Marvel's Overwatch

 

If I worked at the Marvel company right about now- well I'd be loaded, wouldn't I? But I would also be incredibly hyper-conscious every waking hour about the razors-edge my place in pop culture is currently balancing upon. Insist though Kevin Fiege might, there's no denying the fact that Marvel is currently far past it's prime and rapidly approaching the realm of irrelevancy at such a depressing speed that I'm no longer surprised when a Marvel named project slides neatly under everyone's radar and goes on to underperform. As this point every failure has to feel like a stab in the back of a wounded animal, struggling to get back on it's feet and speed back into the race, which is probably why Marvel has all but retreated from this year in the hopes that Deadpool can prove the about face their franchise needs. Of course, Marvel can't control the whims of the mad scientist Sony, and as such another on of their half-aborted cross-bred abominations of life will slither onto screens this year too with 'Kraven the animal-loving all-vegan largely-respectful bad-guy hunter'.

In such straits, I can only imagine a slam dunk video game under the Marvel brand that will remind everyone why they love this franchise is exactly what the team are looking for- something to keep people distracted whilst the movie divisions figure out how to unscrew themselves from the absolute mess of everything they've made. (Not least of all changing course after having to fire their leading man for the next ten planned movies.) We've already gotten wind of that Black Panther meets Captain America game- which could currently be anything from a Souls-based action title to a choice-based narrative game to a Rhythm-based space shooter- we've got nothing to go on for that one. But one might say that for their other leading project we have quite a lot to go on. Perhaps even too much- considering that I'm pretty sure most of the gaming world is familiar enough with Overwatch at this point.

Yes, the team based hero shooter based around guarding payloads through the same rough feeling map that hasn't managed to significantly grow out of that base concept since it's inception. And the team have gaslit themselves into being proud of that, despite once having dreams of growing the brand into a powerhouse that caters to all kinds of players, not just forlorn soldiers of the old guard who stick around out of habit and Rule 34 artists who pop in to get a preview of who they'll be morally bankrupting over the next year. Having just recently shrunken to such a size in their development team that they can't even support the promised PVE functions that were meant to replace the promised extensive singleplayer content- one might say it's never been a better time to present a direct competitor copycat with the money and brand recognition to steal it's faded luster. In comes Marvel Rivals.

Despite sounding like on of those low-rent mobile store fluff pieces, Marvel Rivals looks like it might be a semi-competent hero shooter set in colourful cartoon-style maps that look near identical to Overwatch ones and featuring a cast of characters who have actually been properly fleshed out through canonical ancillary media- Blizzard! We'll see anime-ass looking Iron Man teaming up with K-pop idol Hulk, mobile-banner-ad Loki, Hanzo-in-cosplay Namor, Ultimate-design-reject Spider-Man, Grown-up D.VA stand-in Peni Parker- (Obviously piloting SP//dr) and this one girl called Luna Snow who looks like she exists only as a 2D ad-waifu for Korean mobile games. All these heroes are teaming up against Galacta- Galactus slightly more skimpy daughter who likely exists only to quench some lonely comic artist's desire for hot giant women. As a Lady D survivor, I have no grounds on which to judge that.

And you know what- the game looks... functioning. It doesn't promise a whole lot thus far, merely bringing us to a Marvel-based version of the Overwatch vision; but in that lies a simple and steadfast truth- they haven't overpromised yet. Overwatch was the home of overpromises, built on the foundations of a Blizzard that still had some slither of it's former dignity left in 2016. Some saw Overwatch, which had existed in some form in the company vaults for years beforehand, as the last hurrah new franchise from the player-first studio and expected it to be the exception in the slow dissolution of brand. Overwatch's promises then started to turn into broken promises which blossomed into ruptured trust. And when all trust is gone- that is when the lying started.

What Marvel Rivals offers is a clean slate- if a familiar one- peppered with an easily recognisable cast of distinctive silhouettes that already starts with a stronger base appeal than, say, Paladins. (Another Overwatch wannabe.) I genuinely think that this game's cleverly picked line-up of thin coded Tik-tok E-boy Marvel variants paired with the long-legged waifu companion cast has the potential to slip into the rotation of hero shooters provided everything goes to plan. Given that we're looking at a pure PC release right now, the most difficult platform to develop for recently, it would be really bad if they do a 'Modern gaming move' and screwed up the windows version. (And there's a not-0% chance that they do screw it up, knowing the landscape.)

Of course, any sparks of anticipation you might feel welling up at all this should be duly tempered by my next bit of news. This is a game by NetEase Games. Oh yeah, that Chinese tech company known for peddling free-to-play titles that lure in with functioning games and then trap you in their culture-typical pay-piggy hell. Starting up one of their games is like signing up to a Loanshark subscription service where they come around and knock on your window every morning when you're trying to relax to squeeze some blood of you. It's like trying to walk down the street and enjoy the view whilst beset by an gang of organised beggars who have strategized how best to squeeze into your wallet. It's like trying to be an an every day land-loving Chinese famer in the 1800s, whilst bad-boy-Britain keeps hitting up your local haunt peddling just wagon-loads of Opium for an insane mark-up. And you're already addicted at this point, so they're essentially just dependency enslaving you. You're picking up what I'm putting down, right?

Still, with how Overwatch currently sits- their waifu skin-suit badly stretched across a one-armed bandit- (I just remembered how that is actually a fetish, unfortunately.) maybe there's a space for even a NetEase disaster child to steal some of that thunder. I mean, it's not like Overwatch has some moral highground to stand on. They've thought impure thoughts about Lady D, just the same as the rest of us! (Wait, what were we talking about?) Of course, it will take a talented team of dedicated developers to retain such stolen thunder, and not do a 'Pokemon Unity' and fade from the limelight less than two weeks after launch. And to this I can say- wow, Overwatch 2 really wouldn't be in trouble of being outshone of they stuck to their guns and diversified the brand, now would they? Food for thought!

The Will Smith Zombie game

 

I know I heard about this game somewhere. I don't know if it was at an conference of some sort- (although in hindsight, I seriously struggle to believe this is the kind of thing Geoff would allow to touch his annual celebration) all I know it that Unturned was in my head before it hit the silly pages. Umm... Wait- no, Unturned is the blocky zombie game, isn't it? Undawn- there we go- totally forgettable garbage, I should have known! Still, it really is wonderful that after only a few months The Day Before has it's sequel and they managed to score Tencent as a publisher and Will Smith as a celebrity endorsement- what a glow up! At least- considering the game in question is every bit the most bargain bin generic uncultured zombie trash waste of time game- I can only assume it is the 'long anticipated' Day After.

Undawn is what happens when you have a studio run entirely by the boardroom. I know we like to joke about with some of the least creative developers in the Industry right now but I always insist that some of the artists manage to ply their trade before the entire work is largely ruined by executive meddling. Assassin's Creed has some of the most talented world artists in the industry, hands down, Rocksteady may have sold their soul but they didn't flog off their incredible animation talents nor their connections to top-tier voice talent- and as for the Saints Row Reboot... umm... you see... that game... it... was fully voiced. Which is more than you can say for the game Undawn, which some may spy as Will Smith's grand return to the limelight.

Return from what, I heard you blatantly not ask? Well allow me to undermine your intelligence by reminding you that Will- well, he's been on a bit of sabbatical, honey. Ever since committing assault on stage, at the Oscars, in live recording, in defence of a woman who would then go on to throw him under the bus by saying 'I don't know why he did any of that- we haven't even been a couple for ages!'. That was pretty much the brakes on Wills career for a bit as he did the classic thing of disappearing from the lime light until everyone forgot what he did and he can come slinking back to make a name for himself bit by bit. You know- like Kevin Spacey! (Ohhh- actually maybe that's not the kind of comparison his team is looking for.) How about... current famed Twitter-denizen OJ Simpson? (Nope! Nope! Definitely not!) Uhh... Mel Gibson, the Anti-Semite! (Yeah, that's about the best comparison he could hope for, to be honest.)

I'm racking my brains trying to think of literally any other thing that Will had done cementing this as the age of his comeback- there is no way in hell that Undawn is his return debut, is it? I mean there were the various apologies, his public mocking by Jada, nothing in the way of projects- I must have missed something, let me check. Good god- his IMDB reads only Undawn for all of 2023... the only people who wanted this man were the crappy mobile-dev team under Tencent likely built with the intent to sell to a Chinese audience- considering the clear quality deficits that any self-respecting gamer with access to literally anything else would scoff at. Ain't that just sad... how the man has fallen. But hey, maybe there's a soul somewhere in the game if you look deep enough? I mean, we are talking about a Will Smith endorsed product here, the 90's king of charisma and cool! Surely he saw something the world didn't, right?

No, of course not- did you even look at this travesty? It's straight average Korean-app store cookie-cutter garbage all the way through. Basic ass third person shooter gameplay slapped atop 2D pictures of idol-looking women in skimpy outfits- only this time there's also a Will Smith stuck in the middle of them sometimes. And how about the game itself? Will Smith's likeness made it to the game, but unless my man was acting on his worst off-day of all time that is not his voice. It seems they got a rough sound-alike to voice over the very few lines that his character even has as a basic quest giver, but then they couldn't even hire that actor to do all of his lines. That right, some of these lines are literally just dead air whilst you read text- because basic quality standards are a foreign concept to this studio, apparently.

