what about the 'accident' that Ubisoft recent got into regarding the advertising of Assassin's Creed Mirage over gameplay for the entire mythology trilogy? (Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla.) For a brief time whilst playing those games one could pause to access the menu (the only way to navigate through worlds as cumbersomely designed as those) and be greeted with a full-screen slide begging a purchase out of people, needing to be dismissed before play could be resumed. This one, according to spokespeople, was an absolute mistake for a splash screen that was intended for the main menu. Now I've never coded for an Assassin's Creed game, so I can't confirm how insanely moronic that sounds- but I can't really imagine the injection sight for a menu screen before the map interface and before the game booting are right next to each other. I'm going to go ahead and assume that was another one of those 'bold faced lies' this company prides itself on.

Here's one that annoys me to no end- So I recently brought the full collection of Life Is Strange games (Sans 2) because apparently I want to roleplay as a gaggle of teenage girls for some reason. I bought these games, buyer's ownership. And yet whenever I try to log on to play Life Is Strange 1 I'm met with a splashscreen asking me to buy Gamepass. I don't have Gamepass, nor do I need it; but I guess because Life is Strange is one of the most Gamepass friendly styles of game out there Microsoft just assume I would be interested in signing up so that I can play, I dunno- Life is Strange? Seriously, what is the point? And why is it every time? Can't you at least put a cool down on the thing so I can the game unmolested just once? What did I possible do to deserve this level of constant harassment?

In all of these situations the real line being crossed here is the physical barrier between the player and the game. None force themselves on the player, preventing access for any longer than it takes to press the 'dismiss' button, but that smooth transition between deciding to expend free time and actually engaging with the act is a particularly temperamental moment in which interruptions are rarely tolerated. Visual media has established itself in this field well enough, but when it comes to the interactive realms- well, let's just say we take our agency a lot more seriously, and are willing to get a lot more vocal when that agency is robbed of it's momentum. Of course, it is the Assassin's Creed advert which takes it one step further to invading the game, but what if I told you that's not even nearly the worst such advertising I've seen?

There was a time when Street Fighter V experimented with In-game ads such as clothing items and background prints to promote their upcoming events- a shattering blow to the immersion of the game heightened by the apparent threat of penalisation towards any player who took the impetus to turn them off. (How petty.) UFC 4 took thinks a step even further by taking the commercial break in the game and slotting in a video advert for Amazon's The Boys- before that prospect was spat at by the public enough to make those developers reverse course. There's never an end to the amount of people out there frothing at the mouth to push the boundaries just that step further at the cost of their reputation and morality, all to try and score some cheap marketing points. And it all supremely sucks.

There is room for marketing in gaming, sure. But I think it's fair to all to insist it remains squarely within the realm of Free-to-Play games. Sell your ads slots to Fortnite or Apex Legends, sure the returns won't be that high, but they're never that high anyway. Digital advertising is such a bizarrely wasteful money sink that the only reason it exists as largely as it does is because the world of marketers has grown big enough to advocate for itself against within a larger market that really should know better. (But don't let the people in charge know that. Youtube and everyone else online really needs their money.) The realm of a purchased game is a seal between the buyer and the maker, and anyone who tries to insert themselves into that relationship is declaring open season on themselves for all the world to pounce on. 

Why is Far Cry 6 so boring?

 

The other day I sat down, duties of the day put to a swift and lasting rest, and loaded up my list of games on Xbox (The computer I'm using currently being somewhat preoccupied for the time.) and clicked up Far Cry 6. I found myself loading into a cave wherein a quirky mad scientist with a dog in a wheelchair told me to gather up three somethings-or-others in order to get his napalm machine up-and-running, that being where I had left the game some month or so beforehand. And do you know what I did? Do you know what my course of action from there was? I turned off the game. Just like that. I sighed, somehow instantly exhausted from that 5 seconds of simply realising what it was the game was asking me to do, and I suddenly became too tired to play games. That, in itself, is an achievement for which I award only a very few games in my life- Far Cry 6 makes gaming unappealing.

To be fair, though, I can't pretend that Far Cry 6 is the only game which has done this very same thing to me over the past few weeks. I also found myself affronted with the very same insta-exhaustion after loading into Assassin's Creed Valhalla once and being faced with a 'clear the camp' objective, but I came around on the chore eventually. Far Cry 6, I've been unable to come back and pick up again- and it's starting to worry me somewhat. I always knew that Valhalla was going to be a challenge to endure after the road-rash that was playing through the entirety of Odyssey, but Far Cry has never dragged for me before. Hell, I finished Far Cry 5, my previous least favourite Far Cry game, twice for some reason. Once on the hard-mode. Why is it that I can't stomach even a preliminary playthrough of 6? Where has the magic of Far Cry got lost?

I found the very start of Far Cry 6 to be very awkward, in the way that the game seemed confused about the fantasy it was attempting to perpetrate. The context and narrative wanted to tell me it was about a rag-tag guerrilla army squaring off against a fascistic military dictatorship, but the game's idea of deliberate and ramshackle home-made assault landed me a back-mounted missile launcher pretty darn quickly. And a one-shot armour piercing rifle, which seems to totally invalidate the new 'ammo type based' gameplay system, as my literal second weapon in the entire game. And from there, almost 10 hours later, the game never really found it's footing. Far Cry 6 hasn't really gotten around to enforcing it's premise, or enriching it's fantasy, really at all. It kind of feels like the game just wanted to push me out into it's open world as quickly as possible and pray that everything came together from there. It didn't.

For me the real problems with Far Cry 6 start with it's characters, none of which seem to fully grasp the world they're currently living in save for your soon-to-be-dead friends from the very intro. Everyone seems just that tad too extreme and archetypical, silly, overdramatic, incomprehensively grumpy and largely annoying. They all seem to want to be my friend, which contrasts wildly with the Far Cry I know wherein most of the cast are self-driven and potentially suspicious. Where it's sometimes difficult to tell if that CIA agent is really working with you in this moment of aligned goals, or pushing you into deeper into a hole you can't escape so they can walk over you to get what they want done. Characters in those games were sometimes deranged, sometimes duplicitous but never so obvious that I figured out who they were in a single conversation and then filed them away under (cardboard cutout) before the game could get anything out edgeways.

