The last of me

Terrible title, I know.

I come with quite the curious little tidbit, not exactly new news but a pretty impactful update on the direction of Playstation through one of their flagship studios: Naughty Dog. Playstation of course maintains a dominate lead on the market of console gaming which is propped up partially by the supremacy which is their cadre of first party developers making exclusive titles that drop on their platforms months and sometimes years in advance of the PC launch. There was a time when they also had a stranglehold on the high budget Japanese market as well, but thankfully that has become unwound in recent years. Still, those core development teams and their identifying franchises, Last of Us, Spider-Man, etc. through the way they operate we can ascertain a decent idea on Sony's overall game plan in the coming years.

Which is why it was oh-so upsetting to hear that Sony were throwing their weight behind the Live Service model, a genre of games which has failed to put out an unblemished masterpiece in it's entire existence. (Even it's long standing heroes like Destiny 2 ended up collapsing under it's own weight after a while, it's just a poison of a game genre!) Leaked reports claimed that Sony were mandating double digits of new live services out of their first party developers in the current console generation and the vanguard of this initiative would have been forced into the laps of The Last of Us with a 'Factions' spin off game. Based on the online component of the original 'The Last of Us' which was very well received for what it was, Factions sought to expand on that concept enough to support a replayable, season passed up, infinite money generator reimagining. And it was a sad state of affairs.

Not that the concept itself was at all wrong, I suppose. There was a surprising amount of love for the original online mode, even if the DLC weapon pack totally destroyed the balance of every other gun in the game- squashing high level play into the single archetype state which made Gears online so boring to invest into. (I know Gears has it's avid and rapid online fans, but I've tried three times to get into it- I just can't bring myself to care about shotgun/sawn-off metas.) Bringing that back made sense, and given that it's now illegal to put an online mode in a single player game or something, a spin-off standalone seemed... fine. Not a brilliant leap forward for the narrative driven world of The Last of Us, but not a complete cop-out for the sake of nothing. Still, the very nature of a Live Service is voracious. It is born to take more and more until you are bled dry. Was that really the kind of franchise The Last of Us should become?

Well it would seem that we were not the only one's with concerns given that, in a shock announcement, Naughty Dog recently announced the cancellation of The Last of Us Factions, in some politely scathing statements which kind of spits in the face of Live Services as a whole. So does this mean a shift in policy might be coming Playstation's way as they realise they are better off sticking within the means that have served them well rather than risk it all on embarrassing live service 'plays'?  Naughty Dog are market leaders, afterall- something like this does not fly by in a vacuum. An announcement like that whittles down trust in the concept and threatens to sully any future live service marketing efforts. So what does it all mean on the larger scale?

What Factions represented is exactly what FIFA represents when it comes to the implementation of money sucking marketing tricks- an easy trick. The reason why all the gaming world rallies to kick the FIFA games in the nads everytime it tries to sneak some horribly exploitative nonsense isn't because we care about the wel being of FIFA enjoyers, it's because we know that audience is too oblivious to make a fuss themselves when they're being robbed, and because history has shown that whatever is proven successful in sports games soon becomes ported over to our games given time. Sports gamers are essentially Guinea pigs subjected to experiments that their tiny brains are too simple to comprehend, thus making them a low-risk test market. The Last of Us Factions would have been that low risk market for the Live Service plan, to prove how feasible of a future this really is for Sony's game development efforts.

Naughty Dog must know how drastically they're effecting the bottom line of Sony's plan from the wording of their cancellation announcement. Of course the company is diplomatic, they'd be insane not to be, but one needn't be a professional linguist to interpret the raised brow behind some of the words. Such as how Naughty Dog frame this cancellation as making a choice between sticking to their high quality narrative excellence for which they're known, or dedicating a giant chunk of their production efforts to the maintenance of this live service. Of course they knew about this cost going on, they'd be fools not to know, but by highlighting the contention point they make the distinction unmissable. They essentially say their choices are either 'quality' or 'maintenance' and they chose quality. As influential as they are, those are words that will have an effect.

Whatsmore, this is no idle chucking away of a half baked idea. This game was actually 'in' production for a decent chunk of time. Developers mourned the loss of a year or so of work after the announcement, bemoaning an idea that was good, but not worth the investment. There's quite some world of difference between changing plans and scrapping others, the latter can prove disastrous for many out there. It takes quite the force of will (and a large financial cushion) to have the freedom to be able to go out and just do that. It also, rather pointedly, is not the kind of decision that one can take back. It's just like one of those important moments in a VN where the disclaimer 'This choice will have serious consequences' flashes on screen and you just know the world is going to have something to say on this one.

And as you can predictably expect from someone like me- I applaud them. Completely and utterly! Live Services have been a plague on creativity just as Survival games were before them, and if they're allowed to fester any longer than TES VI is going to have to become one by laws of Bethesda market chasing. For such a significant development studio to be placed in the spotlight of that world and for them to reject the concept so utterly is such a beautiful damning indictment that I can't help but clap for the spectacle alone. Not that I think we're free. Sony will not rest without publishing at least a single Live Service in the next year, but it won't be The Last of Us brand which gets muddied in the scramble and that small gratis is worth smiling over. Thank you for being a stubborn old Naughty Dog, team.

The Last of Us Director proves why we can't have nice things

 >Sigh< They never learn, do they?

You know I did just do a blog about this which covers most of my usual points rather succinctly, but I feel the need to get a bit more specific now that we've got an actual fresh example to ruminate on. Example of what, you may ask? the sheer unfounded elitism of traditional media to any and all other forms of entertainment. And in some cases, such as the fellow we're talking about today, I will go so far as to say that it's probably a largely unconscious elitism. I don't think the show runner of the upcoming Last of Us show would agree to go sign onto a project like this if he wasn't at least enticed by what this game in particular had to offer him in adaptable material; but good lord does his blind arrogance echo a far more prevalent and widely accepted sentiment around the world that video games, animation and pretty much anything that isn't live action isn't quite real art in comparison to what they do.

