The role of Streaming in gaming.

It reaches forever

As gaming starts to really develop into more of a mainstream presence, I find myself regarding and assessing the components that make up that community, which leads me to asking a question now and then: just how important is this to gaming. Know that I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but in as clinical a manner as possible; how has streaming and Internet culture influenced the growth of the gaming community? I've never been too far into the whole world of Twitch and streaming, so for me I've always been in the position of an outside observer, but I recognise it's significance. Just as much as YouTube has done wonders for spreading gaming culture further than ever before, Twitch has bought competitive gaming into the limelight in a way that traditional TV could never achieve and that makes it significant in the discussion of gaming in my book.

I think there is a certain 'interactivity' with Twitch that steps just one foot above even YouTube at times when it comes to the building of a community, and that makes it the perfect ground for the spreading of a shared culture. For Twitch, a platform ostensibly primarily focused on gaming, that means the shared love of gaming can enjoy extended proliferation over the globe. The act of being able to sit down, put on a game you love, and broadcast that experience for all the world to see is the sort of heart-to-heart that can really draw eyes. Whatsmore, in the wake of the pandemic and other events that I really don't feel like discussing, Twich has become something of a last bastion for the bored and lonely who lack the creativity and/or drive to sit down and make a YouTube and have the common sense to stay away from Facebook. The amount of folk from all walks of life that have jumped into the land of game streaming over the past few months or so really showcases the breadth and power of such a streaming service for the industry.

But speaking of YouTube, the term 'Streaming' isn't exclusive to a live feed that is broadcast to you, no, it also works for VOD. (Yes, I know YouTubers livestream as well, but the community isn't as tight knit so I'm overlooking that.) In terms of hobbies that they cater to, YouTube actually has a much wider net to cast over the world in comparison to the primarily gaming-focused Twitch, but that doesn't mean they've had a lesser effect on the gaming community. Indeed it seems that since the dawn of time, when man first crawled out of that primordial muck, there were 'Let's plays' ready and waiting for them to spend their hours watching, as well as 'jumpscare compilations.' (God, who remember's those abominations?)

Personally, as someone who has paid much more attention to the goings on over at YouTube, it's a lot easier for me to talk about the way that platform has helped shape the future of marketing. (Which isn't to denigrate Twitch's hand in that, I'm just less familiar with the specifics.) One of the most profound examples of this lies in the whole 'influencer' trend that has spawned out of the YouTube format. Seemingly 'ordinary' people with a wide variety of specific hobbies and preferences, all of which draw very specific crowds, makes for an ideal petri-dish for those that look to target their marketing efforts to their target audiences. (That is more cost effective afterall.) Out of this a practise has grown of teams reaching out to YouTubers who's audience fits the demographic of their games in order to slide directly in front of the right eyes. This is arguably what led to the smash success of 2016's DOOM and Mortal Kombat X; thus proving that the streaming platforms can be symbiotic in relationship to the industry given the right circumstances.

However that is not always the case. Streaming, in terms of Twitch and YouTube, is still a form of Social Media, and social media is notoriously difficult to predict and effect the mood of. As such, social media sites can be the perfect breeding grounds for a successful marketing campaign or the staging ground for a burn campaign that can sink you to the ground. Point-in-case; look at Fallout 76. A game which failed to land with practically anyone significant in the online Fallout community in it's initial reveal. (Which may be in part due Bethesda's wanton misleading advertising that people picked up on quickly.) Now of course, the game was a mess at launch and rightly deserved a lot of it's criticism, things were so poor, in fact, that the team spent a great many months desperately scrambling to fix things together.