Now I don't want to pretend that Far Cry 6 doesn't try with it's characters, because rather uncharacteristic of the Ubisoft brand- they actually did. These people have character moments and emotional pitfalls and actual professional voice acting performances! (God I missed effort from all my time playing Valhalla.) The problem is that none of these characters are interesting, or different, or note worthy. They all feel like trace-jobs over various 'break out' characters from popular franchises, ripped from their context and slapped in the middle of a Far Cry game to hopefully stand out. They aren't products of the cruel Cuba-analogy world they inhabit, they're products of the pithy Marvel Universe or a zany James Gunn production- they swear, fully embody their one quirk and undergo very basic arcs that basically just further affirm their own personalities even harder. They're one trick ponies, to a man.

And then there's the presentation, terminally confused I would call it. For some unexplainable reason every time you enter a mission giving camp the game shunts you into third person mode, something no other Far Cry game has ever done, forcibly subjecting the player to the fashionable disastrous visage of whatever crude selection of armour you've chosen to don yourself in. Again, for no reason. It adds nothing. And then there's the actual mission briefings themselves. Presented like it's an MMO, with a control-arresting context screen whilst the quest giver talks lifelessly at the camera and explains the context behind the mission. Of course, this somehow respects your time worse than your average MMO given there's no written summary of the trash they've got to say, skip it an you'll have to figure things out on the go. (The plot is largely paper-thin anyway, you don't need a PHD to guess without the brief.)

Then there's just the lack of cohesion between the world and the gameplay we're supposed to engage with. Fascistic dictatorship that stamps on our freedoms? How, with those increadibly rare outposts that are so sparsely manned you can drive right through them without picking up a tail? Jungle pathways and horse hitching posts, presenting the resourcefulness of underdog as an alternative play style? Why bother when I can summon a bullet-proof turret mounted car at any time for no cost? The game utterly fails to reinforce the guerrilla fantasy in it's characters, it's world, it's systems- (the guerrilla weapons are all laughably useless in general play) it's only really the narrative desperately insisting that we're playing as scrappy cave dwellers to remind me what this game is even supposed to be about- which makes it hard to bring the disparate pieces of the game's construction together into something, well, cohesive.

I don't want to play any more Far Cry 6 because, to be honest, there's nothing really to it. Far Cry 6 utterly fails to stamp out an identity for itself to justify it's existence as a sovereign entity from any other open world adventure title like the one's Ubisoft spits out bi-annually. They try, but at this point it mostly just comes across as an old man, far past his prime, trying to piece together memories of his glory days to breathe some form of life back into them- whatever that's worth. "Lets do the flamethrower mission, reviewers loved that ten years ago!", "Oh, the bad guy needs to make a speech here- make it rambling and circular- it'll be just like the Vaas scene!" There's no soul to the game. And you want to know the worse part? I'm still going to play it. Not today. Not tomorrow. But some day. Why? Because I hate myself. And I want to suffer. And whilst no one exists to tell me stop, who cares enough to try and keep this thin scattering of dying neurons I call a mind healthy- I'm going to keep drowning them with pathetic trash just like this until my eyes pop. So thanks Ubisoft- your mediocrity will literally be the death of me.

The Bannerlord

 They pulled me back in!

I am a sucker for a fantastic story. Aren't we all? The stakes of a well crafted narrative that unfurls gradually before snapping up and capturing you in it's web, spinning endless tales of daring exploits, twisted relationships and heart wrenching pathos! It's one of the reasons why Baldur's Gate 3 did so well, it had such a robust and malleable narrative that anyone could play around with empowered by the special video game sauce of having the potential to do literally anything with those beats and make the narrative all your own. That's all we ask for in our games. (That isn't too much, is it?) But sometimes I don't have the brain space to dedicate to a whole other universe with characters and stakes and narratives and finales. Sometimes I just want to kick up my feet, slap on some noise on the screen and live in a world that is as in depth or as vapid as I want it to be at that given time. It's at these points I would love to spend my time playing Destiny, but given how Bungie are so revolted by the idea of new-players joining the ecosystem that they actively design their games to sabotage them- guess I'll stick with Sandbox RPGs.

Sandbox RPGs are great in the way that they combine the ultimate freedom of a story-free adventure game where you can travel the game world, do anything and be anyone; with the somewhat structured progression inherent in a solid RPG game system. Do you want to be a trader who goes from town to town pawning off goods here and buying some to take over there? You sure can, but you'll slowly get better at doing it as you go, telling the naturally evolving story of a gifted tradesman learning their craft and dealing with the troubles of the road in the journey. Simply bliss, right? Of course, most Sandbox RPGs have some idea of how they want you to experience their game and world, but the beauty of the subgenre is the ability to spit in the face of the architects and play however the heck you want to. That is why I come back to the Mount and Blade games again and again.

Not just Mount and Blade, I hasten to add. Space Sims have their place in my mind as well, as long as those space sims don't cost several thousand pounds in order to 'buy in': Star Citizen. (Squadron 42 does look sick though, very surprised with what they've put together over there.) But something about the Mount and Blade formula is just that right level of janky, unwieldy mess and thoughtful medieval simulation that tickles my jimmies. Originally released back in 2008 by the Turkish Developer TaleWorlds, the game was conceived to simulate the trade, management and tactical warfare of the swords and steel era of man, set within a fictional continent that at one point was going to have zombies and necromancers before clarity struck the development team and a semi-realistic direction was settled on instead. (Damn, this game was so ahead of it's time they both almost fell into the 'Survival zombie' niche of the 2010's and managed to mature past it into our current age- innovators I tell you.)

But at the end of the day Mount and Blade is really just a game about first person Medieval battles where you smash through a shield wall of fleshy humans with your giant armoured horse and gleefully chuckle in the crunching of bones and flying of heads! Actually there is no decapitation. Or bone crunching SFX. (Missed opportunity, I tell you!) But the immersion is certainly there in those moments when you're charging at a giant rolling cloud of approaching cavalry, Warhammer primed for a preliminary swing! Or staring up at the parapets of the fortress you are scaling watching arrows rain back and forth. The game ain't the prettiest in the world but damn if it doesn't nail all the right vibes that you would be looking for an experience like this. Just goes to show that graphics aren't the whole cake, they ain't even the icing sometimes.