For me the most notable part of the game doesn't even involve Will Smith at all, actually- it's rather when you happen across this one girl during her off hours and upon approaching her are forced into an excoriating music video whereupon this harpy croaks out the most AI generated drivel to make it out of the 2010's. As if sudden music moments in video games weren't awkward enough, as though I still don't have nightmares about Dragon Age Origin's Leliana singing purely in the backing track as she stares me dead in the eyes from two feet away- here comes Undawn to supplant that crippling phobia with something much worse. Bad singing in a video game. Oh, and this is justified as her 'quirky thing she likes to do on nights off', if you're wondering. Girl sings an entire hooky country ditty she cooked up her own brain-damaged noggin as a hobby. Maybe she should take up knitting- that way she'll only be in danger of harming herself.

But the craziest part about all of this- Undawn isn't even new. As I hinted at earlier, the game launched in the middle of 2023 and has only just been discovered now by a totally baffled public. Which might be why the game has already been internally acknowledged by Tencent as a flop generating a bit under 300,000 on a budget of... wait... hang on, a budget of 140 million? What the- look up screenshots of this game right now and then come back and tell me where that money went! Nah, I'm sorry this is a red flag to the IRS- this is clearly a cartel running a fake game studio to try and cover up their money laundering- ain't no way this is legit. You cannot spend 140 million on a game that looks worse then my spare-time learn-to-Unity projects; that just ain't possible. Undawn is a front for a burgeoning drug empire- I'm certain of it. 

If the intention was to overshadow Will Smith's previous indiscretions with a disaster big enough to overshadow them- that probably backfired a bit when literally no one played or even reported on the game. And now it's just another curiosity of this ongoing period of turmoil which is the Smith dark ages, a perpetual valley of rakes that Will is stepping on time after time in his fruitless attempt to become a household name once more. Disgrace and disappointment that he was, at least there are worse and less deserving people out there willing to spend, can what I only in good faith assume was 139.8 million dollars, keeping the man employed. What nice guys these devs are, giving the starving artists of the world something to gawk out in pure disbelief as they finally succumb to malnutrition- good job, Undawn- be the nightmare you want to see in the world!

Baldur's Gate 3 is over party

 

I endured the speculation of the past few months with a wary eye, offering my own hopes but never quite reading into the actions of Larian beyond that. I wasn't watching the voice actor's every move and believing that transcribed the future of the stars, nor was I looking into every update for the game trying to discern some hidden agenda to patch in content somewhere down the line- I merely fell back on what, from a narrative stand point, would have been essential to continuing on the story that Larian built up through their work on this franchise starting all the way back in 'Decent Into Avernus'. Now it has become quite clear that I overestimated Larian's dedication to rounding out their stories- of course I have- I should have remembered they made the Divinity Games. Archangel Zariel was introduced with no overarching purpose to the Baldur's Gate narrative, and now I want to blow my brains out. Also- Baldur's Gate 3 is over.

It came as something of a shock announcement, following the months of tentative speculation led by a man who seemed himself largely unsure if he had anything on his plate even as he battered off assertions tossed his way- but Sven himself told it plain at GDC: There is nothing more on the horizon for Baldur's Gate fans. No DLC, no sequel (we already knew there wouldn't a sequel right away, they said they weren't going to go into BG4 anytime soon. But the way he phrased it makes it sound like Larian will never do a BG4) and no ancillary events around this Universe from the team. Larian have moved on entirely from the biggest success of their careers and passed on all the intellectual property they loving produced to Hasbro- objectively the worst safeguards humanely conceivable. So that's great. (Can't wait for the comic next year that canonical casts Tav as a Lawful good human fighter literally called 'Tav'.)

That goes true for the much beloved cast of Baldur's Gate as well- so I hope you all get very used to the idea of Karlach and Lae'zel getting shoved into marketing for every other DnD event happening over the next decade! Who cares about the end of their stories, turns out Karlach is running for President of Waterdeep with Gale serving as head of state! Oh, how quirky! And, of course, a Baldur's Gate 3 MTG card pack is probably already in production! Oh wait... no they already threw that cast in with the Dnd themed release. And it happened so long ago that Minthara has her early access model, that's cute! (Is it enough of an excuse for them to do a re-release though? That's the question racing through the minds over at Hasbro right now.) What I'm basically saying is: prepare to steel your heart and accept only the game as canon because Wizards of the Coast are about to squeeze this game and it's property dry trying to profit off the success of Baldur's Gate 3.

What I do not subscribe to, however, is the belief that Baldur's Gate 3's retirement is somehow due to Wizards of the Coast or Hasbro. As Sven himself said, this is a decision that I know Larian made as creatives. They threw everything they really wanted to do into the main game and though I'm sure they had ideas to perhaps expand here and there- maybe even depict the new god Zariel that was introduced for the express purpose of leading in Baldur's Gate 3, ultimately I'm certain it was their idea to walk away. Sven even boasted about how relieved the team looked when he announced their budding DLC plans were cancelled. Of course, then he strangely went on to talk about the great relationship Larian has with the people at Wizards- despite last year kicking up a fuss about how the recent round of WoTC layoffs dropped every contact they had with the company, including the people that gave them the licence in the first place. (Odd about face. Guess they most throw great corporate partner parties as Wizards or something.)

But for me this is suck central. All the coyness about their next project can go do-one: we all know exactly what the next game from Larian is going to be. The fact that Sven even tried to wink at the camera and go 'It's not Divinity Original Sin 3'! Of course it isn't- we already know it's 'Fallen Heroes', that bizarre looking Divinity spin-off has been on hiatus ever since they got the Baldur's Gate 3 go ahead and shifted all resources to the obviously more interesting project. Not once has the whisper of 'New IP' been uttered, which is nary a rare tease for developers to make- thus I can only assume we're back to the world of Divinity which is just... god, I know it's a hot take but I think the Divinity IP holds back Larian's potential so much!

Don't get me wrong, I know it's their homebrew baby and they love it- but the world of Divinity is such indistinctive, wishy-washy, generic-fantasy, mouthwash- I can't stand it! Larian's strengths have always been their incredible application of gameplay systems which transcends the conventional and rewards the creative- it's what made Divinity 1 so creatively interesting, 2 so opportunistically incredible and Baldur's Gate 3 the anarchist's playground. But by god do they miss a beat with world building! Their storytelling is also less than brilliant- but it's not bad. I would even call it good, when they get set-up right. But the world building! GAH!

I'm always talking about it, so I won't go into too much detail here, but Larian have constant inability to paint tangibility. You can have a wayward prince describe their homeland as a real culture you can taste or touch, or as some vague allegorical fairy tale palace of gold upon gold that summons nothing to the heart and mind because it's not meant to be real. It's supposed to serve a vague purpose in a limp parable about 'greed' or something equally as unchallenging to any other observer who passed high school. (Guess which extreme Larian more typically veers towards. I'll give you a clue, the Prince wasn't a hypothetical, that's literally Jahan's backstory from Divinity Original Sin 1.) Larian make countless backdrops, but I've never brought their worlds. (That might have something to do with them totally rewriting the founding principals of said-world every couple of games!)

So in my heart I hope that Larian go off and do something totally different for their next game- still an RPG, of course: they've spent far too long honing their RPG development skills to go and diverge now- 

but maybe a new genre type? Maybe develop a Dark Fantasy next, touching in the kind of worldly philosophical themes on creationism and primal human foils like Dark Souls? Or perhaps a cool Apocalyptic Fantasy instilling a looming existentialism across a grand narrative- heightening the stakes- such as in Vermintide. Or mayhaps a Contemporary Fantasy, taking us into the hidden world of the modern day- like with the 'World of Darkness'. Or maybe even a cool hybrid contemporary-Fantasy that brings us to a modern-day comprehension of the world tempered with normalised magicks that allow for contemporary ideals and struggles to be exploded into world-defining struggles against good and evil- as Shadowrun did. Or maybe even a historical- nope, I don't like historical fantasy. (Stuff's lame. Even Sekiro was hardly 'From Software's best narrative work.) But finally, realistically- I want them to do a kickass Sci-fi and put us Mass Effect missing fools to sleep once and for all. That's the Larian I want to see several years from now when I wake up my fandom. As for now, it's going to sleep along with Baldur's Gate 3. Thanks for the memories, team!

Kotaku is Cooked

 

It's no great controversy to say that Games Journalists have a rough go at endearing themselves to the public. Especially if their name just so happens to be 'Kotaku', in which case theirs is a company best identified for their audacious publicity stunts over their hard hitting journalism or staunch integrity-based values. Any respect they might have fostered within the space has been slowly whittle down after a decade of rage baiting, web spinning and all around sewer-tier 'journalism'. Of course, Kotaku have not been alone in this endeavour, many are very much just like them- following in the path to most consistent low-effort 'success'. (How temporary that victory might prove.) But as the face of this side of game journalism, Kotaku have no public fyrd rising to their aid when moves are made to blatantly wipe them off the face of the Internet by the callous folk that sign their pay checks.