In the year and a half since, Fallout 76 has been forged into a decent title that perhaps still isn't exactly deserving of it's namesake, but certainly isn't the dumpster fire it started out as. But as a momentum-based construct, the hearts of Social Media aren't ever really interested in changing their minds about a product, once they have an opinion they have it for life. Now you could argue for days about whether or not this is a good or bad thing, whether this is deserved accountability or blind bandwagoning; but the effect is that when a mistake is made on the global stage, the folks of the various streaming platforms will use that leverage to drive your game into the ground. Just look at Fallout, as I've mentioned, and the way that all of that game's good improvements are ignored over any perceived wrongdoings. When Bethesda announced their 'battle pass' systems, the entire Internet latched onto it to call Bethesda greedy and manipulative for throwing yet more monetisation on a game not deserving of it. Only that wasn't the case, as Bethesda then came out and clarified that the Battlepass system would be free for everyone, and how did the community respond? Silence. No apologies, no backtracking, just silence.

This is the same sort of treatment that Battlefront 2 went through during it's lifetime, despite how actually great that title turned out being; or what Anthem will go through when it relaunches after it's hibernation. Changing hearts and minds is one thing but changing the course of Internet chatter is nigh on impossible. Although that doesn't mean that smaller, less popular, communities can't find a home on Streaming sites every now and then. The entire Internet, including myself, practically vomited when The Culling returned with it's laughably asinine business model, and yet that game still has a rotation of Twitch streamers who play it. (Sure, that rotation is of about 4 people, and none are Online as of the time of me writing this, but that still counts for something, right?) Even this small gesture is enough to stir the pot of community and provide some grounds for games to grow from.

And all of that isn't taking into account the games that owe their success to the sharing of streaming and VODs, like Undertale, Doki Doki Literature Club, Surgeon Simulator, I Am Bread, and all games of that ilk. So at it's most basic level, the streaming landscape is a potential wild card ruled by trends and gut emotion and cowboy lawlessness, but at it's best it can be an amplifying beacon that shares itself with the world. Somewhere within that mixture there lies the face of the modern game community, and perhaps a hint of where that industry might head in the future. Of course, this is just a perfunctory glance into such a world and there are plenty more specific branches of this topic that I intend to touch on. But that's for another blog.

The quality of gaming AI and bots

Machine or man?

The gaming culture is one of ebb and flow, fads and trends, habits that come and go. Sometimes that is for the best, and sometimes it's for the worse, but either way, it makes gaming and game design a world in constant flux. To pull out that Bennett Foddy quote again, "It's like building on drying concrete." We all have those eras of gaming that we wish we could return to, times that we can point to and go "There! They had the right idea with that one." But time moves ever onward. That cannot prevent some wistful folk, like myself, for sparing a nostalgic thought about what was and what might be had certain trends played out differently, with that in mind, let's talk about AI.

No, I'm not talking about the traditionally accepted definition of AI (Which can be more accurately defined as 'super-intelligent AI') but rather the collection of algorithms and processes that make up the mind of a computer; it's 'Artifical Intelligence'. In gaming, we commonly use the term 'AI' to refer to the handling of bots and NPC's by the software, it's a catch-all term that encompasses their behaviour, reaction and believability. A game that would considered having 'good' AI, would be one wherein the NPC's make appropriate use of their tools, navigate their environment succinctly and pose an actual threat to the humans; whereas a 'bad' AI would be the type you see running into walls and standing around waiting to be shot.

In the early days of gaming, AI wasn't too much of concern for programmers as their games were a lot more simplistic in scope. Enemies didn't really need to be programmed with a wide range of possible actions and route planning algorithms, they just had to operate a simple patrol task with the player's one job to be to avoid them. It was in this vein that famous video game bosses such as Super Mario Bros' Bowser, resorted to little more than jumping up and down and shooting fireballs every now and then. The only real challenge on the player's part is jumping over the Koopa king and hitting the axe-switch to plunge him into lava. Difficulty ramped up as patterns became more unpredictable and/or erratic, which is why many a player still has nightmares about the Hammer Bros from Super Mario Bros 3 and the Gorgon heads from Castlevania.