Where Mount and Blade really impressed was with it's melee combat, which remains one of the best systems ever invented for medieval battles both for it's simplicity and it's engagement. Basically, it's just a four directional system where a weapon can be swung overhead, underarm or to either side, with the type of weapon (blunt or sharp) and the locational damage calculating up how much damage is being done. But the elegance is in the movement. By default the player just needs to push their mouse in the direction before swinging and the attack will come from that direction. Look up to do an overhead, look down to go underarm. Blocking just means matching those directional strikes with a well timed block. It's intuitive, it works. In fact it works so well that Mount and Blade has been recycling it time and time again ever since they originated the system- and there's plenty of Medieval fighting games since that owe something of the Mount and Blade framework for what they'd make of themselves. (Even Ubisoft's For Honor owes some blood to TaleWorlds.)

The latest iteration of Mount and Blade, entitled Bannerlord, utilises many of what made the original games so endlessly replayable and brings them into a slightly more stable and pretty package. Bannerlord still isn't anyone's idea of a 'good looker' when it comes to raw graphical prowess, but their is a rugged beauty in the musty fog drifting above a battlefield swamp or the glittering light settled on a lake moments before a dozen cavalry crack that perfect mirror. And the character models look less like unevolved primal apes, so that at least is a step in something of the right direction. Aside from that Bannerlord is functionally the exact same sort of game as the 2008 predecessor. Which really goes to show the staying power of the little cult classic that could, no?

My favourite memoires are the game at it's most hectic, caught in the middle of giant city siege in a moshpit of swords and hammer where everyone is cutting at everyone else with reckless abandon. But there's something to said about the tactical moments too, when you're in a huge battle, two hundred men weaker than your opponent, and take command of a cavalry strike force- cutting away at the enemy force one formation at a time until you turn those heavy tides. There's very few games that can propose 30 minute long battles whilst keeping the tension taut, and Bannerlord can count itself amidst the few! Whether the cycle of fighting an endless war in which the micromanagement is more likely to overwhelm you before the difficulty does is your cup of tea comes down to the amount of patience you have, I suppose.

Mount and Blade really has longer legs than most to still be somewhat relevant, if within it's niche, in the modern day after all these years- and for a game originally conceived and constructed by a husband and wife duo that is a legacy worth hanging up on the wall as a trophy. There's a timeless appeal to a game like that, one you'll find in Minecraft or Stardew, that worms into your mind and stays there totally naturally, without needing to hook you in the desperate and predatory way that Live Services fall over themselves to do. So if you ever find yourself wondering what it would be like to be part of a castle siege, and balk at all the intimidating looking 'total simulation' medieval games out there with their sweaty online leaderboards and mile-tall barrier to entry, then you could do a lot worse than slapping down a few bucks on a classic in it's own right. Grab a mount and don that blade.

Suicide League gank the Justice Squad

 'Dawn of microtransactions'.

So we're pretty clearly in the marketing cycle leading to the release of the Suicide game which is everything that Rocksteady fans don't want. I fully expected the team to go deathly quiet and hope to stealth release this bad boy when nobody is watching, but much to my absolute pleasure we seem to be going through the whole nine yards of gameplay reveal meets interview meets endless trailer after trailer until we're so sick of the game we could dig out our eyes and still have the purple hues of Brainiac's ubiquitous hitboxes emblazoned within our minds. That's just the world that Warner Bros. has to reside in, given that they alienated the inbuilt Arkham audience by now- every step from here is a bitter battle to win over the audience from scratch. And in that respect, how they doing?

Not brilliantly off the bat, I must admit. Afterall they are trying to shill out a game genre that has outlived it's welcome, led to the downfall of many games before it and even a dissolved studio or two, and seems diametrically opposed to the context of the game proposed. But then again, if we take the weaknesses of the Superhero genre and the Live Service genre and whittle them out by conjoining the two successfully, then the finished product should be a superior to them both, right? That's some of dat thar Hegelian Dialectics I dun herd about on the rray-dee-o. So if we fool ourselves into believing that half-digested philosophy, then we can delude ourselves as fully as the others who are actually doing their damndest to drum up Suicide Squad Hype. (And they do exist.)

Now let me start off by clarifying exactly what it is that makes me so cross with Suicide Squad. Because we've seen other games slip the way of Live Service tomfoolery and I hardly let it bother me, I just write the game off with prejudice and check back in about 6 months for the inevitable: "we've reached all our goals and that's why we're immediately shutting down, it's not because the game was a financially disaster- it actually makes tons of money, I'd show you my accountant to prove it but she goes to a different school!" I am upset with Kill The Justice League for two clear reasons. Firstly, this is Rocksteady: The guys who brought us the best Superhero games of all time, and who were in the process of a kickass follow-up which would have shot the franchise into the modern age in a way that would have been everything the fans wanted. And secondly, I'm upset because the game looks good.

On a purely cosmetic level, I hasten to add. In that sort of- "wow, they're cute! If only they had a personality to match"- kind of way. Because unlike the many disasterpieces of this year, Rocksteady haven't magically forgotten how to do their jobs. They've made a game that looks gorgeous, with spectacular animations, a fluid looking movement, and an apparently giant landmass. (They really harped on about the size of Metropolis in this trailer. Does that mean it will be open world afterall? Why is it so difficult for the team to just bloody tell us?) Even the cosmetic skins, which are of course being sold as extras because we live in the worst timeline, look fantastic. I didn't think a 3D Old School Harley Quinn could work, and that apparently makes me a fool because they nailed it. It just wish the game felt like it had a little bit more of a soul.

One of the great conceits of Live Service games is what they want to extract out of the player. Most games want the player to extract from it, but Live Services turn that relationship on it's head. Whereas Arkham presents itself as an alluring present begging to be unwrapped by the player, by it's very nature Suicide Squad is an open bear trap hoping to latch around your ankle and force you to be an addict. A Live Service wants to sap away your free time for as long as possible so they can whittle away at your free will until you're drink up their microtransaction soup which in turn justifies the continued construction of the game itself. The only way a Live Service can succeed is by dragging more money out of the player than they expected to spend going in. A deception off the bat. (Guess this game really is for the bad guys!)