A lot of the time in the past it has been by extracting this very clear underlying prejudice from very pointed comments, that I have been able to see the lack of respect so blatantly slathered on the faces of all those recent video game adaptation studios. The Halo TV show team lauded about how not a single one of them played the game, and then delivered a product that failed to capture the vibe, charm or point of the source material. (Shocker!) The Resident Evil TV show was just helmed by a man who suffers from terminal CW show brain, and decided to run the decently adaptable Resident Evil franchise through the 'creativity' blender to spit out one of the most disappointing soggy messes of a one-and-done 'series' I've sat down and endured in a very long time. Which isn't to say that lack of respect for the source material will automatically result in a worse product, mind you; but not everyone out there is Stanley Kubrick with his hands on a Stephen King novel. Unless you're an auteur, it's probably advisable to stick to the original material and what made it special.

To which The Last of Us show is said to be a rare exception according to the director behind the games, although I wouldn't exactly take the word of Druckmann at face value, I'm inclined to agree that for everything I've seen, this show looks frighteningly accurate to the games. But then, The Witcher series was driven by people who regularly proclaimed how much loved the books, only for the show to veer wildly from the source material and ultimately veer of in it's own direction. Same with Rings of Power; same with whatever adaptation Netflix and co are working on next. This isn't me trying to establish the precedent that The Last of Us is going to veer into mediocre territory, that's just an unpleasant side product of all these deviations, what I'm trying to highlight is the sheer lack of respect from modern adaptors for the material they're working on, particularly when that material comes from video games. 

I think video games get the most dismissive of adaptations because our passtime is seen as the most juvenile of established entertainment vectors. It's also the most profitable which provides some of the more toxic flavours of the hipster phenom, where snotty TV directors can wax lyrical at how the 'mindless masses' flock to 'inferior platforms of entertainment' because they simply 'don't know better'. Animation, anime, video games; are all lesser forms of art in the face of these higher people, who somehow never learn the simple lesson of how certain platforms can simply do some things better than live action can. Hands down. Animation is better at realising fantastical characters whilst imbuing human emotion that an audience can connect with; but Disney still made their photorealistic (because the term 'live action' is a wild misnomer here) Lion King movie. Anime can covey bombast and speedy movements better than real actors could ever hope to; but there's Cowboy Bebop with it's crappy live action adaptation! And games... we'll get into it.

There's no point picking apart the statement until we absorb it for ourselves. So here it is, an excerpt from a larger interview with the man who is show running the upcoming Last of Us TV adaptation. "When you're playing... when you die you get sent back to the checkpoint. All those people are back, moving around in the same way. Watching a person die, I think, ought to be much different than watching pixels die." Now the responses have very much been obvious; poking fun at the fact that 'hey, films are fake too, my man!' To diving into the actual meaning behind the statement (Which he touches on a bit later in the interview) and picking apart how the desensitisation of violence is not a video game specific occurrence, painting a whole medium with a single brush is always, invariably, going to bite you on the arse. But even beyond everything that has already been said I just have to remark, personally, about how genuinely disrespectful it is. 

Because I understand the poorly chosen words spoken by a man who is trying to hype up his show, and everyone gets a little marble mouthed and says the wrong thing here or there, but to phrase what he did in the way he did speaks volumes about the way he's trained to view gaming as a medium. He doesn't see it as valid. He sees games as flat and emotion-compromised, lacking the impact of the 'higher art form' which live action represents. That his mind could only conjure up a compliment of his medium by denigrating ours tells us all we need to know about the mindset of the man, and talented though he may be, and the man is talented, it sucks to hear that. Because at the end of the day, my problem is the confidence with which this man talks about a medium he clearly knows absolutely nothing about.

This isn't the first time he's done this, by-the-way, but I regarded the last remark as too flippant to really dive in to. But let's go back this time. In another interview with Empire magazine the man said "It's an open-and-shut case: This is the greatest story that has ever been told in video games." And again, I can't help but draw issue with that sentiment. With what experience does he make such a bold assertation? Is he taking into account the sweeping narrative of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater? The greatest James Bond story, and it doesn't even feature James Bond? Is he placing his series above the original Bioshock, the first game to subtly slide past the confines of the Magic Box and ask the player, not the protagonist, but the player with the controller in their hands; what the concept of 'agency' even means? Surely he's accounting for 'Fallout: New Vegas', the expertly complex web of stories so robustly constructed that they can come together in an uncountable number of narratively coherent variations! And what about Yakuza 0? The greatest crime drama story told on any medium, perfectly balancing melodrama, absurdity, romance and heartbreak! He must have factored all those into account, right? And the dozens upon dozens more examples beside? Of course not, because he knows nothing about any of those games.

Which is fine, by the way; the man doesn't need to know a single thing about the wider gaming market to adapt The Last of Us. All he needs to know, is The Last of Us; (But he has to know it well; we don't need another 'Halo the TV show' situation on our hands.) everything else might as well be white noise. But to use that platform of privilege that he has been granted as the showrunner on the most anticipated video game TV adaptation to date, placed on a pedestal as the unofficial (and I'll bet unwitting) ambassador of video game narratives to the mainstream world, and to spout indirect, and more recently actually direct, disparaging remarks about matters he knows nothing about is simply asinine and insulting. I trust the man knows what he's talking about when it comes to making TV shows and everything that happens in the world of TV entertainment and I genuinely believe he's going to make, at the very least, a watchable show out of The Last of Us. (Which would itself be a vast upgrade from the usual offerings) But with the utmost respect, which he clearly does not return, he needs to sit down and stay out of his lane because he is a frank embarrassment to our medium. Stick to TV, Mazin; play to your strengths.

"Last of us Remake isn't cash grab" says the cash grabbers

 Do I detect a conflict of interests?