Games gradually evolved throughout the years, however, and so too did people's perception about what made good enemies in video games. In my opinion, the real watershed moment was when 3D world's became a thing with the advent of the Nintendo 64. Suddenly, AI would need to navigate a whole 3D environment and it became difficult for Developers to get away with simple patterns for the enemy AI. Now they had to code in path-finding and write in extra rules to determine line-of-sight and determine when to use certain abilities. The old guard method of planning would be to have enemies attack the moment they rendered on the screen or whenever the player got too close, now games consoles had become so powerful that this was unfeasible, enemies could be rendered from far away and players could navigate in 3 dimensions, requiring the system to evolve.

This really started to take route in the early 2000's when Developers began to expand the sorts of games that they could make. On of the biggest games of the time that boasted about it's AI's capabilities would have to be, possibly the first game I ever played, Metal Gear Solid. That was a game which ushered in a whole new genre of play, stealth, and with it a whole new set of requirements when it came to coding enemy AI. Patrolling guards had to follow their routes, sure, but they had to be able to react to their situations in a way that felt dynamic and realistic. Should they become alert, they needed to comb the area in search; if someone held them up with a gun, they needed to freeze in fear of their life. This revolutionized the way that people viewed AI and laid the ground works for where it would evolve next.

From this point onwards it became something of a point of pride for developers to boast about the cool new AI that their games had to offer and boast about how clever it was. Battlefield 1942, for example, had one of it's key selling points rest on the strength of it's bots and their ability to mimic real life opponents. (Isn't that weird? A purely online game that teases the offline components.) This trend caught on too, with future online games like TimeSplitters putting considerable effort into ensuring that their offline play was just as exciting as their online play. During this time it was actually feasible for an offline gamer, like I once was, to buy the newest multiplayer centric game under the knowledge that I wouldn't be left out.

One might have thought that this influx of innovation would be never-ending considering the huge jump forwards in software tech in the years since, however that has not been the case. It seems as standard AI procedures (AI good enough to hold their own against a human) became less of a novelty and more of the norm, there grew less of an incentive to strive for improvement in this general area. Games stopped boasting about how smart their AI was and some multiplayer titles started forgetting about AI Bots altogether. (COD has never had AI bots in their multiplayer as far as I know.) I guess that creating the perfect online opponent was too close to literally cloning gamer brain patterns for Devs to continue down that road. (Although, some of the best advancements in the development of general AI have been made in Video game settings. Maybe these game companies are selling themselves short.)

In the modern age, the only time you'll hear a big fuss made about the quality of AI is when something truly spectacular has been achieved. Who remembers the reveal gameplay demo for 'The Last of Us' when we saw Ellie dynamically react to a situation when the player was in trouble? It was an incredibly impressive showcase and one that should have, in a perfect world, sparked interest in bot development for the future. But it didn't. The same was true for the impressive AI systems behind the Xenomorph from 'Alien: Isolation'. With a reputation for being the 'perfect organism', Creative Assembly knew that they had to do something more imaginative with their Alien beyond giving it a patrol schedule, and so they designed two AI 'storytellers' to manage it's behaviours. One storyteller would give the Alien's AI clues as to where the player was, simulating the 'it's always nearby' paranoia from horror movies, whilst the other would send false clues to distract the alien, ensuring it wasn't always on the player and making it's movements difficult to predict. Despite the creation of this ingenious system, 'Alien: Isolation' was not the spark to revive the AI trend.

So is the concept of great AI complexity dead in the world of gaming? Not quite. Some games have started to look into bringing bots back into multiplayer games, like Battlefront 2, and advanced AI scripting is slowly becoming more of a talking point thanks to pioneers like 'The Last of Us part II'. But perhaps what we really need is a huge leap forward in the technology to really fan the flames of creativity once again in the minds of creators and push the boundaries of what can be possible. I've seen AI demos in simulated environments that go so far as to start simulating the action/reaction motion of human emotions, effectively creating artificial wants and needs; the least we can do in gaming is create an AI that chooses to take cover once and a while.