The only problem being that a Live Service works best in the framework of a forever game, one in which the player is constantly employed to grind towards some ultimate unattainable end be it that BIS pairing for their gear or some ultra-rare game changing drop. Whereas a Superhero game is a simple power fantasy. There's some level for crossover there, but I struggle to see where they come together neatly. If we start the game as underpowered nerds who need to grind to become powerful, then the game will feel like a slog to start off, but if we start off powerful (as the developers attest we do) then what is the point of designing this like a Live Service, with gear levels and loot rarities and all that, to begin with?

And then there's the shooting. It looks good, again I can't deny that, but it feels wrong, and that might be the bigger deal considering the genre we're messing around with here. King Shark going around lugging a minigun? It's just not right! And sure, there are more personally appropriate finisher animations, and they look great- why can't the gameplay be focused more around them? The unification of playstyles feels like yet another concession made in order to better fit the Live Service angle, whereas instead of trying to come up with various new variations of 'Bat' for Harley Quinn to collect, they can give her new guns instead. Because guns are easy. When the style is giving away it's agency to the gameplay genre, the question of whether or not these forces are congruent should really come into question.

I probably won't be coming around on The Suicide Squad game when it launches, which sucks to say considering the developer we're talking about, who put together some of my favourite games of all time! I want it to be good, and I hope it's successful enough for the team to turn around and use that momentum to make that Batman follow-up; (even if it will be without Kevin in the role) but my gut tells me this isn't going to work out. The same gut feeling which churned when it first saw Forspoken advertised all that time ago, and which nearly burst when the NFT game craze started to infect the industry. That's the gut which says Suicide Squad is going to disappoint. And man do I hope it's just the ol' acids playing up this time. I really do.

Vampire the Masquerade 2 has me confused

Or should that be: Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2-2?

Woah, Game of the Year hates Xbox?

 True if big!

The Game of the Year Nominations are here and I can't be bothered to go over every entry exhaustively because I just don't care about all the numbers. All you need to know is that I still voted for 'Faker' in the E-Sports one like I do every year- still have never watched the guy a day in my life but he looks like he tries his all. But what I want to talk about are the categories that actually matter, and how shockingly absent one game seems to be through most of them. A game that a certain little tech giant that could rested a lot of their hopes on. A game that dared to take us to the stars and then gave us a loading screen between literally everything we wanted to get to and delivered hundreds of barren planets in a never-ending cycle of diminishing returns. How in the heck is it that Bethesda very own Starfield only got one nomination, and it was for Best RPG. (A category it would never win in a million years with Baldur's Gate 3 also on the list.)

One of the most egalitarian illusions that the Game Awards peddles is the idea that you don't have to be some sort of fart-sniffing critic for a reputable magazine partner in order to have your say at the awards. Anyone can sign up and give their two cents off of a G-Mail account and I recommend you do so right now. But in truth we do know that public votes count for something as little as 10% of the final decision and it's the top critics who make up the lionshare of the voting power. Which in a way does make sense considering there are a lot more of us, but that does leave an avenue of disappointment. Afterall, what is the public supposed to do when a game they want to vote for is never even up for an award in the first place? Afterall there is a sizable movement of people who wish that Starfield was in the running for Ultimate game of the year, despite my personal thoughts, and they get jack squat. They have to vote for what's in front of them. (Which is particularly galling given that it seems this year you can't choose to abstain from categories- which is bizarre.)

But the fact of the matter is clear. For what feels like a decade (and might actually be) there wasn't a single first party Xbox game in the candidates for Ultimate Game of the Year, but there were two Sony nominations. That has to be an absolute kick in the gut for a company who's one sleeper title, Starfield, failed to make the splash they wanted to. I mean, what is there even left to be excited for in the Xbox wheelhouse? Perfect Dark? I don't believe that game is even still in the pipeline given how little we've heard of it. We're better off waiting for a Hollow Knight Silksong release before putting our grubby mitts together for an Xbox first party slam dunk. Meanwhile Sony are so comfortable in their as the head of the games industry right now that they're investing in Live Service titles going forward- so thanks for being so non-competitive Xbox!

Of course, Xbox didn't get totally snubbed this year. Hi-Fi Rush managed to nail quite a few nominations and there might be even be a win tucked somewhere in there which would be a fantastic reward for a little game that seemed to do literally everything right. But yes, you heard me right- Hi-Fi Rush managed to nail more nominations that freakin' Starfield! Yikes. Starfield didn't even got a look in for best Soundtrack and Alan Wake 2 did! (To be fair- haven't played Alan Wake so I can't comment on it's music, but an Inon Zur OST didn't even stir interest: that is wild!) Hell the Golden Joysticks literally gave Xbox a free award with the category 'best Xbox game' which of course dropped on Starfield. So yes, if you blot out everyone else in the world and literally consider Xbox an ecosystem in of itself- then yes: they can win an award. How gratifying. (They also nominated the actor for Andreja in Starfield which is... just wrong. I wouldn't nominate any performance in Starfield for an award...)

Hi-Fi Rush is seeing quite a bit more love, which is probably due to the fact that game faced absolutely no expectations, literally launching an hour after it was announced, whereas Starfield somehow drummed up the expectations of an entire genre of game lovers only to miss the mark with great swathes of them. I don't think Hi-Fi Rush is actually in the running to win any of it's categories however- (I would be very happy to be proven otherwise, however) which makes this yet another year in which Microsoft's grand plan to become a console competitor is flagging. At this point it's starting to feel like a curse. Every game that Microsoft touches underdelivers or underperforms.

In fact, that might actually be right on the money now I think about it. What happened right after Microsoft finished their deal finally securing ownership over Activision? They published the worst reviewed Call of Duty game of the entire franchise, so laughably terrible that no one will even let the team dribble out the old "The team is really proud of our work" crap without tearing them a virtual new-one online. Redfall is well documented for it's disaster. I can't help but wonder if maybe someone from Microsoft just happened to be in the room when the first pitch for Forspoken was made. Or maybe even for the Saints Row Reboot. Maybe there was a Microsoft employee aboard the Hindenberg. Maybe one as a co-pilot of the Enola Gay? Maybe it was a Microsoft employee who washed his hands and sealed the fate of Jesus of Nazareth. After this year's showing, I'm starting to believe that anything is possible!