Hardly a week ago the Last of Us Part 1 Remake went gold which means that we can all sit back and enjoy the fruits of what so far looks to be one of the most pointless remakes of recent memory. A touch-up of a game that is hardly a decade old looking only slightly more worked on than the Dishonoured Remaster, and sporting a shiny spanking new price tag in order to suck some fresh schmeckles out of an audience of fans who really don't need to be nickle and dimed right now, of all times. Oh but hark! Old lady Naughty Dog has crawled off her porch to shout obscenities our way for the crime of looking upon the fresh cane mark on our cheeks and questioning whether or not it's fair. "Don't call this a cash grab, I'll take no such insolence from you" she spits, chewing on her gums and something sticky and black between them. "You'll open up and swallow your Remast-, I mean Remake, and you'll like it! After you've handed over your credit card details, of course. These expensive projects that no one asked us to embark on won't pay off themselves, you know? Oh and don't forget the digits on the back, I might need to fleece you for the next Remake our the boys are cooking up."

Now yadda yadda, you're going to want to defend something you're working on, yadda. But have some humility while you're at it, eh? A developer, not the lead but a mind from the process, declared how this game couldn't be a cash grab because of the care they're putting into the project. Which, in all fairness, is a definite boon. As much as I poke, I'll bet there's some increadibly impressive work being done on the Remake in order to make it accurately represents the original in new shiny glory; but good lord if that doesn't totally miss the point of why people are incensed I don't know what does. I wasn't concerned it was going to be a low effort port, and if this is some kind of strange attempt to equate this situation to the GTA Definitive Edition then let's put the kibosh on that right now. You'll earn no merits by comparing yourself next to an absolute horror-show disaster. Just because that crap is crappier than your crap, it doesn't mean your crap is any less crappy. Savvy?

This game is going to be realised in "The way the developer intended", we are being told. Which means that ol' Neil Druckmann, in between sessions of concentrated fart sniffing, dreamt of the exact game they were currently making only with higher resolution models and ray tracing! Get out of here with that 'George Lucas' bull, will you? The Last of Us Part 1 came out in 2013 and was the belle of the ball in that year and for many years following; there hasn't been so much of a seismic shift in technology that a total remake is going to utterly change the face of the product and shoot it into the vastly improved future. This isn't as much of a revolution as the Demon Souls Remake, honestly. And don't even get me started with Final Fantasy 7 Remake comparisons! That whole "The way they intended" garbage is such 'empty marketing drivel', sheesh... 

Oh, but here's a good actual point I've seen bought up in defence of the Remake. And it's a doozy, listen here: "No one's forcing you to buy this." Ah yes, we're taught to call this one the 'EA defence', in sleazy video game scheme school. But in the context there could be half of a warped point to be made here, because he is right; Neil Druckmann has yet to lose his last grip on reality and go door-to-door forcing his products on people at gunpoint. That is accurate. And in fact it's so liberating to know that I can, at any point, abstain from this Remake and hop along to the original version of Last of Us on Steam and buy it at a reasonable price po- oh wait, I can't? The only way for a PC player to play this game is through this upcoming Remake? No exceptions? So if that's the case... then I guess... if we really put this together... I'm kinda, sorta, maybe, actually, being forced to buy this grossly expensive remake if I want to play the Last of Us... aren't I?

 

Ah but I already know the next argument and it's another doozy. (We're doozing it up today!) This is when the grey matter starts leaking out their ears as defenders rush up to regurgitate the half-digested faeces fed to them buy their marketing heads. "Oh the game is £70 at retail? Um, that's actually to take into account the expenses of game development and catch up with inflation, which the games industry is immune to." Okay so number one; that isn't how finance works you absolute Neanderthal. Secondly, yeah games were £60 since the 90's and before; that's because they were all egregiously overpriced! We've coexisted with the sixty pound price tag so long because it's slowly grown into being equitable, but that by no means implies that games have only been £60 for the past two decades. Or are we to just ignore the rise of DLC, seasons passes, microtransactions and all the other ways that companies have carved off small pieces of their game to sell them for extra's on the side? Like Horizon Forbidden West is doing despite having sold at a £70 premium price point. Are we going to willfully ignore the $15,000 average price to complete a single character in Diablo Immortal within a normal human's lifespan? Because I ain't ready to just ignore all that.

And then there's the real kicker. Games have decided that despite being one of the most profitable industries in entertainment, that they deserve this random price hike right on the cusp of a cost of living crisis. Yeah, this hits hard over here in England and in the United States right now, but the current state of the world means hardly anyone out there isn't struggling to meet their daily living standards without shelling out something extra. And games want to take advantage of people who are having difficulties trying to meet their essentials, and then they turn around and wonder why people are buying less games on average than they were last year. That kind of sounds like scum-sucking self sabotage, or at the least a 'money grab', wouldn't you concur?

So by all means, go ahead and publish your Last of Us Remake and dazzle the world with it's impressive graphics and the like but stay off your soap box to start moralising to the rest of the world how far away from a cash grab this game is. As long as it's price gouging it's customers it's going to be a cash grab in some shape, it just so happens that with the fact this is literally a 10 year old game remade faithfully on a slightly prettier engine, this whole project reeks of being particularly schemey. But I shouldn't worry, people will still flock to pick this up and another big game is going to loose out on a potential purchase as the trend of people buying less games with the rising costs starts to dig into the gaming industries bottom line as they continue to callously believe that the general public have an infinite pool of money for luxury expenses.

What surprises me is this defensive nature of treating discourse like this as an 'us versus them' situation, and it does spur from both sides. But at it's core all we really want is an equitable and fair industry that is beneficial to both sides, because once the pendulum starts to swing one way more than it should, it starts to form cracks which, when untreated, break apart the very fabric of the industry. If you're too immature to recognise that, on either side, then perhaps this is a debate you should really sit out just in case you end up doing more harm than good; because this, and the precedent it will set, is a very hotbutton and consequential issue. I just hope that all the companies around Sony and Square Enix are levelheaded enough to be able to see that. (Although knowing EA; I'm betting their next game will launch at a £75 retail mark-up.)