Kotaku recently lost their Editor-in-Chief who let their reasons for leaving absolute beyond a shadow of a doubt on the way out the door. Jen Glennon resigned in direct response to the Kotaku parent company G/O sending down the directive that future journalist endeavours from the website should deprioritize 'political statements' and replace that push with 'gaming guides'. A hilariously bizarre heel turn given the various other sites that have the market in this area, and the growing division of people who simply rely on Youtube for those guides so that they don't have to consult poor map directives as though receiving life-saving directions from a Morrowind citizen. ("Keep following the road until your left nipple starts to ache- then you'll know you've gone too far!")

Kotaku may not be my favourite company on god's green earth but I can tell you one thing- they don't make their bread and butter by being the Internet's utility gaming site! We've got IGN, Rock Paper Shotgun and Fextralife for stuff like that- Kotaku has always filled the role of being the trashy gossip rag, run by the terminally online who fill up their day construing all the world into miniscule battles of good and evil that they are the paragons of in their own little imagination. But even then they hardly hold the monopoly! IGN were the one's caught drudging up the old immensely tired rhetoric that having nearly exclusively Black people feature in a game about a zombie outbreak in Africa was inherently racist. (Whilst the actual sentient masterminds of Resident Evil 5 were both neither black nor African. Where do these guys get off?) So surrendering ever more of their Marketshare is akin to profit burning. 

In fact, the only time I've seen Kotaku manage to wiggle its way into relevancy all throughout 2024 was when one their of less... shall we say 'competent'... writers decided to spout their embarrassing lack of taste on main by publishing the title- 'Halo Season 2 sticks the landing- I told you so'. Now, Season 2 of Halo is much better than the first, that much is for certain, although I struggle to see any way it can be considered 'great'. It seems to struggle despite itself to be somewhat competent and when decent strides are hit there's so little runtime that everything has to be condensed into highlight reels of action- genuine character moments be damned. But more than that, the 'I told you so' part refers to the fact that this same writer affirmed that Season 1 was good too- and that's... well... let's just say I never thought I'd see Kotaku, loud-mouth contrarians that they are, come to bat for a show that portrays a sexual war crime as a romantic touchstone. (Which they try to play up again in Seasons 2- urgh, I wish they just crushed Makee with a comet immediately and forgot about her, thanks.)

Where the shoe really lands on the Kotaku necks, however, is with the expectant output of these game guides. Apparently Kotaku has been told to distribute 50 a week, an absurdist degree designed specifically to burn out the team until they either get so sick of the content that they quit or they struggle to meet mandates providing a decent enough justification to fire them. Truly it is the act of a company quite eager to be done with a division they have no legal power to simply shutter thanks to labour laws. Which of course means that the dissolution of Kotaku is something of a forgone conclusion. Even should the team manage to whether this storm, there will be a new one behind that- the game simply doesn't come with a Kotaku win condition.

Of course morality itself overrides my personal feelings in this matter, regardless of the quality of the people themselves on the block, it is truly ghoulish for any company to lean on it's own like this. Trying to force their people out of their seat, presumably to avoid having to pay fairly for an amicable firing, is just about the worst you can pull yourself down to. That is the real scum writhing around all the journalism world, even wherein people can call themselves genuine-to-god writers and not just gaming website content fillers. Although I don't think any great value would be lost in a future of games journalist sites ruled by corporate oversight, given that this circle has done precious little of good with their freedoms up until this point anyway.

For a very long time there has existed a general distaste admits the gaming community betwixt the gaming public who shun the pointing finger of the grandstanding media who seem to loathe having any association with them. Sure enough, the gamers tend to strawman a lot of the time, bringing complex issues down to easy to digest bite size targets and lumping the world's of responsibility upon just them- it's a human thing, we all do it. But Games Journalists assume this almost omniscient role of pre-eminence declaring themselves moral arbiters and intellectual superiors. The amount of time I've seen general label statements admonishing every gamer as some level of ignorant for some primal truth that only them and their cadre of headline writers are privvy too, I cannot help but cringe. Also, it has to be said: whoever was the person that invented the idea of 'entitled gamers' needs a time out. The day I, as a paying customer, accept being told how 'entitled' I am for feeling like someone took advantage of me- is the day a sentient TV with anger issues takes full control over hell.

Of course, just because Kotaku is on it's way out that doesn't mean anything significant is going to change. You need merely briefly scan the sorts of topics that these writers have championed over the past few years to get a decent idea of how addicted they are to viewing themselves as some sort of influential mouthpiece, so no doubt a lot of the worst are gathering to slide into friend's publications or perhaps even band together to create their own underground little counter-website. But they won't be as mainstream as they were. It's hard to imagine any publication rising to the mainstream loathing that Kotaku haply took on. And maybe that's for the best- the last thing this industry needs is more lit torches from the consumers side, please god.

Overwatch

I've been focusing on the same whipping boy for the past few months on this blog, the big U- who's name I shall not quoteth throughout this diatribe- such to the extent that I've forgotten the other names who deserve my villainization just as much. In that vein, allow me to bring to the fore Overwatch 2- the fall of Blizzard; although, I suppose every Blizzard product has been the fall of Blizzard in some way shape or form, hasn't it? To even coin the term 'fall', would imply that the Blizzard of today is in any way similar to the Blizzard of the old world- which of course it simply isn't. Those old developers have been weeded out of the company bit by bit and those that remain are the inexpensive and inexperienced interns stumbling over their own feet in pursuit of some vapid concept coined 'Blizzard quality'.

Overwatch has been like a 'before and after' picture condemning excessive drug abuse, showcasing a Blizzard team that were once powerful enough to steal the spotlight of the entire industry for a brief time alongside a pathetic shadow of their former self which cannot help but repeatedly disappoint everyone they come across. To this day I find it near impossible to reconcile the fact that Overwatch 2 launched with promises that the team knew were scrapped and wouldn't announce their cancellation until years had already passed. Here I was waiting for the complete single player campaign to drop in order to get back into the game, only to learn that I had been essentially shafted by a team who figured their online efforts were so taxing they couldn't possible meet the bars of quality they set for themselves.

The team's claim that the parameters of their vision have changed is like a government trying to recontextualise the devastation following a hurricane as a 'reimagining of their public infrastructure.' How else can you feasibly go from a high quality single player narrative campaign that highlighted individual heroes with RPG skill trees undergoing story-led missions and end up with badly balanced co-op raids feasibly stretched across an ill-fitting range of PVP designed and focused characters, topped off by bare basic narrative voice overs in lieu of real storytelling, and not be supremely embarrassed in yourselves? God, I wouldn't ever show my face again in the industry if my game underwent a glow down that pathetic for a franchise has well-defined as Overwatch.

To this day this franchise has no storyline beyond that which we're briefly told in the intro cutscene, despite years of well designed and performed characters with entire wealth's worth of backstories which could be used to fuel a truly engaging narrative if only the team could successfully pull it's head out of it's arse. Instead they want to screw around slowly 'trial and erroring' themselves into gradually recreating the exact same game Overwatch 1 was, before pulling everything apart again and building it up once more. How the hell can you just totally rip apart the healing system that the entire franchise has had since inception and call that a decent use of development time? Seriously, I'm dying to know!

But of course, that is all old news- the newest of the new is the current 'missions structure' that Overwatch decided to pimp it's former narrative aspirations through, premium chunks of paid content that seems to have been disparaged by every Overwatch player on the planet for their lack of replayability and general play-worth, has been cancelled. Or so the team seem to think behind the scenes, because of course Overwatch devs are terrible at communication both inside and out of their community- Don't worry though. When the decision is actually made the Overwatch team will be sure to inform us around about circa 2026- probably after farming pre-orders of the next bunch of missions with a handy 'no refunds' clause attached to the disclaimer.

The ambiguity comes from the fact that there was actually a large team at Overwatch dedicated to making these missions, apparently somewhere near 400 people were sitting down trying to fit a square block through a round peg and failing embarrassingly through the attempt. 'Were' being the operative in this conversation because these fellows are no more. They have shifted off this employed coil after the recent rounds of layoffs that apparently got everyone working on the co-op missions, mid-development. So either literally no one in management realised that and the department is going to stay unknowingly dormant for the next three years, or this was a particularly guerrilla way to insist they aren't going to need the team anymore for a task they aren't interested in being completed anymore.

So yes, this seems to be yet another aborted vector of the game that is Overwatch 2- a product who's only substantive changes has been removing one player from the line-up, recently totally restructuring healing and... there has to be another one right... oh- I guess the monetisation system! Yeah, Overwatch 2 is a bit of an embarrassment of a multi-year project that has floundered in nearly everyway to innovate upon the first game. It's lost the cultural impact the franchise launched with, fumbled every opportunity through which they could have launched a second wind and seems to be scratching it's head wondering how to get the Multiplayer working. (Which means rewiring the game, apparently. Cause why not, it's not like anything else you try is going to make it to market!)

I actually used to believe in Overwatch. I thought it could be a positive and fun force for moving in a solid direction in game design. Normalising multimedia storytelling, developing iconic and distinctly strong characters, presenting a cast of diverse nationalities in a way that makes sense and isn't pandering- there is so much that Overwatch could have been: but for some reason no one seems willing enough to put in the effort, resources or love to bring it about. Maybe it's a corporate thing, with the man in the high castle stomping out the flames of potential before they can be sparked, or maybe we are suffering from an unfocused team who can't decide whether they're brave enough to try and innovate or still too skittish to trust in the framework they've been refining for about 8 years now. Either way, the Overwatch vine is wilting- and they have no one to blame but those within the office walls.