But the black Jackal Anubis can rest calmly on his laurels in the knowledge that the scales of Justice are evenly weighted, because Sony's biggest game of the year also got snubbed for the ultimate prize. That's right, Final Fantasy XVI didn't get itself in the running but Resident Evil 4, a Remake, did! So there goes Square Enix's chance to win around worried perceptions after the big 'underperformance' fiasco of the game. (Although it wasn't an underperformance by general commercial standards, but rather just by the expectations set by Square, which is probably much worse.) Maybe this will land a lesson on the heads of the afflicted. You know, some sort of lesson that might be something along the lines of: "Stop depriving half of your player audience from buying the damn game"!

So I guess neither one of the two consoles won this battle in the painfully drawn out and pitifully perpetuated console wars- except, of course, for Nintendo who manged to sneak in their with 'Tears of the Kingdom', a game made directly to mock the British people for the shuffling off of it's Queen just weeks prior. (How very improper of them! Harumph, Harumph!) So be sure to make a note of that on your annual conflict-assessment tallies. That's one strike on either side and two knicks on Nintendo's line, the smug brown-nosing teacher's pets! Whelp, better luck next year Console heads, maybe next time the morons at Microsoft won't pass on the actual biggest game of the 2020s. (Man, that memory must haunt the executive who wrote it. Or it would, if Executives have souls. But we all know that Mindflayers, strictly, never do.) 

And so awards season begins...

"I'm gonna be king of the game developers"- Swen Vincke, age 15 (Probably)

The award season of the Games Industry tends to be a little more exciting for the industry it celebrates than other award ceremonies; that is likely because of the very different sort of public reputation we hold compared to, say, film awards. In film the idea of award ceremonies feels like an antiquated and bourgeoisie-coded felicitous orgy of back-patting and fart sniffing, created for the sole purpose of narcissism and worth affirming. Ask the average movie watcher what they're most excited to see during Oscar night, and they'll probably tell you: their bed pillows, because even those that watch the show as an institution are forgetting what they bothered showing up for, as evidenced by the delightfully depreciating viewer numbers that the shows have been afflicted with for time immemorial. When it comes to gaming however, well- we do things a little bit differently!

The game awards are something of a lot more grass-routes and earnest celebration enjoyed by all in celebration of- as much as Geoff can manage to cram into his little show. And that might come from the very open host of it all who everyone knows by name and deed. Geoff Keighley has been a central part of the game's media for over a decade easily, and though I'm sure he makes a buck and a half off of the fame around the awards, we know the passion behind why he started this in the first place. We all know that Geoff just loves his industry so much that he wants to be the one to bring everyone together one night a year. We know that Geoff Keighley is the sort of man we can trust to keep our industry every bit as strong and healthy as we need it to be, by breaking down the 'us versus them' mentality wherever he can. He's a champion of the little folk when he wants to be, and a friend to the upper class when he needs to be. And the award ceremony is a beloved joining together for gamers everywhere because of it!

Personally I think the reason why the Game Awards sees so many viewers (last year's showcase saw 103 million viewers compared to the Oscars 16.6 Million) is because we as the consumer come to see the big new reveals that Geoff has managed to cue up. In the passing of E3 and the coming of independent publisher showcases, there really aren't those big industry events that we can set our calendars to anymore, with the exception of The Game Awards. Geoff managed to score an Elden Ring release date trailer in the past, a Death Stranding 2 announcement- and if I'm right and he's managed to secure the reveal trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI- the man will go down as a legend for all eternity. And we all want to see the future of the industry so we show up in the hundreds of millions! Also, it helps that The Game Awards are so liberal and accepting on co-steaming, allowing the modern Internet in all of it's niches to come together and enjoy the show together, unlike the painfully antiquated Oscars who still think this is the eighties.

Of course we're a bit off from the Game Awards just now. It's time for some of the other ceremonies to get their awards out of the way and hand off to the 'best of the year' before the big show that everyone cares about rolls around. But seeing as how a lot of these events are as much fan driven as they are critic driven, it's typically a good indication of the direction that the industry is leaning by looking at who is sweeping these other shows. Afterall, we know that Game of the Year is going to Gollum, but if we can get confirmation that the Golden Joysticks also granted Gollum that inevitable gratis then we can be comfortable in our belief that the single most deserving game in history got it's dues. Because man does Gollum deserve some sort of break for all the crap he's been through...

But lo and behold it seems there was something of a sweep at the Golden Joysticks, with one game picking up so many awards there is now a meme worthy image of it's Director walking out the event clutching an entire arm full of gold. And that man is obviously the infamous Marine captain Axehand Morgan, going by his cover identity of 'Sven Vincke'. (I'm onto you, Marine scum!) Somehow Baldur's Gate 3 ended up scoring Best Storytelling, Best Visual Design, Best Game Community, Best Supporting actor, (Neil Newborn's Astarion) Best PC game and ultimate game of the year. They should have handed Sven a broom so he could sweep the floors as well, cut the catering some slack. What a way to reward a team that risked it all.

There's certainly a desire for legitimacy that everyone in the industry is forever chasing, proof that this frivolous past time of wasting others time is actually worth something in the end. Becoming a professional in the medium is the first step on that ladder, earning a profit for the first time is the second step and winning a reward validating all your hard work is perhaps the crowning moment. Maybe that is the appeal of award ceremonies for the watchers and the attendees, that moment of ultimate fulfilment disseminated by osmosis out for everyone to collective bask in. That's how we get over the inherent stupidity of what an award even is and what it represents. And that's good enough justification to warrant my vicarious living through these events!

Personally, I love a little bit of award season. I love the pomp and the glamour. I love being one in a group of million all indulging in the nerdiest of passions simultaneously. I love seeing the faces of the madmen who slave away to steal away chunks of our lives in the most elegant and seamless ways. I just love the world of gaming and what swathes of creative passion it unfurls upon the world of art and the work of artists. Gaming pushed so much forward with it, tradtional drawing artists, storytellers, cinematographers, actors, music- everything that the movie industry used to lionise before that all started growing so stale and restrictive. The AAA might be a closed boys club, but the industry is way bigger than them these days. And the Awards season allows everyone to bask in their love of this hobby.

So champagne bottles up and corks popped for the start of another award season- one for what might go down as the best year for gaming in the past decade- which really goes to show how we're somehow still managing to blow the socks off of the gaming world. There's no more gratifying a sensation than being stumped over who wins an award because every candidate is just so darn good, and it's decisions like that which separate the men from the lions. Or it would if any publications took their nominations any sort of seriously. >sigh< At least the public say has it's value in the conversation too, so the real critics can let their preferences shine through. Which is my subtle way of reminding all of you to vote. How politically conscious of me.