The Last of Us: Highway robbery edition

 Your money or your Remakes

Ah, another day another exciting remake the likes of which  will completely reimagine a game that we hold so dearly to our hearts, not just bringing it up to snuff with those rose-tinted recollections from the backs of our minds, but surpassing even our wildest dreams of what that game once looked like! Who could forget that incredible Resident Evil 2 Remake, or the genre bending Final Fantasy 7 Remake? Even the Demon Souls Remaster-style Remake truly pushed the boundaries of fidelity past their resting point! Truly we're in the age of the increadibly transformative remake! So what's up next? The Last of Us? The Last of Us Part 1? That's... not even an exciting sounding new suffix, it's actually almost insulting in how basic it is. And it's going to... what? Remake a game that was already remastered for the last gen? Why? What can you possibly bring to the game that wasn't already there? Is this another 'technical remake' where everything is functionally the same but they had to create it from scratch on a new engine? I'm feeling like it is.

Not to pour water on the people out there who are obviously going to be excited about this, but this feels kind of lack lustre. I know there will be fans, people would give their first born child to save The Last of Us 1, afterall The Last of Us Part 2 has people who sing it's praises to this day even with the numerous garish and whole-hog-fisted thematic choices that stink of 'look how clever and artistic I'm being!' (Yes Neil, you had a boss fight against two people wielding a Hammer and Sickle, truly your intellectual ingenuity knows no bounds.) Of all the games that really need a remake around about this time in the industry cycle of trends with Resident 4 and Knights of the Old Republic on the docket, does The Last of Us really deserve a place on that list? Is it going to earn a spot? I doubt it, somehow.

And it's not the only piece of Last of Us news which fell a bit flat. There's the show which, again, looks like actors in dress-up rather than anything with a heart and soul of it's own. And maybe that's the taint of having endured the abysmal Halo TV series which is making me see things that way; that show could convince me that the Godfather movies were on the same level as The Room which it's mind-addling awfulness; but I'm just completely not sold on this show and why it has to exist at this point. Then again, I have admitted to feeling that way about pretty much every videogame adaptation in production. Metal Gear, why? Mario- okay that casting still makes me chuckle so that might be entertainingly weird at least. Yakuza- wait is that real? Damn it's just talks about prospective production studios right now- that would be amazing, that's the only adaptation I approve of!

At least there's the The Last of Us factions game coming out which is, thank god, new content. It is ancillary universe stuff for a world which I don't necessarily think warrants genuine building beyond the trails of its title characters, but maybe I'm looking too critically at things. (I have a tendency to do that from time to time.) To be fair, The Last of Us was one of those games with a surprisingly decent multiplayer mode, and whilst we'll never get a full game adaptation of Max Payne 3's excellent multiplayer, this makes a decent enough consolation prize. Oh but here's a special bit of news; that Last of Us remake is coming to PC! Hark? Well that's such great news I can overlook the unnecessariness of it's existence. In fact, heck I can even justify it! Yeah, the original game was probably too tightly wound for a decent port, this remake was the only way the rest of the world would see a decent build of the game. Yes, this had completely turned the news around and there's nothing which could now put a damper on- wait, it's how much?

Okay. We need to have a chat about the utter SHENANIGANS that Sony Entertainment Studios is grinding on these days, because it has to stop. You too, Square Enix, don't think you can slink away with your head down and get out of this, you both have some explaining to do! What, in the stinking cursed depths of Merlin's soggiest posing pouch, do you think gives you the right to try and force the gaming industry to up the standard price of new games up an extra $10? Tell me true, because I don't wanna hear any of the lies again. I'm done and tired with the cow waste, now I wanna hear the facts! Because let me tell you, one and all, that there is quite literally no publicly presented excuse for this pathetic attempt at a price hike that can withstand against the slightest scrutiny of a critical eye, and I'm about done with stuffy suited saps telling me otherwise.

What's that they like to tell us? "Oh the price of video games hasn't risen with inflation for decades, it's just about time!" That's bull, plain and simple. If the price of games hasn't gone up in all that time then what the heck are special editions? $100 Collectors Editions? DLC? Microtransactions, subscriptions, lootboxes and all the other litany of extra revenue sources that can make a single game drain three figures worth of income out of some players? Whatsmore, how about a game that just came out, Diablo Immortal, that skewers itself on the pay-to-win spike so far that it turned the acquisition of power into a paid chances game where speculators have estimated it could cost around $100,000 to max out a single character. Don't turn around and tell me there were $100,000 games back in the 90's because there wasn't and you'd be arguing completely in bad faith.

And then there's the big one; oh games are so expensive, woe is us! That sounds a little bit like a *you* problem, not a consumer one. The trend of AAA development is to sink itself into this constant game of one-up-manship that just doesn't work with a qualitative metric such as art. Just take a look at modern movies and the stalemate they've met where pure spectacle films are reaping diminishing returns; this journey isn't sustainable. These games companies build themselves into a money sinking model and then try and punish the consumer for their own problems by charging extra for the games. No- this solution starts at you. As the market becomes more saturated with competition that is not the time to start upping your prices under the delusion that it makes you seem more valuable; it makes you look like an opportunistic arse, which may be truer to the point than we know.

$70 for a game is just too much, plain and simple. This industry makes literal billions and it sure doesn't sink all of those funds into development, not even close; so Sony and Square can get out of here with their silly excuses and justifications. And to try this on a remake- again! I can't believe I'm saying this, but these companies have somehow overtaken NINTENDO for the company that exploits it's legacy properties the most, because at least the big N only charges normal full price for twenty year old games. If you let them have this, give up and slap down a purchase, make no mistake that they will take a mile. What they want to establish is a sliding scale where games become steadily more expensive and we have the opportunity to buy less of them. I don't even want to get into the general world economy and wage stagnancy because I'm no economical professional and clearly neither are these games companies with the utter nonsense they're spewing! Nice try, Sony; but I think I'll look elsewhere for my fix. 

Sony's tree vs Gaming's forest

How the turns table

One of the more fun aspects of following the gaming world is discovering new ways in which the worlds of information and perspectives can open up to you, with results that you never might have conceived of before. I don't pretend to be some grizzled well-travelled professional pundit who knows the ins and outs of how every business decision across the industry is made, so times come when I'm completely thrown off-guard by a story that makes me go "Oh yeah, I guess that would be a problem, huh." Point in case, this whole sudden backlash that has been thrown Sony's way, a company who recently could do no wrong in the eyes of the average gamer through sheer merit of being the only game manufacturer with any confidence nowadays. (If 'confidence' is what we're labelling callous pig-headedness, but I'm getting ahead of myself) At first all I heard about this story was the news that Sony would be remaking The Last of Us Part 1, (go-go gadget eyeroll) but suddenly those stories ballooned into damning indictments of Sony's entire corporate structure and it seems like the whole world is screaming about how Sony have 'lost their touch' and are 'getting drunk on their own success.'