The not-so great hacking of Apex

 

So I have been quite vocal about my feelings on the Apex Legends title and where it has gone over the years, and whilst I'll never confess to being that much of a fan- I can appreciate the pretty solid Star Wars Jedi franchise we've been able to enjoy on the back of Apex's success. Few Live Services can boast a net positive like that, Apex might just be the only one. That being said, I do acknowledge that despite my feelings, Apex is not so small and insignificant a game in wider gaming culture, in fact it is one of the primary E-Sports hosters of the modern day. And it is in their capacity as an E-Sports vehicle that I bring their name and energy into my mouth and person once again because yes, Apex has postponed their NA tournament during the proceedings. And that is absolutely worth talking about for the way it connects to something we talked about a long time ago with the Apex package.

Firstly, I haven't watched an E-Sports tournament to completion in- probably my entire life, truth be told. (I watched a lot of the For Honor one when that debuted, but it was depressing to see people that much better than me be destroyed by even more skilled players- so I stopped.) For that reason I was quite surprised to see that Apex tournaments do not take place in a closed 'Tournament lobby' like one would expect for any other game. That is because, quite interestingly, Apex tournaments are competitive- but not strictly confrontative. That is to say, being a Battle Royale it would be unreasonable to expect any tournament to fill out an entire lobby full of E-Sports teams and just let them duke it out- so instead the final qualifying teams are placed through a series of online matches together wherein each team dukes it out to earn points until they reach a certain 'winner' threshold. I assume somewhere in this chain was what led to the events of the recent tournament.

To keep things to their essentials, as I cannot claim to be an expert enough on the topic to go into specifics, a rando in the lobby was equipped with hacks. Game cheats. You've heard of it a hundred times, no big shock. But what happened for Apex was so much worse. You see- this user was actually able to inject code into others present in the match and load their hacks onto their accounts- which he demonstrated on a few of the competing players, forcing them to exit out of the match and call the tournament to a pause. This hacker, who judging from his username was probably a 15 year old kid, loaded wall hacks and auto aim onto professional E-sports players' machines entirely remotely through the level of access that Apex provides. How is that even possible?

It actually reminds me of the days back in Grand Theft Auto 5 wherein players would be often met by flying hackers that would dump millions of ill-gotten gains into your wallet, prompting your account to be flagged for fraudulent activity by Rockstar. (Who cared because they sold that fake money with microtransaction brought by real money. So cheating that in was like cheating them out of a quick buck.) Luckily for the players they were present enough to loudly announce what was happening and get themselves out of the game, but that could have led to some very awkward confrontations if someone was gifted a hack they somehow didn't notice until after the round had ended. (Of course, in that instance it would be extremely questionable how a reputable pro couldn't notice the game playing even the slightest bit differently- it would be a Catch-22 at that point.)

Now, this actually goes a little bit deeper. The two who were hacked performed fullscans of their computers and came back with Trojans linked sourced directly from the Apex Client, and there are rumours that everyone else in the lobby received those virus' too. (Though I've yet to see that definitely concerned in the mad scramble around the situation.) The only remedy is to perform a full reinstall of Windows which, from somehow who knows a bit about that recently, is pretty much the nuclear option just shy of throwing away the entire computer and getting a new one. Seriously, you have to reinstall everything, all drives, programs, apps- it's just about the biggest headache a user can willingly impart on themselves.

That is all possible because of a vulnerability that was highlighted years ago, that even I spotlighted on my blog of the game- the Kernal Level access that Apex's anti-cheat software demands from your system. Access to the very route files of your computer system, meaning that in an instance where a developer gets lazy after years of support, or perhaps simply can't keep up the same support because their parent company has fired entire chunks of the staff, failures in server safety can threaten the most valuable innards of your system. By installing these anti-cheats you are burrowing a hole to the centre of your computer system and waiting for someone to come poking through the mysterious new hole- and now we've seen the consequences of that play out live on a grand stage for millions to see.

Apex has been developing a reputation for hackers of late, but now everyone is aware of just how dangerous of a problem it is- the viability of tournaments have really been thrown into question. If any lobby rando can sneak code to take hostage of a pro's system, potentially even go so far as to siphon their details while they play and use that to hack them- a very real possibility given the spotlight these players get put under during these competitions- one has to wonder if the current Apex scene is worth the very real risk one could put themselves under. That is why this is more than just a delay to the tournament, it's a full scale pause as everyone tries to figure out what the heck they can do in the face of what the world has belatedly woken up to.

So after years of literally being written off as fearmongers, those wary of Apex anti-cheat have finally be vindicated, and now the eye must turn to other games with similarly invasive anti-cheat measures and the potential vulnerabilities that they can present.  A horrendously badly timed article from 'Pushtotalk' this Feburary entitled 'Gamers Don't Understand Anti Cheat' actually framed this exact fear of Kernel level Anticheats under the simply delirious strawman that "Developers aren't trying to steal your data, dumb dumb!" As though anyone was seriously worried that bloody EA was trying to hack into our system, that was never the concern! This was the concern! And those wiping their hands of online competitive games thinking themselves safe be warned- Helldivers 2 has Kernal Level Anti-cheat access!

Guerrilla Games needs a wake up call.

 

I understand how 'commitment to the bit' is a powerful driving force behind some of the most insane ideas known to man, but at some point Guerrilla Games needs to realise that they aren't serving anyone by forever feeding into the most ludicrous meme in the industry right now. Because at this point it has to be intentional. There is no way that the same company accidentally stunts the potential of one of their releases by trying to go up against the might of a vastly more established brand time and time again- you would have to be managed by absolute villains or be shooting for cheap laughs on Twitter. But something tells me that in those moments, the actual developers sinking their blood, sweat and tears into making these genuinely fantastic games are not the one's laughing everytime their mentions are swept under the tide of everything bigger.

To be clear, I'm of course talking about their work caretaking for the 'Horizon' brand name, the surprisingly decent action adventure about post-apocalypse technologically futuristic but socially tribal societies beset by cybernetic dinosaurs. I say 'surprisingly' for how little of a footprint the games seem to have on the landscape of gaming despite how high quality they are in most every aspect. These games feel the kind that should be going up for Game Of The Year everytime they drop, but people always seem to forget about them by award season despite the incredibly interesting nature of the setting and the ever noticeable art direction and the tactile world building, and the lovable- okay, so most of the side characters aren't that lovable, but the protagonist Aloy is always a blast! What could be going wrong to keep this franchise down?

Well, that isn't even a matter of speculation- we all know what they keep doing. They keep releasing the game with a week, or sometimes a day, of some massive other game release that totally gobbles up the hype around the game in the matter of a few days and leaves it a relic. The fact the franchise is still profitable despite doing this time after time is a testament to how good the games actually are. Word of mouth manages to secure just enough interest to stop the games from being outright scrapped despite not being the year flagships that, to be utterly honest, they largely deserve to be. Look at their review scores- those aren't exaggerations! The games really are that good and compare pretty well against the slew of so-so open world titles that have littered the space since the 2010's. These games deserve so much more for the effort they clearly display.

And yet Horizon: Zero Dawn released on the 28th of February 2017, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released on the 3rd of March. A game which nailed so many of the open world checklist tropes that Ubisoft's AC games had infected the genre with, versus a game that totally forsook those cheap tactics to drag players about their world space and instead created a artistic masterpiece designed to encourage natural exploration at every turn. Zero Dawn had so much to offer but Breath of the Wild was like 'innovation incarnate'. There was no way Zero Dawn was going to steal the cultural zeitgeist in that head to head. And yet, Zero Dawn probably earned the most traction for this release than any subsequent Horizon ever would in the releases to come.

Horizon's most questionable entry was the VR title, Call of the Mountain, which at the very least gave itself a few weeks of distance from Hogwarts Legacy, only to release a day before Atomic Heart. To be fair, I would have taken those odds but Atomic Heart was an actual game and Call of the Mountain was a VR game so... the match-up was never going to go in their favour. Of course the real follow-up to the original game was 'Forbidden West' which still pretty definitively holds the crown of one of the most beautiful games ever made. And it dropped a week before Elden Ring. I mean, wow... you really can't make this up at this point, can you? It's like when Mad Max tried to take on Metal Gear Solid V- do you want to assassinate your opening week?

I bring all this up as a prelude to the fact that the PC version of Forbidden West, which I am actually excited to get around and play once I finally finish the first one (and open up my packed back catalogue) came out one day before Dragon's Dogma 2. First one's on you, second one's on us, third one and your taking the piss- fourth one? The jokes gone on for a bit, wouldn't you say? Is it really the end of the world to push back a release by a week or two? I'm not asking them to find some magical week occupied by no other games, because such a thing does not exist- they should just try not going up against majorly hyped super games that, whether they're good or not, are going to suck all the air out of the room on release! It's a fools gambit!

And here's the thing: I actually think this has a noticeable effect on the reach that Horizon games have had. I don't think any have been financial washes, which is good because for the amount of quality work that goes into them that would be a tragedy- but when was the last time you heard Horizon brought up in conversations about relevant modern games? Sure, part of that is the fact that Horizon isn't ground-breakingly innovative in the way it handles open worlds or monster battles or narrative storytelling or really any individual aspect of it's design. But it is exceedingly competent to a commendable degree. Hunting robot dinosaurs feels great, exploring the world feels decently rewarding, the narrative feels grand and world spanning- that alone should set the franchise apart as an example.