The Metal Gear situation

 

I promised I would talk about this a while ago but the truth is that I really didn't want to. In fact, I wanted to bury my head and pretend that Konami would fix everything in the interim but- I mean what was I thinking, this is Konami we're talking about! Part of it was blind optimism, and the rest of it was fear that if I accepted the rank incompetence of Konami I would also be accepting the terrible danger all upcoming Konami projects are in under a publisher that clearly has no idea how to quality control anymore. But reality isn't a matter of picking and choosing what seems comfortable, it's about sitting down in front of the meal prepared, undercooked and worm ridden as it is, and bearing everything. So I have to take my medicine and admit- Konami have absolutely screwed the pooch with the easiest of it's upcoming projects, the straight Metal Gear Ports.

If we are to accept the recent gall over everyone's inability to remake Knights of the Old Republic then we should damn near pass out from sheer flabbergastedness by the fact that simple HD ports lay outside the ability range of one of Japan's premiere development studios. Or perhaps it would be fitting to say 'former, most premiere'. Konami did a fine job whittling itself down into a studio focused entirely on mobile and gambling machine ventures, keeping all our favourite franchises hostage in the interim. I think mostly the world was praying for heroes to swoop in and nick the Metal Gear brand right out from under them- but that's just not how it works in our damnable capitalist society, now is it? That's probably what led to that false optimism when Konami, a proven mediocre publisher, decided to do anything with it's licences. We accepted the gruel, now we have to swallow it down.

The Metal Gear Master Collection proposed a brand new introduction into the classic franchise sans the name of Kojima on the box art because apparently we're all still petty about that after all this time? Although I suppose the original team must be grateful not to have their name handy on such a blatantly undercooked horror show of a port that somehow managed to achieve even less than an emulator could do on a tight schedule. These ports are ripped from the decent 360 era HD collection and propose little else to that formula other than a slight update to the menu screen when starting. The actual work they had to do, bringing Metal Gear 1 and 2 along for the ride, is the most rudimentary emulator job feasible carrying none of the basic classic re-release tools one would expect as enforced by the literal decades of retro renewal ports we have to compare with.

Tools such as The Metal Gear Solid original not supporting mouse control on PC (Which the GOG version absolutely did) were not even considered at launch. The highest resolution possible appears to be 720p for a lot of the games, with anything higher resulting in ugly stretching- which is only acceptable for about one single player in the world. Me. The one PC gamer who still has a 1080p monitor. (Fear my backwards ways!) There is nothing in the way of substantive configuration options in the games menus, (Just like FF7R- do Japanese players just never alter their settings or something?) the textures look untouched from the original package, there's no boost mode to speak of for the classic games or even save states. One ongoing problem seems to be an inability to switch from Windowed to Fullscreen (A problem the team intend to patch in later- that's premium apparently...) and no way to exit back to the menu midgame... It's essentially the lowest effort port one could feasibly make.

You could threaten a talented team with a life time imprisonment to make the worst product possible and they wouldn't have screwed up this badly. You know why? Because they would have tried, and that tiny modicum of effort, even to a destructive end, distinguishes that theoretical assignment with what Konami has delivered to us. People have already rushed to point out that the GOG Metal Gear Solid has more features. The HD collection for 3, 2 and Peace Walker (PW is nowhere in this package) runs at a smoother 60 with seemingly better textures. For a 'Master Collection' there doesn't seem to have been any effort put into 'remastering' whatsoever, which I guess explains their marketing approach- sticking the announcement for these games at the end of Metal Gear Solid Delta and riding off that game's hype.

But whilst we're on the topic, do you think this debacle paints the development of Delta in any different light? I've already raised my dissatisfaction with the fact that from everything we've seen Konami appear to be going the absolute safest route they possible could by recreating everything from the original game one-to-one, even borrowing audio files from the original. (Come on; even Persona 3 Reloaded hired the old musicians to play slightly updated versions of their old tracks!) But somehow safety even seems to be a risk at the Konami offices, and that was before they were tasked with actually creating anything. Now I don't know- we could end up getting a technical nightmare the likes of which sullies the Metal Gear name forever more. All I wanted was for my literal favourite game ever to walk in the sun once more, and the Monkey Paw prophecy is winding up for a haymaker retort to my foolish ambition.

To play complete Devil's Advocate, to the point where I've travelled to the pearly gates, enrolled in their most prestigious university, shirked all solicitation in order to focus on my studies and then pushed myself directly into application to pass The Extraplanar Bar for otherworld affairs in order to serve as lead attorney in Satan's trail- maybe this is a 'priorities' situation. As in, maybe key resources were deprived from the Master Collection and funnelled into Metal Gear Solid Delta under the belief that they were more deserving there. That would, at least, give the hope that The Master Collection died so that Delta can live. But even that is giving a lot of credit when, in honesty, sacrificing the re-release of universally beloved classic games would be a marketing nightmare by most's reckoning. You would have to be certifiably instituionable to champion such a terrible gambit when this whole movement was designed to rebuild the Konami image out of the dumps in the first place. Could the big K really be that incurably dumb?

Shame as it is to say, I can only hope they are. Because at least in that case we can hold out for some sliver of hope as it pertains to the future of Metal Gear. Right now I can't help but think of what Kojima must be making of it, matured and moved on as he is, looking back on the dissolution of his name-bearing franchise with a conflux of vindication and existential sadness, like watching one's progeny fall to illness. Konami is that illness, unshakable and malignant, seeping off the lifeforce of a property fans have kept living in their hearts for years now- and they are a terminal affliction. Coupled with the dogs-dinner of the Silent Hill revival currently happening, (Did you know the 'interactive TV show' has a Battle Pass? Yeah, kill me.) it's becoming soberingly obvious there is no redemption path for the bloodsucking vampires over at the big K. And the desiccated corpse of Metal Gear will be their debris in the year to come.

Look what they've done to my KOTOR...

 I don't believe it

Avatar... huh?

Everything changes...

Okay; GTA VI prediction time!

 The Florida man, cometh!

Suicide Squad go missing with the Justice league

 "Reports finger a likely culprit in the salaciously, scandalous, scruple-less shrew: Spider-Man!"