All of this stems from the accusation that Sony devs are becoming upset with the main company's growing obsession with creating blockbuster titles and how they're slowly shaping their entire company towards only that pursuit. This started with news of Sony folding one of their longest running Japanese studios into another, ending a 27 year long run with one swift consolidating wave. (And losing several employees who were none too pleased about it in the process.) Now this is great news for Microsoft who have been desperate to stick their toes in as many pies as possible; if Sony wants to step away from their home market (a strategy which Sony vehemently denies, by-the-by, regardless of prime evidence to the differ) then that just opens the field for Xbox to secure some of that Japanese audience which they've callously ignored up until now. But, why would Sony be stepping back from Japan to begin with, that is where they're from afterall. (Allegedly stepping back, I should say) Well, indicators suggest it's to move toward the western market and to devote themselves fully to growing the next great blockbuster franchise.

Honestly, this really shouldn't be all that much of a surprise to anyone; Sony have been rather transparent about their business model for a while now. Ever since Uncharted 2 it seems they've been seeking out ways to homogenise the games they publish into a few blockbuster series that cost the GDP of several small countries to make and become must-owns in everyone's library due to their sheer quality. (Thus ensuring a profit) Uncharted, Last of Us, Infamous, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding, Final Fantasy 7, Spiderman, your mileage might vary on some of those titles but there's no turning around and calling any of them small-fry or time-killer games. These are fully fledged AAA adventures that are designed to rule your summer in the same way that Hollywood does with their latest star-studded superhero movie. These are the games you're going to see printed on billboards, plastered on the side of busses, slid into every TV ad spot, woven into every banner ad, sequestered into every conversation and ultimately stamped onto both eyelids when you try to go to sleep at night. Sony have built themselves into an engine for producing 'Too big to fail' games, and it's only really recently that anyone outside the development studios have had a problem with that.

That's because they make, and seemingly have always made, great games. These aren't just titles that are big for the sake of being big; they typically fill that space with gusto, are technologically innovative and, frankly, are just plain impressive. So what's there to complain about? Well, when you put all your chips into one basket there's bound to be some bad eggs in the bunch. (Mixed metaphors much?) Making all of their games a horrendously bloated mega product makes the economics stand front and centre, influencing decisions astray from what's best for the industry or the artform and angling it more towards, 'what's going to allow us to keep this up for as long as possible?' Point in case- Xbox game pass. Now I don't care about no console loyalty or any of that malarkey; the Game Pass model is the future of game accessibility that more and more studios should be getting in on. (Heck, even Apple have their own version of it!) But stubborn ol' Sony doesn't want to play. Why? Because they invest so much money into each of their exclusives that it just plain wouldn't be finically wise to start sticking them on an affordable subscription service. So there goes Sony's chance to be ahead of the industry trend for game accessibility. And now you're starting to see how stifling this mindset can be.

But so far I've only discussed this from an outsider's angle, because that's where my personal viewpoint lies, however the real interesting elements which sparked my fascination in this matter to begin with actually spreads to the inner workings of this enigmatic gaming giant. One such element being the story of Sony Corp's Visual Arts Service Group, a nameless studio who have been assisting many of these large titles that I've bought up, making them probably some of the most qualified developers in the entire industry right now. (Good lord, those resumes must be gold lamented) But despite their several years worth of hardwork (successful hard work, I might add) the Sony blockbuster machine has kept churning and they've been trapped making other people's products for an age now, lacking autonomy of their own. (The dang studio hasn't even got a name yet! That's just neglectful...) The problem is that Visual Arts Service Group isn't nearly big enough to helm their own AAA blockbuster title, and Sony seems to be interested in nothing less nowadays.

Their story over the past few years has been one of hope getting swiftly crushed, as the Studio hoped to score the right to do their own product by kowtowing to Sony's ravenous hunger and helming a remake. (A much more doable prospect for this studio) They proposed Uncharted 1, which would have been too difficult because of it's age, and instead they settled on a The Last of Us remake. (See, we went full circle) This pleased the great feeding machine, because a remake could be bundled alongside The Last of Us 2's PS5 upgrade, and so the project was approved. Unfortunately, then The Last of Us 2 started to hit development snags and SCVASG (My god, I thought that acronym would read better before I typed it! These guys need a name) was drafted back into a support roll for Naughty Dog. The exact thing they wanted to move away from doing. And then, as if to rub salt into their eyes, upon The Last of Us 2's completion, Sony moved ownership of the The Last of Us Remake project over to Naughty Dog, essential stealing Visual Arts Service Group's idea and robbing them of credits and an identity. The group had been fearing for a while that they were destined to be consolidated into Naughty Dog, and now that seems like a forgone conclusion.

The gaming industry isn't run on the back of tentpole franchises, but a sea of smaller and imaginative titles that fill the gap between these huge event releases. But it seems more and more apparent that Sony is loosing sight of those lily pads in favour of the whole pond. Honestly, I never really thought of this as a bad thing until hearing of these stories, Visuals Art Service Group's and Bend Studio's. (Who got their 'Days Gone' sequel concept tossed out of the window because the first game, despite being profitable, was not a blockbuster success) They paint the picture of a distinctly unsustainable company ethos obsessed with topping itself each and every release; bigger budgets, bigger studios, bigger games and bigger success. And some think this makes them blissfully unaware of what they're setting themselves up for; a major fall. What happens when it all runs out of steam? What will Sony do when these series and studios, as these things do, start to change as old faces leave looking for something new? Will Sony have enough of a bedrock around them to raise another blockbuster studio and keep the train running?  I honestly have no earthly idea.