But Guerrilla Games, or whoever is making release decisions on behalf of Guerrilla Games, refuses to let the games shine. By pitting them up as the constant underdog, it's almost as though no one believes these games can stand the unbridled criticism of a full month's inspection, and I don't think anything could be further from the truth! The Horizon franchise has it's hang-ups, but I truly believe that Aloy's journey will go down as one of the greats in the Games Industry- whether or not this whole train crashes or not, and the more people who find a blank spot in releases and shrug-purchases a Horizon game, the more effort can go into making the next one an even better game! 

Marvel's next game

 

It's been a little sad watching the mainstream bigwigs of the entertainment industry dodge our platform like the plague- scared of some little things like 'not understanding the medium' and 'risking funding on a volatile investment'. I won't lie, those others tend to suck at making games. Disney, bless their black hearts, funnelled largely trash when they were publishing games- and Warner Bros. seems adamant on fighting the quality work of their world class studios to turn them into trash. Even Amazon, battling hard to win a piece of the MMO pie and investing practically everything they had to do so, only managed to pull off a decently successful title that stays alive but earns no relevancy currently. Google straight up couldn't even release a single game even after developing a whole unique console to potentially play the thing on. What I'm saying is- I know why Marvel is so standoffish.

Well, it's not just the reputation- I suppose. It might also be because as a whole the Marvel brand is undergoing something of an identity crisis right now, as the high quality story factory seems to have fallen into the passionless noise maker that legendary curmudgeon filmmakers were accusing it of being all this time. Every slip up by Marvel in these coming years will be like a dagger in the back of a dying Wyrm struggling to make itself stand up straight, and I don't want to see the Wyrm wiggle like that- it makes me feel bad. And I'm sure it makes Marvel feel worse. Given that they are the Wyrm in that scenario. Being stabbed would feel bad. I'd imagine. Haven't been stabbed. Currently. (Stepped on a upwards pin once though. Wasn't fun.)

Marvel going hog-wild supporting Square Enix's Avengers was a really big investment for them, and so it should be given it was hosting the company's biggest heroes in their first debut game. And Hawkeye. After Spider-Man it should have been a slam dunk! And it was. If one 'dunked' by launching themselves through the basket hoop and slamming face first onto the asphalt- which I've been told is actually not the way Basketball is played. (At least not if you're a coward.) Avengers was a dud and a low-scoring mess that sunk the companies chances of scoring big with their chosen player base- live service chuds. Of course, they still had the licenced Guardians of the Galaxy game with Square for the Single Player heads! And that was also a flop. Just a financial one, mind. Critically it was beloved- I'm playing through it slowly now and I think it rocks! But- well: my opinion doesn't sway investors. For some reason. (I have pretty cool opinions, guys; you should really listen to 'em.)

But that doesn't mean the big M is out for the count- oh no! Just like with their movie division which is handily skipping 2024 and leaving the playing field open for Ryan Reynolds and James Gunn- (Hmm? I'm hearing that Superman Legacy is a 2025 movie? Guess it's all for Ryan- go team!) Marvel was merely regrouping and making sure they come back with a bonafide hit. Whatever that looks like in this age where Marvel is a walking punchline. And rarely the funny kind. In terms of games- Marvel has turned to talent production company Skydance Media, of many hit movies, to make their next game. And if that sounds a bit iffy to you, Skydance were partners with Skybound (apparently that naming convention is a complete coincidence. Bet it still inspired the partnership though.) on 'Waking Dead: Saints and Sinners'- pretty much the best VR game you can play for under a grand. (Sorry 'Half Life: Alyx')

'Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra' might be an objectively terrible title for a video game (Which is why it's already been stylised as just 'Rise of Hydra') but it does represent a very unique endeavour in the Marvel gaming universe that so far has not been attempted. You see- every single game so far has launched itself off the strength of an existing brand, utilising the strength of already laid marketing efforts even within the Marvel motherbrand. Avengers, Spider-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy- all supremely successful movies that call to audiences naturally, on the otherhand a game designed to not at all evoke the MCU but still was under that Marvel logo, Midnight Suns- went undersold. (Which is a shame, the game was half decent.) Rise of Hydra might bring us Captain America and a previous Black Panther we haven't yet met- but who knows what that is going to feel like in action?

Which is why it is oh-so important for reveal trailers on such projects to be explicit about the kind of game we should be expecting. And from this trailer I can derive that this is going to be... a CGI movie? A really high-quality one, those models look incredible in motion, but... like there's going to be gameplay in the final product, right? We hear a lot of guff about CGI reveal trailers, but curiously I don't think this was that. (Besides, we already got a CGI teaser announcement years ago.) Judging from the spoken dialogue, the scene selection and the cutting- these appear to be cutscenes from the finished game but... unless I'm missing something there was an active choice not to give us any gameplay. And sure, I know this was the story trailer and all that- but marketing usually does the story trailer after people know what the game is on a basic level. This could be a turn-based tactical game with virtual novel relationship cut-ins for all we know- which is currently nothing. They forgot to show us all the things.

Scrambling to read through the lines of scant materials provided, I assume we're looking at an action adventure game here designed to be a high-quality cinematic experience to the visual quality of The Last of Us. I doubt we'll get that degree of survival gameplay, but I get the impression the team are trying to call upon that same sort of feeling we get playing a game like that the moment we hold the controller. I'm thinking heavily directed and largely linear levels with supreme visual storytelling focuses intercut by- well let's be honest, this is a Superhero game so... a Batman Arkham light style combat. They're all Batman Arkham light, afterall- it's just the done thing in Superheroing. Only Guardians of the Galaxy managed to bring their own sort of feel being a shooter with AI teammates- and I guess the card-based gameplay of Midnight Suns- but then what did you expect?

You see what I'm forced to do when you give us nothing to work with, Marvel? It's not like I can get all excited about the prospect of exploring the origins of Hydra and how deep into the Nazi-backed war criminals we're going to get- because the trailer seems more interested showing off the Cap vs Black Panther drama as though we don't already know they're going to resolve their differences and fight together by the end of the first arc. That's Shonen anime one-oh-one guys, come on!  Overall- I'm a bit annoyed that we're still in the dark, but quite impressed by the cutscene quality. These guys should be in the movies! Oh wait...

Dropping the bag: Sony Edition

 

I feel like I've been reiterating the same few points over and over of late, so allow me to reiterate a slightly different one today- VR has it's problems! Yeah, somehow the VR scene still really isn't where it needs to be in order to be considered a viable vector for game development despite us having actually reached the point where worthwhile experiences can and have been developed for it's exclusive use. No longer do we just have VR ports of popular titles to go off of- there's Half Life Alyx and Boneworks and Walking Dead Saints and Sinners and probably others, I'm sure... but the conversation around VR never seems to stick around for long and these experiences are flashes in a very tiny pan enjoyed by some small microcosm of the wider gaming community that have access to such tech. So the problem is accessibility? Well then in comes PSVR, right?

PSVR should have been the slam dunk solution to the VR problem and you know what- maybe if the thing wasn't a Playstation exclusive machine it actually might have been. Inexpensive VR tech that can hook up to any piece of hardware- (apart from an Xbox- but that's no surprise. Xbox is never allowed to be part of the cool kids club) I could see that really popping off for the PC crowd. But keeping the machine purely without the Playstation library? That seemed to not really be the best move. It limited the amount of games that were available on it- no third party developer was really encouraged to take the risk with it and with no games, nobody was recommending them and they slowly died. What a shame. Lessons learned. At least they pulled it together for the PSVR 2, right?

PSVR 2 has been rocking around for just over a year now and it's slate of worthwhile software has been a little limited. Resident Evil 4 developed with an exclusive compatibility mode for it, which was nice- there was the Horizion tie in game that probably dropped the same day as a moon landing or something (knowing how those developers work) and... um... Saints and Sinners? Still there's a lack of people developing experiences for the VR scene and that just leads to all the hype around new hardware going wasted when there's nothing badass to try it out on! No Man's Sky VR can only keep you invested for so long until you remember you're playing the largely meh space survival game No Man's Sky- which itself is a fate I'd wish on nobody. (The game isn't that bad, but it's nowhere near as good as people say nowadays, either!)

So what would be the next step from here? Well were I Sony and were I really invested in making this thing last- I would dedicate my first party studios who can spare a project towards making something dedicated to PSVR with one of their flagship IPs. Heck, you could even try and entice some third parties to get in on the fun. Anything to create the impression that there's actual gold down this mine once these exclusives start dropping and attention turns towards this side of the market. Then the ball will roll down hill and pick up momentum from there. But Sony have to at least push it first! For the love of god- someone has to make the effort! But no, I guess gambling your reputation and the next few years of labour of all your studios on a Live Service initiative is a better use of time, huh?