Battle on the Battlefronts

These alliterations are getting out of hand...

Up until very recently I was an unquestioning devotee for the fan club of Star Wars. I watched all the films, consumed all ancillary media and played all of the games. I was the obsessed fan stereotype that marketers dream of creating. I didn't care about value or quality, I just saw a product with Star Wars iconography plastered on and I had to have it. It was almost like an addiction, only I didn't want to kick it. As such, It should come as no surprise to learn that I am incredibly familiar with the Battlefront franchise.

I don't just mean I've got the first two, or even the latest two. During my fandom, I managed to purchase every single Star Wars Battlefront game ever released, including the PSP exclusives. Who else has enough history with this franchise to remember the good old times with Renegade Squadron and Elite Squadron? Despite their technical limitations, those game were some of the most ambitious Battlefront games ever. Their Galactic Conquest gameplay was some of the most advanced of the series, their single player storylines bordered on feeling genuinely cinematic and they were the only games that implemented the, much requested, feature of space-to-ground combat. (Although I will admit that Elite Squadron made a pretty big mistake in adding Jedi powers as high-tier unlockable in general customization. It made online battles feel a little bit one sided.) But I am getting off track, I'm not here to big-up the lesser known games of franchise but to compare the reboot with the original and see if there's any hope for the future of Battlefront.

The original Star Wars Battlefront was an absolute obsession for me back when it released in 2004. I remember seeing all of the commercials and magazine ads selling me a game that was supposed to bring the epic battles from the movie to life. Point me to one self respecting Star Wars fan who could fail to be excited at such a proposition. Who didn't want to storm the trenches of Hoth, kill teddy bears on Endor or... slaughter the Gungan army as the Separatists? Sign me up! In all seriousness, there is no way I can accurate convey the giddiness I felt when I saw that purple Gungan shield in the first story mission. You know what I'm talking about: That giant huge purple glowing dome projected from the backs of those giant Elum-looking beasts. (Might be an animal cruelty case to be made there.) It may sound odd to hear that it was those shields that set off the butterflies in my stomach, but maybe it'll just go to show you how much of a Star Wars nerd I was. "Just like the movies!" I cried more than once.

To this day I still maintain that those old Battlefront games hold up. Okay, they may not hold up flawlessly in the departments of graphics, gameplay or general scale, but they hold up in their own little quaint simplicity. And as far as arcadey war-games go, I would actually argue that Pandemic's Battlefront 2 does hold up in the gameplay department. But those games now exist only in the distant past. The much anticipated 'Battlefront 3' would never be released and the bulk of fans would never come to experience the ground-to-space combat that they had been left wanting for. (Partially because non of them bought the PSP games.) Despite reportedly being mostly finished, Battlefront 3 would be cancelled by Lucasarts for reasons that are still debated and the franchise would never be heard from again.

Until 2015 rolled around that is. In October 2012, real-life mega corporation, Disney fulfilled their 'troubling monopolising' quota for the year by purchasing Star Wars for a tidy $4.05 billion. This has resulted in a whole slate of new movies, shows, merchandise and the exclusive gaming rights to Star Wars being sold to EA for 10 whole years. Now, I've made my feelings on this deal very clear in the past, it's baloney. Before 2013 us fans received at least one Star Wars game a year whereas now we are lucky to get one every 3 years. But this deal did broker in one pleasant surprise for us old school (Or perhaps more Secondary School) Star Wars gaming fans; a brand new Star Wars Battlefront helmed by DICE.

It seemed like a match made in heaven. Afterall, DICE are the ones responsible for maintaining the Battlefield franchise and, as a rep for DICE once rather snidely commented, Battlefront was a game that was very much inspired by Battlefield. Pandemic even went so far as to adapt Battlefield's capture mechanics to fit their own game. Fans were giddy, thinking 'If DICE, with their years of experience and huge budget, got ahold of this franchise just imagine how far it could propel these games. To the stratosphere and beyond, surely!'. Turns out that we were being a little bit too hopeful.