Sony are a giant of a company who have been on the top of the gaming industry for a while now, so I'm not surprised to learn that their leadership is pretty bullheaded and dismissive. I am surprised, however, to hear the effect it's having to their own talent, and I wonder if this news coming out will spark enough of a response to change their course at all. Because, as much as we may grimace at a studio of talented developers getting crunched up by the Goliathan content creator that is Sony, at the end of the day they're still on the top of their game. Putting out hit after hit, crushing sales figures, raking in awards; what's a little internal discontent against unadulterated success? I may have come around to the accusation that Sony is missing the forest for the trees; but I honestly can't see the Sony of today actually doing something about it. (Maybe the Sony of tomorrow. We'll see.)

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.

In defence of: linearity

Down the only road I've ever been down.

Every now and then there develops a trend in the world of gaming. Usually it spawns from something good and imaginative, just like any cliche, only to become repetitive and overused in no-time flat. In the early 2010's this was the fabled 'Multiple ending'. For a good few years it was genuinely considered lazy not to shoehorn some sort of branching ending into your game, even when such was completely superfluous to the main story. If you don't believe me on that, do you remember how Call of Duty Black Ops 2 had multiple endings? That's right even the big boy in the playground, Mr "Too big to fail", succumbed to the trend of passionless multiple endings for fear of looking silly amongst his peers.

It was all pretty ridiculous when you think about it, as imbuing a story with multiple endings doesn't automatically give that story depth. (Just look at Black Ops 2.) Usually, all this amounted to was the player having a slight choice thrown towards them near the end that'll slightly changed the ending cinematic. (Ohhh, how branching!) It never should have caught on in the first place, but there were so many big games successfully pulling it off that creatively bankrupt publishers felt it their civic duty to conscript developers into manning low effort rip offs. Games like GTA V, 'Deus Ex: Human Revolutions' and Dishonored, all featured multi-choice endings and all enjoyed some sort of critical and/or commercial success. However, in my opinion the one which really sold the concept to the world was Mass Effect 3. Say what you will about that ending, the main game was nothing short of a gaming cultural phenomenon. Everybody knew that Mass Effect was wrapping up in a grand way and people were just buzzing about the 'every choice matters' promise that many convinced themselves had been made. Replicating that would take effort, most publishers realized, but multiple endings could achieve the same effect simply and with gusto.

During this whirlwind of a fad, there was one obvious casualty amidst the gaming archetypes of the age. Namely, those games that choose to go for a single ending. This was the age in which such a direction in design was considered a crime towards creativity, and all those that were guilty of such would be labelled with that most damning of brands; 'Linear!' I'm being serious, look back on games of the early 2010's and check reviews from all the trusted critics. Almost all of them would bring up the phrase 'Linear' and use it as a pejorative to throw at the game. Afterall, games are all about empowering the player, so if you don't account for that one time they punched a jellyfish in the face and bring it up in the ending, you're stifling the player's freedoms! (Or at least, that's what I assume the logic was.)

The thing which always got to me was the fact that there is nothing inherently wrong with being 'Linear' with your story. In fact, usually that isn't a sign that you lack the creativity to expand out your story, but more that you posses the focus to fully realize your intended story. Many great games from around this time were all out attacked for their linearity despite handling it incredibly deftly. Sure, there's some overly noir moments in 'Max Payne 3', but the linear story was a blast. (I still maintain that game was the closet we ever came to a good Die Hard game). Assassin's Creed Brotherhood met with some grumblings in this regard despite being arguably the best written (and in-arguably the best paced) entry in the series. And even 'Bioshock: Infinite' only managed to get people to say that the story was 'good, for a linear title'.

Everytime I saw a review like that I would just grimace and bear it, confused by this mass hysteria that I fundamentally didn't understand. Even back then I could see how multiple endings for video games rarely lived up to the promise they made, if not now then in the future. Who remembers the GTA V ending? (Spoilers) That ended with Franklin being given the choice to off Trevor or Micheal in order to save himself. (And, of course, there was the option to rally against the man handing this ultimatum and risk everyone. Guess which ending everyone choose.) Whilst this initially looked interesting, in hindsight it was really rather shallow as the only ending which makes any remote sense is the one in which they kill off Trevor. You know, the guy who's insane antics got them in this position to begin with. The other two endings felt nigh-on nonsensical (Like the one in which Micheal opts to kill himself rather than be saved by Franklin.) or a bit too cleanly wrapped for a tale about 3 murderous bankrobbers. (It's a setup.)

That isn't even the worst of it. Just look at those games that were praised for offering those genuinely distinct endings which inexplicably granted real power behind the player's decision; Like 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution'. That was a game which placed itself in a precarious situation by being a prequel, in that it came from a franchise renowned for it's branching endings and yet would have to adhere to the state of the world in the original Deus Ex. To solve this, the writers ended up focusing on a supremely important but underexplored portion of the original game's lore, The Illuminati, and focused that final decision around them. This allowed for a final choice that gave the player the power to change the world in significant ways without retconning anything. (Supremely clever!) So what was the problem? Well, 'Human Revolution' was a huge success and warranted a sequel. So what did Square Enix do? Simple, they invalidated their own endings and choose one for the player in order to facilitate a franchise. (One which they then bundled with the narratively underwhelming 'Mankind Divided') So that shows you how much those 'multiple choice endings' are worth when it comes up against making money.

At the height of all this nonsense, there was one legendary linear narrative driven game that proved how one could follow a single storyline and still be caught up in the moment. (Something that shouldn't have needed to be proven, but here we are.) This of course being the story of Neil Druckmann's The Last of Us and way it used the setting of a post apocalypse to tell... well, the kind of story that the post apocalyptic genre was created to tell. (It's actually surprising how many zombie stories mistakenly make it about the zombies.) This absolutely shot through the gaming award shows of the age and won award after award for storytelling, all without giving us a red, green, blue scenario at the end. In fact, the game even has the guts to have the protagonist enact a highly controversial action at the end of the story that players have no recourse to prevent. Allowing for a powerful moment to remain powerful instead of doing what Rockstar did with GTA V. (That finale would have actually been somewhat poignant without the choices.