Oh, also the 'affordability' is no longer a factor in play. The PSVR 2 costs about 500 smackaroo's, which makes it more expensive than most medium-end VR headsets out there today- making those the direct competition only- well- they have more options. And to rub salt even further into the wound, because this is a Sony product and they hate you, the PSVR 2's library is not compatible with the PSVR library- so adopters have to rely on ports for PSVR 1 games that they liked, and then buy full price for those ports once again. At this point in time PSVR is eering dangerously close to hilariously destructive 'Stadia' methods of business- it's not quite as bad, of course, but it's on that road- and that is galling. It's also unsustainable.

As of now we've heard perhaps the most embarrassing news one can receive in terms of console manufacturing- that Sony have ceased production of the PSVR 2 whilst still sitting on their huge stock of unsold units. That is just about the kicker in the nuts you want least of all, because if anything you'd expect Sony to at least be pushing an average number of peripheries out, if not the targets they want to hit! This is following a period of scarcity for the PS5 that ran so rampant that they couldn't remain in stock for more than a week at some times- a total polar opposite as if to highlight the absolute absurdity of the player interest divide between core console and the VR add-on. Pile this ontop of massive layoffs that have trickled through Sony, and there's no doubt that the VR team would have lost some of it's operational capacity- right when they're in a crisis mode and need to figure themselves out.

If you'd have asked me a few years ago I would have chuckled and thrown up hands saying 'that's about the way things work out with nowhere tech'; but after witnessing literal nowhere tech rise and fall under the name of 'NFTs'- I've amended the way I look at VR. There is so much potential in VR at it's best to achieve things totally impractical in the traditional space. Fascinating logic puzzles, visceral in-your-face combat encounters, transformative locale transitions- a great artist can paint a fantastic piece on this canvass! The PSVR was a valiant attempt at harnessing that potential and I'm a little scared it's going to fizzle up and go the way of the dodo if nothing drastic changes in the VR marketplace.

Sony had themselves a monopoly on the VR space away from the PC crowd, and they've managed to squander it excessively to the point of parody. If ever that company knows where to spend it's resources, one might wonder why they ever dabbled into something they weren't prepared to fully invest towards. Or even more so, why they did it twice. I wouldn't at all be surprised if this is the last significant update we hear on the PSVR 2 for the rest of it's natural life cycle- and given how things worked out I can't even be sure that such an end would prelude a PSVR 3. Overall- what else can you say other than that Sony dropped the bag on this one- shame as it is to say.

Star Wars Battlefront: Judgement

 

There are few things which annoy me more than revisionist history, in all it's forms. Those that wantonly erase the past in order to bridge a perception of reality better attuned to their sensitive sensibilities- oh, it makes me angry it does! In the modern age, with information retention and education as rampant as it currently is there is absolutely no recourse for that sort of behaviour and those that fall to it squander the basic most tenets of our enlightened age. I loathe it. I loathe them. And you're probably wondering why I'm even talking about this in a blog ostensibly about the Star Wars Battlefront collection. Simple, because of all the remasters in that collection- they forgot all the good ones! Battlefront 1? Battlefront 2? They were already available on every platform under the sun, Aspyr? If you want to impress, then why don't you slap down some real work and port the unported- why not reintroduce the world to the several dozen Battlefield games that no one remembers but I?

What about 2007's Rouge Squadron, which brought a brand new narrative to the world rather than just adapting the battles of the movies like the original two games did, renovated galactic conquest to care more about reinforcement numbers and sprinkled in some special maps of their own? Or how about Elite Squadron which introduced simultaneous ground and space battles as well as the ability to design your own Jedi character in multiplayer. A horrendously unbalanced prospect, but they allowed it for some unhinged reason! Those games deserve the love they never got, abandoned to the PSP as they were, and that is the biggest cross I can bear as a Battlefront fan after all these years. Still- at least we got remasters of the classic two, meaning that perhaps there's hope for the team to sometime get around to- oh wait, no they even bungled these remasters- there's no way they could pull off a port.

That's right, some incredible how Aspyr has done it again. In their infinite misfortune yet another porting job of theirs has turned into an abject disaster of truly envious proportions. Who could have thought that the whole 'Knights of the Old Republic 2' situation could be topped, wherein they promised to incorporate the 'Restored Content' mod which is largely considered an absolute must for the successful running of the game- only to ghost the mod creators and give up on the process for simply no reason. (Maybe they were getting crashes on the forest moon in testing- I had to go into the individual files and extract the mod bit by bit to get that place working when I played it.) Battlefront should have been a cakewalk in comparison. A simple over-in-one project.

But what resulted was a game that hardly runs in it's most important aspect- the online. See, that's the only real draw of this remaster collection- a online audience with which to play these classic games to replace those official severs for the originals which died several ages ago. Having new servers to play on means new life could be breathed into those old classics, assuming that people can actually access those servers which- at launch, they couldn't. Only three or so official servers were visible to most players, and those servers ran like hot garbage stuffed in the carburettor of a sedan- which is to say, they didn't run even slightly.

Dropped frames, connection drops, awful hit registering-  typically bad online launches have been laid at the blame of developers largely underestimating their beginning player numbers- and whilst I think it's true that the Battlefront Collection had a bigger day one than the developers expected, some of these performance issues feel like fundamental design flaws that the team just weren't on the lookout for. You telling me there were no lag issues during internal tests? Did they run a single full 64 player match to see how it held up, because that would surely expose the problems- right? Did they even have any QA team work on this game at all? All the sorts of questions we need to ask ourselves now that Aspyr has shown it's ass more than once.

Afterall people were already casting a wary eye at the game which showcased an outdated version of a popular PC mod instead of the real game they were supposed to be porting in the promotional material. Oh yeah, within the reveal trailer the team decided to throw up some modders efforts at bringing one of the console exclusive hero characters onto the PC game with a model swap which achieved everything except emulate the unique curved shape of this particular character's sith blade; which was later amended for later releases of that mod. The trailer showcased that same character with the generic straight shaped version of the blade hilt, giving away that what we were seeing was not, in fact, footage of the product we were being sold. (Assuming we believe the now questionable assertion that the Team absolutely did not use mods whatsoever during the port process.) 

Now Aspyr aren't an entirely unskilled team full of hacks or anything, I'm not trying to say that. I just think they have a habit of biting off far more than they can chew. God knows what was going on with the KOTOR remake when it was in their hands, but Sony all but forcibly ripped the IP out of their grip the second their work was made public for them to see- which makes me curious if not apprehensive to learn more. (Perhaps during the next disastrous Sony leak which I'm guessing we'll be getting in the year. The company can't keep a server secure for the life of them.) They launched a decent remaster of the first few Tomb Raider games recently, which might have been what kept them too busy to correctly launch Battlefield!

But do you want to know the worst part, what really grinds my gears? I would be interested in this game if only the team fixed it, the same way I'm interested in picking up the Metal Gear collection at some point. But I cannot, in good spirits, endorse getting a game which remasters two games from a multidecade old franchise and somehow managed to be over 60 Gig in download size. What the heck is wrong with Video Game compression tools when the 14 gig original games are ballooned by actual magnitudes without any noticeable serious improvements. It's madness, is what it is! Save us some damn Hard drive space you fools!

Scamdivers

 

I've always been a fan of scams and scamming. Wait... no hang on- that came out horribly wrong! What I meant to say was, I've always been a fan of content pertaining to the documentation of other people scamming, particularly how they did it and where it all came crashing down around them and they are fed their just deserts. Coffezilla, Kitboga- the good stuff. Which is why I found myself so totally enthralled when news dropped of the recent scam, the first time something like this really became headline news (though absolutely not the first time this has ever happened.) Helldivers 2. The absolute shameless rip-off scam game that no one should buy, Helldivers 2. Unbelievable scummy and deserving of hatred and condemnation Helldivers 2... Okay, not that Helldivers 2.

No, I'm not coming for the throat of 2024's second smash hit video game in three months, scoring stupidly high and unfortunately reviving everyone's belief in the viability of Live Service games whilst the bugger was literally on his death bed. (I blame those developers for the next four years of pain this Industry is going to suffer as idiots stumble of themselves trying to replicate that success but worse in every conceivable way.) What I am coming for is the video game Helldivers 2, which was totally unrelated to the smash hit game of the exact same name but released under that title, with the exact same banner, for a cheaper price, on Steam. The magnet for all the worst video game developers to be rejected from the endless hole of Ginnungagap.

Yes, it's so very simple- isn't it? Just throw down the application fee, throw up a game with the exact same name and watch as people helplessly fall for the scam like the big dumb idiots that they are. Okay, to be fair I could absolutely see this one slipping past me because honestly- who expects Steam games to be totally fabricated? In hindsight I guess there is nothing that can really be shored up on the backend to prevent this from existing- sad as it is to say. There are genuine behind-the-store development reasons why a game might need to be loaded to the storefront with the exact same name as another, and Steam is certainly too large for human eyes to validate every new game to any reliable degree- and at the very least we know Steam holds onto funds long enough that it's unlikely the scammer got their hands on a single red penny out the hands of the unfortunate.

But it makes you think, doesn't it? What other scams slip by the Steam barriers? I mean just earlier this year we caught the tail end of a momunemental scam of marketing that plateaued exclusively on Steam. The disaster of 'The Day Before', a game that was originally marketed by a duo of numbskulls who greatly overestimated the extent of what they could achieve with the revolving door of contractors they failed to properly pay, but managed to stop just shy of overselling the game poorly enough to be easily spotted by everyone like what Dreamworld did. (Speaking of- just saw a Youtube trailer for that game the other day. It's almost commendable how that man hasn't given up and run yet. True delusion.) The Day Before made it all the way to 24 hours before it collapsed under the weight of it's own false promises- and Steam was there to dance on it's grave as the rivers carried it's mangled corpse off to Hellhiem with the now iconic 'The Day After sale.' Cutting.