Star Wars: Battlefront turned out to be the first game in a distinct downwards trend for the quality of DICE games, and fans that were expecting the world out of this crossover, came away sorely disappointed. Content wise, the game actually featured less to do then the original Pandemic games; and whilst it is true that the new Battlefront's graphical fidelity and impressive sound design is practically incomparable to the original games, no one picks up a Star Wars game just to look around and go "Doesn't it look pretty!" Board posts popped up online with comprehensive lists detailing all the omissions DICE had made when rebooting the franchise: Most of the planets were missing, the clone wars era was MIA, No space battles to talk of and a lackadaisical approach to providing single player content.

The most sorely felt omission to me was that of Galactic Conquest. As a huge narrative-RPG nut, no mode in Battlefront appealed to me more than the original Galactic Conquest. That was because it offered something that Instant battle didn't, it provided context. Context that could transform a random skirmish over Bespin into a desperate struggle to hold back the tide of the Empire. Context that made a ridiculous 10 vs 100 battle (That was actually possible in Renegade Squadron's Galactic Conquest.) into a legendary battle hearkening back to David and Goliath. Context that a turned a simple war game into a rudimentary but arresting tactical experience. DICE did away with that in favour of more online content, their bread and butter. Later they did add some special battles with progressive narratives attached, but nothing could ever compare to the stories that we made up in our heads back when we were provided the tools with which to do so.

Responses were ultimately mixed. People loved the presentation of the new game but balked at the execution. What was the point of playing DICE's fancy new featureless product when the originals still existed. For my part, I was still willing to give them a chance. DICE's Battlefront came at the tail-end of my Star Wars fandom so I was still willing to give the game more leniency than it rightly deserved. I stuck through all of the poor excuses, like how it would require too much workload to design space combat, and played through all the DLC, like that one DLC in which they added Space Combat. After it was all said and done, I had managed to wrangle up some enjoyment out of the game, but it didn't hold a candle to the cherished memories that the original invoked. Too many concessions were made, too many necessities were omitted and there was too little stuff to do. All that would be fixed, DICE and EA promised, with the sequel. Oh, how little we knew.

Straight away EA DICE made it clear that Battlefront 2 was going to right the wrongs of it's predecessor, through oodles of content. Not only were we getting the chance to play the clone wars era once again but DICE were going to add the new era from the latest Star Wars Films. With that came a whole host of new playable hero's, Space combat out of the box, a class-based system like the originals and customization. (And still no Galactic Conquest.) That last one was the real kicker, fans would be able to customize their characters to their liking through a skins system. This was something that people merely shrugged off as an innocuous feature, never suspecting what that system might herald in.

No expansions pass, DICE announced, fishing for applause. Every new map would be available for free for every player, DICE's way of not splitting their own fanbase. I mock them for this transparent marketing move but in truth it did garner some respect from gaming critics. Split playerbases is a problem that has been killing online play ever since COD's heyday so this seemed like a positive move in the right direction. I remember how at the time some people, like myself, were jokingly wondering what they might replace it with. Afterall, EA has a reputation for anti-consumer practises that sacrifice player experience for a few extra bunks. There's no way they could just abandon a potential profitable marketing gimmick without replacing it with another one could they? Unfortunately, we were right.

 I have been playing coy, but I might as well come out and say it. You all already know about it anyway. Those cosmetics that we were expecting in the game, were relegated to be obtained practically exclusively from randomized loot boxes. Yes, you could earn them if you kept grinding through the game like it was your literal job, but the rate of progression was skewered to force players to focus on purchasable lootboxes. This also reflected onto heros who required a ridiculous amount of credits in order to unlock them. Grinding to unlock both Darth Vader and Luke would take several hundred games straight. Several hundred games that could be circumvented with the roll of the virtual dice through lootboxes. It was a bad look to lock so much content behind a in-game mechanic that could be exploited with real world funds, but that wasn't the worst of Battlefront 2's woes.