-Thanks for that correspondence from insider and fellow Journalist- J.J. Jameson.

Matthew Perry- how I remember him

 Regretful respects

To be Dishonored

 Or 'to get re-dishonoured again' - redux edition

Falling out.

 Eh?... meh...

Bethesda Games Studios. A name of well deserved glory in the space of the Games Industry for the way that they lionized and ultimately defined the modern Western RPG. There was a time when a Bethesda game release meant the entire industry would stand by and pay attention to whatever it was the studio put out because they made money. They secured influence. They birthed trends. In fact, I'll go so far as to blame Bethesda, alongside Bioware, for setting clear the example of 'RPG lite' that went on to colour just about every game franchise throughout the 2010's and is still messing up some modern games. Ubisoft have never made a decent RPG system in their lives but they're married to the grind because they're so brain-broken the team think that's literally the only way to make gameplay progression anymore. (It certainly is the most obvious way I guess.)

But something has happened to Bethesda, or perhaps around Bethesda, to rob them of their position at the top of the pile; and it's beginning to feel less like a fluke and more like the modern face of the company forever more. To be sure, I'm not saying they've lost all their momentum and can't make a dime anymore, the success of Starfield is proof enough of that- but their games aren't really the air-stealers that they used to be. I could see another studio feasibly going up to bat against a Bethesda release and perhaps not winning, but actually siphoning sales off of the big boys themselves. I don't think they're the industry influences that they used to be and it's kind of sad to see the state of Modern Bethesda knowing how dominant they used to be. It's like watching your favourite talented actor fall off into making low-effort Marvel projects for the last 10 years, losing all that sparkling promise as they go.

I think it was something I started to... perhaps not notice in the fullest sense of comprehension and reaction, but sense in that subliminal and off-putting way, back with Fallout 4. And I loved Fallout 4. For the time. The gameplay, the graphics, the companions, the story- I thought this game to be the great leap forward that Bethesda were waiting for- and then I tried to play it again. Replaying Fallout games, it's what I always end up doing. But this time felt... weird. Wrong. I didn't feel that tug of infinite role playing potential, I just felt like I was stepping back into the same journey I went on originally. And there is a plethora of mechanical and design reasons why that was the case, but I just want to stay with the feelings themselves because they were sobering. Remember that Bethesda were the kings of RPGs in my day. Their offices housed the birthing pots of our fantastical dreams. But I couldn't dream about Fallout 4 after playing it. All I experienced I did in my first playthrough, there was nothing left the next go around.

Fallout 76 was an obvious mis-step by the studio and to this day I don't hold that as indicative of some great fall for the Bethesda brand. It was a wild strike out in a new direction that they weren't as prepared for as they thought- no shame in that. Trying and failing is how we learn our limits, and though this was an expensive mistake to publish it did not colour who Bethesda would become. I think that might be better drawn from the recent release of Starfield, which is very much in Bethesda wheelhouse. And very much the same sort of situation as Fallout 4. Now I think I might prefer the gameplay loop of Starfield, whereas the world of Fallout 4 (which much relies on the many games of set-up before it) stands out as more interesting than the barren straits of the Settled Systems. But neither match that regular sense of absolute freedom I enjoy every time I return to Skyrim. So what happened to the magic of 2011? Why can't Bethesda capture me like they once did?

Perhaps one of the the unspoken truths of gaming, one that I try to hide from the surface, is the possibility that we're all just getting a little too old to be captured by the magic of Bethesda. I mean we fans of Fallout 3, Oblivion and Skyrim- we all feel like subsequent games have failed to grow up with us. Hell, even Daggerfall lovers are forever bemoaning the less of overall complexity present in each subsequent Bethesda game. Maybe those devs just limit themselves forever to the young man's game, Todd Howard's strict rules about what a Bethesda game is or isn't has started to catch up now we've got other developers willing and capable of making just as grand RPG games better fitted to our tastes. Maybe we're not meant to be playing Bethesda titles past, I don't know, twenty five?

Although we might take ourselves back to Todd Howard's rules and instead deduce that maybe the big man himself has misread the audience he serves. That head-throbbing mandate that "Everyone must be capable of enjoying every piece of content in the game" reduces all possibility of meaningful choice and consequence. Replayibility is sacrificed for unending games that just go on and on and on. As Bethesda pidgeon holes itself towards that specific audience they're blotting out the sensibilities of every fan they made along the way. You'll never play a Bethesda game better than your last one, because they keep forgetting how to keep the audiences they gain. I don't particularly like this explanation, but it's a popular one. And heck, I ran into a Sarah Morgan cosplayer, I know there's an audience for Starfield too.

Or maybe, just maybe, the generalised RPG that Bethesda specialises in just has nothing more to say. No more grand thresholds to cross, no more examples to set upon the standards of basic game design. Maybe Bethesda have stretched as far as they can with the genre type that they're married to and the only way to become the head of the pack once again would be to specialise. And I have to be honest, I think if Starfield were a CRPG, or a squad-based RTS or anything over than yet another basic action RPG- all the similarities the franchise had to Fallout would have forgotten and forgiven. But then, would we have wanted to play it? It's like a Catch 22 situation- too different and people would have rejected it, but the game ended up so similar to what we knew that people ran out of imagination for it within a few weeks.

So yes, I'm falling out with Bethesda- and I don't really know what the company can do to fix it. I once believed them to be my single favourite developer- and for a time they certainly earnt that title. But I don't even know if I recognise the Bethesda of today. Not because of some great downturn, but rather because the world seems to have moved on past them, and I never thought I'd be saying that when looking at an industry that once seemed to trail in their footsteps. I still think that Starfield is a good game, by the way. It just lacks the staying power and cultural impact I expect of a company as big and wield-ly as Bethesda's. I guess we'll see if the big B can change that with their support for Starfield over the next, ten years did they say? Yikes... I'm not sure I can hold out hope for all of that...

Where is the 007 game?

 They're keeping we waiting, huh?

Is Destiny depreciating?

The Mountains fall.