Some scams are as simple as declaring themselves straight-up to be some horrendously overpriced waste of your time and rest on the laurels of that fact itself in order to be a viable product. I'm talking about the 300$ bargain-bin twin sticks that do the rounds on social media as "Oh my god, I can't beleive a game is this expensive!" All in the hopes of luri9ng in just a couple curious heads to make a purchase for the memes of it all. Remember that all it takes is one purchase for the team to have tripled their investment, and those that go for the tried and tested excuse of "I'm spending the money so you don't have to" drown themselves in cope to justify the funding of the next two publicity stunts they just fostered in their support, seriously or joking.

And then there are the totally 100% legitimate scams that are just the examples of purposefully obfuscated marketing moves. Maybe the deluxe editions of the game overlap content with the season pass but you have to buy both in order to access anything on offer. Maybe the currency packs are purposefully priced to force players to spend a little bit more than what they need, ensuring they are always somewhere along the path to get something extra and thus have that extra push to spend again at some point. Maybe the scam is just the fact that the game is available on the Early Access system and will never once become a fully viable product because being pushed out the door and the team going straight onto their next product. It really is a whole world out there for scammers!

Because that is the consequence of an industry like ours, as big as it is and resplendent with as many bad actors as it is. With billions flying around it only makes sense that rats are going to try and stand on the backs of actual giants trying to catch their slice of the pot, it's only a question of what is going to be done to try and squash them before they nab some. Nintendo used to be very protective over it's library of games on offer until the pathetic storefront of the Wii U forced them to go in the exact opposite direction and now the Switch has straight softcore hentai on their servers. Steam seems to have it's floodgates totally open and handle their issues on a case by case basis. Surely there has to be a middle ground somewhere in there!

Part of what makes the Games Industry so great is the barrier to entry allowing anyone with the passion and time to sit down and stick something together if they really want to try at it- in any number of tools, run by any number of engines, crossing over any number of genres- but that is it's greatest weakness too. When you can literally download the template for a game, spend $100 on Steam and get a spot on their storefront- you have to start wondering about the nittygritty of what makes and actual game developer on an almost spiritual level- which is a far more thought than really should have to go into a silly passtime. At the end of the day- Don't buy Helldivers 2. Buy Helldivers 2 instead.

More = Better?

 

In the world of content creation there is a cult based around the fetishization of activity. The more on does, the better it is because that is more opportunities for the several thousand projects they work on to go viral at once and shoot them into tacit stardom. Those who take a step back are lazy or don't have their heart in it, or should be shot out of a canon into the stratosphere- or something. Personally, I'm of the rather sound (in my opinion) mind that actually- it's harder to give a personalised touch of beauty to the individual when you chase that allure of quantity over that special little touch of quality. What about you, do you think that sounds weird at all? I think it does. I think there's certain an appeal to being able to spit out content like a spitfire- but there also needs to be a little bit more under the hood- you know what I mean? (I hope that makes sense.)

So how can this be applied to the world of games? Well how about we opine on game development and the philosophy of 'more = better' on both a internal and external angle? And let us start with the output of games and their frequency- which I think we can all agree is trending towards the more dreadful angle, where games are becoming such an endeavour that our favourite series' are going on hiatus for nearly decades at a time. When games companies whine about ballooned development costs, they never seem to address their bloated work loads to create giant overstuffed games that end up failing to connect with anyone because they pulled an open world out their arse and scattered a slim games worth of content across it. (Forspoken!) But some companies have slid into a niche of rotating development schedules which means they can machines gun games out at a rapid pace, which is good- right?

Well for RGG that equation has worked out quiet nicely, allowing the Yakuza developers to pump out entry after entry in their legendary franchise through the merit of building upon the foundations of the game they made before. They never unnecessarily throw in some wild element which balloons development by a magnitude of three simply because some people say it is successful- they iterate upon ideas they've made before, creating games that slowly become better spread admits well written stories. Because RGG are committed and talented storytellers first with a heavy reliance on the integrity of narrative and storytelling. If only there were a company out there on the exact opposite side of the spectrum to contrast against...  

That's right! Ubisoft! The guys who have been deadset on making the exact same game for the past 11 years! Their output is similarly astronomical- with the big difference being in that face that Ubisoft are hac- I mean, that Ubisoft don't really have that same level of passion and direction that drive RGG. If the RGG studio were having a year without inspiration striking for a solid product, they would slow down their production as they have in the past. Ubisoft? They can't slow down, the machine won't let them. When you are deadset in the regular release cycle that gripes Ubisoft, it results in creative ideas and passions being squashed to fit into a otherwise corporate product with the hopes it will shine through coherently, rather than a passion led idea is formed around creativity and integrity. In many ways, it's the more games the worse for Ubisoft.

But what about the insides of games? The content within? We're always complaining about games feeling unfinished- begging for that feeling of well-roundedness that might just stave off the gaping void at the centre of all of our souls. But what if I told you that oftentimes that isn't just a case of how much content a game is packed with, but the nature of that content? You can fill a game with as many senseless side quests as you want, but if you stumble on the implementation of the main quests so badly that most people have to ask online "I'm not getting anymore quests, have I finished the game?" Well, then you might have bungled the creation of a complete feeling narrative with a coherent beginning middle and end with appropriately rising stakes and satisfying resolutions. Oh, and you've also made Assassin's Creed Valhalla. (Save it for the review, me!)

That being said it can be nice to have a grim brimming to the gills with content even when that content in question is side activities, totally inconsequential to the themes or progression of the game's heart. GTA has gotten more serious with it's side content over the years to the point where in V that they offer some activities that aren't even altered in an edgy and exciting way like you might expect. They just threw in Tennis and Yoga. Why? I honestly couldn't tell you, but they're there for you to kill some time in and make the world feel more alive. The Witcher slapped a full-blown card game in their outing called Gwent, which later got revised into an actual functioning card game for a couple of years. And, of course, Like a Dragon 8 just did Animal Crossing. Because why not.

Of course, then it can tip in the other direction where you have so much stuff to do that the player can find it overwhelming. I never have this problem myself, but I know there are particularly analytic gamers who adore the precision of exacting platformers and just can't cope when thrown into an open world with ostensible infinite options. In a similar vein, a game like Minecraft which leaves the formation of goals and purpose up to the player can be a bit too much for some people who just don't want to engage with a game on that level- expending the effort to dream up a vast compound to build or some worldly work to set down can be a tad too much to ask for someone who just wants to unwind at the end of a hard day.

So of course to coin the same strategy that got me an A on all of my English papers- the answer is that neither is correct and both are depending on the situation. Variables shift opinions and opinions shift nations- so in certain instances the right studio with the right head on straight can achieve so much with the right barrel-full of content- whereas the wrong studio who relies on volume as a crutch for talent and vision... >cough< Ubisoft >cough< merely exacerbates their worst qualities but doubling down on the amount of times they show their ass. That being said, if we force ourselves to be binary about this, I prefer a game that leaves me feeling a bit stuffed when it's all said and done. (perfectly timely games that end exactly when they should never quite feel as fufilling.)

What happened to Payday?

 

Payday The Heist holds a very special place in the hearts of PC gamers as one of those very rare 'Valve' style games that seemed to hold a 'forever audience' of a type, simply for how infinitely approachable it's design and concept was as a game wherein players pulled bank robbery after bank robbery. Of course, that game wasn't a Valve product, which is what made it such an anomaly for the time it was released when it joined the cult Steam game status of title like Left 4 Dead! And come Payday 2, the developers started to realise and capitalise on this in a way that Valve never got around to doing with any of their games because they slinked out of the development space long before DLC became wide spread as a concept. Payday 2 is currently buried under a mountain of DLC so large that new players, should any truly still come at the year of 2023, are buried under a mountain of DLC (a lot of which is free, it should be said) that totals somewhere north of $200 in total. What is this, a public transport simulator franchise? (I jest, those would be thousands more expensive in DLC.)

Payday has a long history of support and development to such an extent that it could reasonable be called a sort of 'proto live service' before that term had been properly crystallised and defined as it has in the modern day. Regular season updates, new content such as weapons, heists and masks to keep player coming back time and time again- Payday 2 knew what it needed to do in order to keep fans engaged within it's ecosystem for literal years of upkeep. Under the developer Overkill, the game flourished into something of a cultural icon. And then Overkill would go on to assassinate every bit of Goodwill the industry had afforded them by making their 'Walking Dead' game- which was so bad it was pulled from storefronts before their player numbers could hit the thousands. I guess sometimes you've got it and sometimes you don't, eh?

When moving onto Payday 3, Starbreeze took to developing the game in house even amid mumblings following the disaster of Walking Dead- likely figuring that simply creating a sequel to a much beloved game would be a far simpler, and more sure, prospect for the team. Unfortunately what they failed to take into account was the fact that with a game already under their belt, a fandom of players would be curious as to what Payday could possibly have waiting up it's sleeve- emboldened by the expectations built up by a game with multiple years of support already. City Skylines 2 ran into this issue with their less-than-stellar launched product and Payday 3 ran into this with the force of an out-of-control cyclist barrelling into a brick wall. Which is to say- the outcome was far from pretty.