Obviously I disagree with the labelling of 'Linear' as a pejorative and feel that more modern games shouldn't be afraid to tell one story that they know how to tell. Nowadays the problem isn't quite as widespread as it used to be, it's almost a novelty to get multiple endings in a triple A game today; but Horror games are still very much beholden to it. (Even 'Fnaf: Help Wanted' had multiple endings. That was just a VR game, for god's sake!) I'll always maintain that it is stupid and contrived to artificial force any storytelling element into a narrative that doesn't require it, and the sooner that lesson takes hold in the industry the sooner we can start improving the net quality of video game storytelling.

The direction of morality in the future

Not right or wrong. Only consequence.

A while back I did a couple of blogs that floated around the concept of morality in video game storytelling. (A topic I find particularly fascinating.) First I spoke about how morality appeared in old video games, when storytelling was beginning to come into it's own, and then I carried on with the ways in which storytelling is presented nowadays, with choice and consequence. I want to cap this topic off by giving my predictions about how that concept will evolve in the future, both how I'll believe it'll grow and how I wish it will. Of course, that means this blog will contain pure conjecture on my part as I rattle off my hypothesis, but you're likely already use to that by now so I'll just get right to it.

Firstly, I will admit that I am dissatisfied with a lot of portrayals of morality that we see in modern day videogame storytelling, or maybe it's just with the concept in general. I look at it like a restraint upon the kind of stories that could be told and the manner in which we tell them, one that has become sadly commonplace in the AAA gaming market. (Indie games tend to be a lot more free and interesting when they tackle these concepts.) To establish what I mean, let's take 'Assassin's Creed: Rogue' for example. This was a game that was founded on an eye wateringly simple concept; Shay Cormac, the protagonist, used to on the side of the heroes (The Assassins) before he joined the antagonists. (The Templars.) A child could write this and make it somewhat interesting. And yet somehow, as though Hollywood's cowardice is catching, the game fails to go all the way.

Let me elaborate. Assassin's Creed is a series that sets itself in the midst of very important and complicated situations throughout history and dumbs everything down into a fight against good and evil. All the multifaceted and interesting folk of the era are whittled down to either advocates of freedom (Good) or pursuers of control (Evil), and as a result a lot of nuance that these games could represent gets lost. I think it is an exceedingly fantastic idea to jump throughout history and engross oneself into the story of the land, (fun and education, together at last) but Ubisoft often fail spectacularly in this regrade and denigrate their side characters into overblown caricatures. In Rogue, they seemed to have gotten around this by making the vast majority of the characters completely unique, (You still had fellows like William Johnson around, but Ubisoft had already done him justice in AC3 so I'm willing to let that slide) however it just highlighted the team's unwillingness, or inability to tell a tough story. Instead of having Shay turn against his brothers due to a genuine disagreement in personal philosophies or motivations, everything was just a huge stupid misunderstanding.

This actually reflects the way that morality is presented in a great many big budget Hollywood movies. There can never be any grey spaces, just absolute right and absolute wrong. Just look at Warner Bros' 'Batman V Superman'. The encounter that the movie was named after was based after a famous Batman comic known as 'The Dark Knight Returns'. It's a brilliant tale about an older Batman who has become obsolete due to his age and back injury, he retreated into his isolation and allowed the world to move on without him and America to turn into a totalitarian state. As events drag him back into the limelight, he ends up drawing the attention of the government as his brand of vigilantism undermines their authority. The last remaining active superhero, Superman, is dispatched in order to force Bruce back into retirement and the two decide to settle things with a battle. This story was so fondly remembered because it wasn't afraid to have it's hero's be anything less than absolutely right. Superman was still a hero that saved lives and represented America, but the country he stood up for had become bastardized and corrupt. Batman was still an anti-hero who's presence caused as much harm as good, but he became a symbol of hope to the people of Gotham who had resigned themselves to living under the thumb of local gangs. Neither side was ever completely right or wrong, making their conflict all the more dramatic. (I won't say that you ever had trouble deciding which side to route for because we all know who was more right. It's obvious. I don't even need to say it. You know who I mean. Batman. I meant Batman. You were thinking him too, right?)

In the movie, Batman is introduced as a bad tempered psychopath who's happy to kill in order to get the job done. His entire issue with Superman is based upon a baseless risk assessment that spawned the iconically stupid line "If we believe there is even a 1% chance that he is our enemy we have to take it as an absolute certainty." They even took advantage of 'Man of Steel's destruction fetish to fuel this idea of Superman being a threat to humanity and give Bruce the justification to go ham on his ass. Lex Luthor then pulled some shenanigans and managed to set off a battle between the Last Son of Krypton and the Caped Crusader with little more than a tad of smoke and mirrors. And threats. Those too. As as result the entire movie rings hollow and feels like a vehicle to stage geekdoms most storied showdown. A showdown, I might add, which wasn't even that impressive. All these concessions and changes were made to the base material so that everyone could be in the moral right by the end of it. They could just pat each other on the back say it was a misunderstanding and it'll all be forgotten by the next movie. (Just like the rest of the DCEU.)

Unfortunately, this style of inoffensive storytelling has ruled the roost in the mainstream for a great many years now and it leaves us with a bevy of one-note leading characters. I'm not saying that every story should have the potential for an indepth character study, but a little bit depth would certainly help flesh out characters. I believe that this ambiguity is the key to pushing forward morality in the future of videogame narrative storytelling and, luckily for me, I have some evidence that might be the way things are going in the future.

In my last blog on this topic, I mentioned how the narrative storytelling for a lot of modern AAA games were leaning into the action-consequence model. (Although I would hesitate to call the model a modern construction) I find this preferable to the simple 'good guy- bad guy' layout as it forces the storytellers to expand their horizons beyond the obvious and into the world of the morally grey. Games that have pulled this off well, like 'Fallout: New Vegas', The Telltale games and the Dishonoured games, have managed to elevate their stories by removing preconceived notions of right and wrong and leaving that choice in the hands of the player. (Yes, 'New Vegas' still featured a Karma system but anyone can tell that was just a holdover from using Bethesda's engine. Obsidian clearly preferred going the morally grey route with the main story.)