You'll often here me talk about the unshakable titans of the gaming industry that are infallible and never wrong, especially when they're wrong. I'm talking about foundational institutions like Call of Duty, like Assassin's Creed, like Fifa- franchises that could roll up to your home and shoot your mother in the face and you'd still buy their next title because we're that conditioned to bow down before them- sad as that is. (Hell, I'm playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla currently despite having an absolutely miserable time slogging through that swig of pre-digested pig swill that was Odyssey.) Games like that don't live in the same world as ours. They don't show weakness, never bleed and will never die. For a time I considered Destiny to be one among their number, but it seems I spoke too quickly because from everything we're seeing Destiny is heading along the path of destruction- which very well could just be the spark of a new beginning- but it could also just be a death knell.

Destiny is an important game to the games industry, not just to Bungie who own it. Why? Because it's the single most successful thesis in favour of the 'Live Service' model of business which is the favourite keyword of every heavy-set games industry executive of the day. Destiny introduced the concept to a lot of us, popularised the 'always adding content, keep weekly player numbers' mind set and raked in a simply vile amount of capital doing so. They even lied and re-released the game again- pretending they didn't promise not to do exactly that when launching Destiny 1, and still managed to stay a juggernaut for the industry. Hell, until Cyberpunk rolled around Destiny was testers favourite benchmarking game, it still has a highly competitive 'first raid competition' community every time a new one drops- and some truly insane people out there make entire online communities deciphering the half-vomit fan fiction train wreck this franchise calls a plot. (Okay it's not... actually, the more I think about it- it actually is that bad. Yeah... Destiny lore blows.)

So you can imagine what an absolute shock to the system it was to learn that Destiny's Bungie just laid off 8% of it's workforce, about 100 people, in it's personal contribution to the worker firing frenzy that the tech sector is going on throughout 2023. 100 People? How? Isn't the game painfully successful? Doesn't Bungie have enough money to pay for the upkeep of it's many many staff, or at the very least have enough to not have to surprise lay-off people one day before they lose medical coverage so that the company can... seriously do they get anything out of doing that? Or is that just the sadistically inhuman flair for the revolting evil that lies at the hearts of every executive bleeding out for no reason? My question stands: what could be going on in the world of Destiny to justify the letting go of so many staff? Well- given the numbers Bungie pulls there actually is no justification whatsoever, but what would the executives put down as their reasoning when email their prep lawyers in case of any sudden 'wrongful termination' lawsuits? (They've already got one on the way.)

Well the last expansion apparently didn't do so hot. That sounds like a bit of a nothing burger to a company as big as Bungie: "One expansion wasn't well received, big whoop." But when you start to unpack the situation, and remember that Destiny is Bungie's only active game franchise, and that their next game Marathon has been pushed back to 2025 at the earliest and that Destiny is hard-designed to reject new comers to the franchise has roughly as possible so it's imperative they keep the players that they have. Then the concerns start to make a little more sense. If an multi-year developed expansion that was supposed to carry the game for at least 12 months ended up burning out the player base, then Bungie will fill every hit to their only income source being drained. The Executives might have to start diving into the Scrooge McDuck money vault in order to pay for the second Swedish Villa that houses their third family and the maid who is secretly also their fourth mistress. Nah, can't have that- gotta start axing people. It's the only way!

When taking a brief glance over the laid-off staff you'll notice another depressingly familiar trend- a lot of the people gone are exactly the kind of people management would be targeting, and exactly who you don't want gone from a franchise you're trying to revivify. So yes, we're seeing senior talent, the woman responsible for the Halo logo and... wait, no. There's no way! Michael Salvatori? The Michael Salvatori is gone? Okay, I need to preface this bit quickly. Through all my times with Destiny, during the worst of the worst when the original game forced me out of playing the online and held a gun to it's head with a £50 bribe fee- when I swore off the game and jeered at it's descent into mediocrity throughout the long life of two- there was one aspect of Destiny I could never so much as frown at. One gratis so unbelievably brilliant in it's conception, execution and, yes, composition- that I've kept both game's soundtrack on my phone for years now despite never playing them. It's the music, obviously. Destiny's music is cinematically sublime, deserving of a better game to serve alongside. And now it's gone. Vanquished. Caput. Because Michael Salvatori was it's composer.

And to be clear, as far as anyone can tell this isn't a situation of Michael volunteering retiring out of solidarity to his axed colleagues- during the one email exchange we've seen, Salvatori offered his heart to all those that had been let go 'As well'. All this happening whilst their next expansion, the Final Shape, has gone back into emergency development after the recent internal review process only 'whelmed' testers. Bungie staff are terrified that the next expansion is going to cement them down the path losing touch with their piggy banks- I mean fans- and yet they're in the midst of ripping out the heart of the franchise along the way. Staff who understand the game, artists who breathed life into the game, they probably would have sacked Lance Reddick if the man hadn't passed away first. (He'd probably be too expensive!)

After the Sony acquisition things were supposed to be different. Staff were promised that management would fight to make sure they all kept their jobs and that no one would be culled by the Sony scythe in some vapid attempt to assert dominance over the studio. And for what it's worth they were right, Sony never got the chance to start chopping off Studio heads because apparently this is all Bungie Management's doing alone! So all of that scummy 'cutting people off at the very last day before their health insurance coverage runs out' and 'scheduling job cutting meetings the very morning of the event so that no one could prepare'. Or how about 'Letting staff go so that they aren't entitled to options'. That was performed by people who knew their victims. They probably recognised the faces of those they were throwing in the gutter to step over, maybe even met their families, maybe even played enough mental gymnastics about in that warped vacant cage of twisted blackened steel they call the seat of their soul to call themselves their 'friends'. Yet this is how they treated them.

This is an increasingly common story in the games industry currently, even as profits are soaring to untold degrees, cost cutting measures are being made at the slightest set-back and it's getting enough to put everyone on edge as the illusion we call 'job security' is starting to show it's arse. And here's a little   secret: putting artists on edge is not the best way of getting great work out of them... okay, that's not entirely true, a little bit of pressure is exactly what they need: but making them constantly terrified that they're going to lose everything at any moment is certainly not a 'little bit of pressure'. We're heard the doomsayers call about the impending video game crash for a while now, but I don't think that's where we headed. I think we're headed for a slow dissolution of the AAA class as more and more devs peel away into indie studios or into more secure industries altogether, and the when the studios lose all the people they need to keep up their death march development pace and start eating their own tails in order to stay alive, those cold-blooded creepy crooks will have no one to blame but their own rat-ridden 'ideals'.