Payday 3 launched with perhaps the most horrific server problems ever experience in a modern game launch, rendering the game unplayable for a large portion of the 63,000 players trying the game out at launch. As a fully online game, unlike Payday 2 which boasted ample offline support, Payday 3 sat as inert software for weeks on most people's harddrives as the team scrambled to fix their servers to funnel players in. That crucial launch window, where the most amount of feedback is delivered, was duly squandered in the flurry, meaning the moment had already past by the time the game was playable and Payday 3 only really managed to retain the hardcore Payday fans from 2 who were already deadset on making this their next go-to game/ rather than picking up the wave of new supporters that a fresh release was designed to do. If only that were the extent of their issues!

Upon spending even a little more indepth time with Payday 3, all became familiar with the truth under the skin- that the new game was not the successor they had waited for. And to be clear, no one sensible expected the new Payday game to have nearly the amount of content that the first game did at launch, but you would hope that the lessons hard learnt in the development of years would carry on to the be the foundational basis of the new game, no? Payday 2 eventually started to gain these ambitious multifaceted levels wherein multiple playstyles were welcomed and treated to alternative routes and paths to complete objectives. Payday 3 reverted to the bare basic heists lacking all those ambitious innovations. With a slew of balancing, progression and basic combat issues to boot.

Support has been similarly lacking, with the half a year since launch being marred by desperate attempts to patch the game up to a decent standard which are still very much ongoing. The only addition up until now has been a pack of recycled maps from the old game and a single new map, with unfinished animations and packaged with a small selection of guns that some suspect are literally just cut content from the base game brought back in- for the way they round up the arsenal to some rough approximation of Payday 2's base. Things have gotten so rough that the only roadmap the team have been able to announce to 'Operation Medic Bag' seeks to merely make the game a worthy successor in it's base state by adding such hot button tools like the ability to 'unready' when in a lobby, and a new adaptive armour seemingly designed to try and emulate the Payday 2 armour system which they scrapped in favour of a much more boring and less complex Fortnite-style version. 

All and all it seems clear that somehow Payday 3 was release early. Really early. As in- the team seems to have no idea how to bring this game forward in any significant way such to the point that even if 'operation medic bag' succeeds, what we'll be looking at is a game that looks better than, but is functionally nearly identical to Payday 2. One might even go so far as to ask why this sequel was ever needed in the first place, and just like with the discourse surrounding Overwatch 2- the answer would seem to be monetisation. Payday 3 has been built with the option to squeeze in extra monetisation whenever they think it will best pop, as they rather telling divulged in the FAQ's of the game where they laud the fact that game has no 'Battle pass' whilst simultaneously coyly implying they're totally open to throwing one in if they feel like it. Could Payday 2 have supported such a system? Probably not!

It's always telling when anything other than artistic intent invades key decision within the development space, and the bold-faced bluntness of it can sometimes really dampen the image of the product. There was a slight underground charm to the Payday franchise before it's bastardisation that we've whole-heartedly lost in the rush to seek that homogenised vision for the future of all online gaming. I won't pretend that Payday 2 was the height of player-first design choices- the $200 of DLC makes me balk; but the game under all that nonesense offered something no other game really did. And it still does, because Payday 3 doesn't deserve to be called it's equal, let alone it's successor. But at least both games surpass 'Crime Boss: Rockay City'- for what scant praise that is. 

Game Theory out

 

We are in a time of great renewal, just as the seasons pass with the turning of the sun- shedding life and be born anew- does life move in seasons of growth, thriving, death and rebirth. Within the world of online internet content generation- lacking the precedent of other life paths- no one could know what a full cycle looked like, but now we can pretty safely nail it down to about 15 years. 15 years encompasses a full and successful career doing little else put creative pushing oneself to try and make consistently engaging content before they just can't do it anymore, either they drop off to low stakes hobbyists permanently or for large periods, or give up before ever reaching that point. Thus is the volatility of creative pursuits. And all this was initiated by the departure of a true legend of video internet creation who dared to look askew at the world of video games and see something rare- a genuinely non-condescending avenue for edutainment.

Many factors went into the creation 'Game Theory', many of which are largely beside the point for this blog, but most relevant today was the desire to drag opportunities to teach out of the video games that we play. Personally I've always found the idea of learning whilst gaming to be fun- which is part of the reason why I'm always down to try out the next Assassin's Creed game whenever they drop, regardless of the plateau of quality they bashed their head against years ago, simply for the hazy familiarity the instil on the time periods they cover. I can honestly say that Assassin's Creed introduced me to the basic concept of what the renaissance was far better than anyone else had at that point in my life. (Teachers really struggle coherently explaining that time period to children for some reason.) As such the very thesis of Game Theory really did connect with me on even a subconscious level- even back before I was engaged enough to really comprehend what they were going for.

Through topics as simple as ascertaining the approximate speed of Sonic the Hedgehog by measuring the real-life scale of in-game objects and using mathematical formulas to generate a hypothesis, to the absolute insanity of pixel measurements in pursuit of discovering Mario's height which both blew my mind and destroyed the benefit of the doubt in video game design philosophy from thereon in. (Do you think video game artists really scale everything perfectly to the pixel? They just wanna make things look cool man, you can't hold that to surgical precision!) Matpat introduced the scientific process to the creation of a theory to a whole generation without them even realising it. And considering the amount of people who recycle the phrase "That's just a theory" in reference to unsubstantiated hypothesis'- I suspect they still don't know that he did that. But hey, at least he tried!

Another important aspect of what Game Theory stood for was media interpretation- which I think holds such a significant place in the toolset of media consumption that it should probably be taught in schools! (Actually, I was taught this in school- but only to a primary school level; we really need more advanced classes to better instil this idea in us.) Matpat wasn't just like some out there who seek to discover the truth behind a narrative, reaching the creator's intent, he would also introduce us to the idea of glancing beyond that and developing independent ideas from evidence to conjure ideas far beyond what the creator intended. 'Mario is Evil', 'Mario is communist', (unrelated videos) 'Peach is dead'. Looking at and intelligently interpreting media like this are important steps to Media Literacy and honestly- I think there needs to be more a space for it in today's world.

The ability to watch and actually acknowledge the media that you're consuming is frighteningly rare in the modern day as the complacency of being spoon-fed information becomes more appealing to a the coming generation. Look no further than the recent Hazbin Hotel series, a emotionally intelligent jaunt into the concepts of redemption and confrontational morality under the guise of Demons trying to get accepted into hell. And a certain class of people out there just couldn't understand it. The amount of people utterly perplexed at the fact that Adam, the first man and head of the Angel exterminators, is an arsehole without grasping the rather obvious commentary that is on grandfathered prosperity and binary judgement just isn't paying attention. And I feel it is the good work of people like Matpat, who encouraged the exploration of media, that taught that valuable skill to a generation of snot-nosed Ipad kids like myself. (Minus the Ipad- couldn't afford one of those.)  

Of course, with sheer machine-gun volume of content being produced by The Game Theory team they couldn't be experts on every topic they chose. I remember personally being deeply disgruntled by his one 'debate' themed show during which a conversation on the quality of Dark Souls' game design was spurred on by the argument that Dark Soul's design philosophy was too obscure to be considered good on the grounds of a mandatory key for the main quest which could only be earned by crouching in a bird's nest for 5 minutes in order to be flown back to the starting game area in order to grind through a remixed iteration of the Undead Asylum- an unreasonably complex and not-at-all sign posted route that one could only really discover from reading a guide. Which would be a fair point- were that key at all mandatory. Which it isn't. That entire area is a hidden optional. I personally never knew it existed for my first three complete playthroughs of the game. Which kind of rendered the entire crux of that side of the debate moot.

But even then, that wasn't really the point of the video- it was to inspire critical thinking and to that end- it was a successful video. It got me critically thinking about how wrong the accusing side was on a fundamental level! The same could be said for some of the more modern Game Theory videos headed by the replacement staff which are similarly broached on topics the video writer clearly is not versed in and thus common details get messed up- such as Grand Theft Auto. When you get stuck in the nitty gritty of exact details- you miss the forest for the tree and lose the point. And Game Theory has always been a concept of positivity for video games, the way we see video games, and the way that video games can interact with the world and learning. And, of course, Matpat raised an obscene amount for charity along the way too.

And yes, I did say 'replacements'; because in typical 'retirement' fashion, Matpat is handing off his many channels to the next generation of Game Theory. Several people who he has worked with over the years and honed into representatives of the various niches of the brand, Style, Food, Films and Gaming- to create a sustainable flow of content for the foreseeable future. It will no doubt be a stretch, getting the audience to be totally on board with no longer seeing the classic host- but it's a risk worth taking a stretch more interesting than closing up shop with him as he moves into a state of semi-retirement. (I think he intends to still work on videos behind the scenes- the passing of the torch is largely symbolic for the moment.) Were it that we could have such a legacy to rest our heads on and pass towards the next generation. Good for Game Theory and all they've achieved, I hope they can keep up some sliver of that acclaim in the tough years to come.