The cosmetics were bad, but the cards were infinitely worse. You see, Battlefront 2 offered cards that applied buffs to different character classes. These stat boosts were significant enough to really change the tide of combat for the player, and they were the way in which DICE intended to keep recurrent players. Nothing locks players in like providing a worthwhile endgame and DICE thought that grinding for buff cards would be suitable enough. The problem with this was that those buff cards could also be acquired through their loot boxes. This meant that items with tangible game play advantages were being sold to players through a random-chance system, effectively skewing the balance of gameplay towards those who forked out the most on lootboxes. This is a textbook example of pay-to-win and, as I have previously stated, players hate pay-to-win.

Backlash was immediate. Players were up in arms over the fact that EA DICE had the audacity to try to swindle their player base like this. For the first time in a long while, a major AAA studio had stepped too far over the line and they reaped all the chaos for it. Community managers were overwhelmed by the vitriol that their charges spewed over social media. It was around about this time that somebody, likely a overworked intern who was consequently fired, tried to defend the lootboxes on Reddit by saying that they provided players with a sense of 'Pride and accomplishment'. That comment soon became the most downvoted in Reddit's history. 'Nuff said, really.

Things apparently got so bad that Bob Iger, head of Disney, is said to have called up EA to tell them to get their ducks in a row. Whether that story is true or not, what we can say for sure is that Disney were not happy with the fact the EA was devaluing one of their prize cash cows. And so EA stopped publishing foot-in-mouth statements and straight up just removed all that game's lootboxes for a time. The official statement spoke about rebalancing and retooling but the truth was that the company just wanted some breathing room for the whole thing to blow over. It worked for the short term. Lootboxes are currently alive and well in Battlefront 2, but the subsequent government oversight that has ensued is entirely their consequence. But all that is a story for another blog. (One which I published a while back.)

Nowadays, Battlefront 2 is reportedly in a good place. Their staggered-release single player is finally out and whilst it won't win any rewards for storytelling, people seem to like it enough. Post launch content has been steadily provided to the game and balancing has meant that much of the grind that players initially complained about has relented to some degree. Battlefront 2 still feels like an inferior copy of the Pandemic games, but at least the game is not so offensive that it is tarnishing Pandemic's legacy. Anymore. However, All of this nickle and dimming has sunk the gaming community's respect for the Battlefront franchise. Battlefront 2 underperformed for EA and now they are complaining about the whole Star Wars license deal, arguing that they've received the short end of the stick in the deal. I still haven't given Battlefront 2 a try, although that might just be a consequence of me falling out of love with Star Wars as much as it has to do with EA's shenanigans.

Pandemic isn't around anymore, having disbanded back in 2009. But I'll bet that those ex-employees must look at where the Battlefront series has gone with some degree of disappointment. Battlefront 3's loss was a huge blow for the gaming community, it remains one of the most shocking cancellations ever. (Only topped perhaps by Star Wars: 1313.) Everyone wanted the moon for DICE's series revival, but all we got was a pretty launch that ultimately feel short of it's goal. I find myself thinking about the Battlefront debacle more and more as get closer to the end of the Skywalker saga this December. Don't get me wrong, I've long since lost interest in the films, I just wonder what this will mean for the games. More specifically, what this will mean for Battlefront. Given that the DICE deal is ending in 2023, if they don't get a renewal then EA will only have time to make one more Battlefront game. But will they even try? The headache that Battlefront 2 has caused reverberated around the AAA gaming community, perhaps EA will just chose to shelve the title for good going forward, as one last 'stick-it' to the fans. Honestly, I wouldn't put it past EA. So maybe this is the end for Battlefront, or maybe DICE will give it one last shot next E3. I do know one thing for certain; if they do drag the Battlefront franchise out once more, they darn well better bring Galactic Conquest with it!