The outlook does look positive that the mainstream may be picking up on this trend going forward. Later this month the hotly anticipated Western RPG 'The Outer Worlds' will drop, which Devs promise will be a darkly humorous game without restrictive moral paths. Last year's Red Dead Redemption 2 featured action/consequence prominently in it's story. (Although there was a rigid 'good/bad' system from face value, the maturity with which the story handled it means that I'll let it slide.) And the most anticipated game of 2020, Cyberpunk 2077, practically lauds it's amorality in it's very fibre. These are the kind of big games that start trends and I think it is fair to assume that various big games studios may be looking into this kind of storytelling in the years to come. (If they ever let the 'live-service' idea take a break...)

That being said, this isn't the only way for video game companies to deliver a powerful morally grey narrative. Just look at 2013's 'The Last of Us' and the way it used the background of an apocalypse to tell us a story about the extremes of human emotions. (A lot more succinctly than The Walking Dead is doing, too.) I won't spoil the events of the game, this isn't the right kind of blog for that, but needless to say that there are times that make the player question whether or not they are playing the good guy. (And from the looks of it, 'The Last of Us Part 2' plans to double down on that aspect.) We can even go back to games like Max Payne 2 and see glimmers of morality vs immorality baked into the core story. I think it's a lot harder to write a narratively linear story that challenges your perception of right and wrong like this, but the reward has been a generally more positive reception. (People liked 'The Last of Us' so much that most everyone ignored the iffy gameplay. Except for me because I'm a stickler.)

In my opinion, in order for the future of video game storytelling to grow stronger, it is essential that we abandon the concept of rigid morality altogether and delve deeper into the ambiguous, let the audience decide for themselves. Perhaps it's a little cliche to say, but some of the most memorable characters in my mind have been those that made choices that I wouldn't necessarily do. Those that act on whim or emotion and not always out of rationality or heroic compulsion. Those are the kind of characters ring with the authenticity that I find myself craving nowadays. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy an enjoyable jaunt about killing demons in which you don't have to think too hard (oh DOOM: Eternal, why must you be delayed?) but I feel that there is room for more challenging content in the future. (And I'm not just talking about the next From Software game. Although 'Elden Ring' does have me hook-line-and-sinker right now.)

I do worry, however, that in the years to come we may encounter a little more issues in progressing storytelling than we really ought to, for no other reason than that of abject greed. With that I am of course referring to the rising interest growing for 'Live service' style games due to the potential for substantial financial return that they represent. Just like MMO's, 'live service' games are built to facilitate recurrent gameplay rather than great stories with diverse characters. Think of them like TV series' that keep getting drawn out with season after season with no plan to end things. Perhaps there was a uncorrupted idea in there once upon a time, but it all gets sacrificed and thrown aside in the pursuit of ensuring that the story can perpetuate itself indefinitely. This usually means that the stakes start to shrivel and the characters grow increasingly shallow and/or repetitive. (I just realized that I described the Arrowverse. I didn't mean it Grant Gustin, I still love you!)

For an example of this just look at the poster boys for the do's and don'ts of live services: Destiny and Anthem. Both are games that are characterized by bland world's and lifeless protagonists who embark on so many tireless good versus evil crusades that the terms start losing all meaning. The Destiny team scrapped their early ideas of splitting their player base by revealing a cold truth about the godlike-entity know as 'The Traveller' and seeing which players picked which side. Instead they chose a 'villian-of-the-week' model which is easily forgettable and fails to engage the critical thinking of their consumers beyond the thought "Which gun should I kill this Hive drone with?". Anthem, on the otherhand, was so directionless that the team has completely abandoned their story plans, leaving the barebones of a narrative without any idea of whether of not an actual narrative will ever pick up. (Not to mention that the story that was there amounted to another 'destory the ultimate evil' plot.)

This is especially distressing because Anthem's developer, Bioware, should really be leading the charge when it comes to revolutionary storytelling in games. Once upon a time, Bioware were the crafters of choice based narratives that pushed the rest of the RPG industry to catch-up. Now they've lost their special spark and become a vending machine for boring storytelling. And if you're thinking 'Hey, that's just one game. Maybe they'll get their groove back someday.' First of all you're wrong, 'Mass Effect: Andromeda' was a similarly badly written game. Secondly, you're still wrong, leaks tell us that Bioware's next game, Dragon Age 4, has been retooled into being a 'live service' too.

Bethesda have gone the route of live services as well with Fallout 76, following hotly off the heels of the narratively disappointing Fallout 4. (Although, in their defence, Bethesda have never exactly been exceptional in the storytelling department.) And the long promised 'Beyond Good and Evil 2' has been revealed to be a live service before we've even had a chance to learn anything about the gameplay. It seems that there is a trend picking up for jumping on this bandwagon and, giving how potentially profitable this is, I fear it could otherthrow the positive example being set by studios like Rockstar and CD Projekt Red. (However, it must be noted, that the 'Live service' model was perpetuated by Rockstar in the first place. They are our saviors and our condemners.)

Given the evidence, I feel it's safe to say that live service games are certain to have poor narratives that refuse to take risks. (Just like Hollywood.) So the direction of morality in storytelling could be grim as we slowly slink back into the dark ages of good versus evil plots only this time with but a modicum of the passion thrown in. Although I suppose this is more of a critique of the industry rather than the storytellers themselves.

Morality has the potential to become really ascendant in the future or really basic, and that may seem very middle-of-the-road for me to say but I genuinely mean that we could be straddling between those two extremes. However if I make the bold assumption that the future of video game storytelling will be placed in the hands of the storytellers, then I can certainly hold some hope for the future. Directors like Neil Druckmann, Cain & Boyarsky and those Polish guys who's names I couldn't hope to spell behind Cyperpunk, all seem dedicated to evolving traditional morality into something subversive and transcendent, and that is something that I crave to see more of in my games. Whether we will be lucky enough to see this play out in the future of our games, is a matter of fate. And maybe a little bit of Karma.