Amending the Anthem

 I can fix it: I have the imagination!

Live Service games: The final frontier. Aside from the mastermind of the genre, Destiny itself, it seems that the 'Live Service' style of game is one forever circling the drain ready to swallow up the unwary. A missing link between single player focused personally driven narrative and massively multiplayer bigger-picture gradually unveiling narrative; it never seems able to grasp onto that core audience of people who'll love it for what it is. Probably because so many of these games try to be exactly what Destiny is, not realising that Destiny was a success case of funding, development and novelty that even then had a plethora of growing pains in the beginning. Still, there has to be a way to do one of these games right. Destiny, and I guess the Division, can't live as sole arbiters on what it is to be a healthy live Service.

No, in fact I'm convinced that there is some missing substance that all these games have lost and I'm going to discover what it is as I unravel the method through which we might theoretically reboot some of the saddest failures. Avengers recently shut off all updates, and though I wish I could fix that one up first- I'll be honest it's a difficult conundrum to solve. Superhero's as a genre just doesn't seem to work from a fundamental level with what a Live Service functions on, as we've seen twice already with Avengers and Gotham Knights, (I know Knights was an offline Live Service, but the principal was the same) and we're about to see it a third time when 'Suicide Squad: Kills the Justice League' commits Seppuku. So I want to take look at an easier game to work with, Bioware's supposed opus: Anthem.

Now Anthem was one of those games doomed from the start, with no one quite knowing what the game they were making even was until the E3 trailer team informed them and the audience in the same moment. But what was there appealed at least conceptually. A high fantasy sci-fi world with mech suits and a mysterious power called 'the Anthem' left behind by the old gods. It had this 'Sci Fi channel' vibe to it with a lush and diverse city of people's kept within a massive fortress surrounded by untameable wilds full of wild monsters, bandits and eye-pleasing visual delights. It had all the looks to be a hit, and even it's world seemed functional enough to support this style of modular progression, expedition based gameplay snippets and slow unfurl narrative progression. It could have worked! But it didn't.

Largely I'd say this was because of the 'lack of vision' problem. This game was thrown together at the last minute, the team had no way of creating enough content to keep a new player base happy and had to stretch out what they could make until it was stringy and ugly- but in the world of imagination we can restart development with intention from day one and propose what the game could have focused on instead. And to start with, I think that Anthem should have shifted pace from creating a WOW shrunk down experience (like what Destiny shoots for) and try for a more Runescape style of game with a unique Bioware flavouring sprinkled on top for good measure. Don't understand what I mean by that? Don't worry, I've been brainstorming this for at least a year at this point.

Now from the getgo I think that most Live Service titles, Anthem included, would be vastly improved by going the route of providing 'vertical progression paths' rather than the genre-standard 'Horizontal progression'. Essentially what I mean by this is giving players an incentive to progress down the skills and activities they come to like rather than down some vague universal 'core level' like most RPGs already do. If, instead of focusing on purely getting stronger, the game provided a range of activities that players could level up their proficiency at doing, such as what Runescape offers, you'd have yourselves a fertile field for player constructed storytelling to thrive. For example, let's say that one such activity was being an Escort Javelin for the various merchants travelling the land. Completing basic escort jobs unlock more dangerous routes against complicated land- travelling across sea or in the sky- facing different threats along the way. The endgame version of these escort missions could have you safeguarding a merchant through an active 'Anthem' whilst it rages about, teraforming giant chunks out of the ground, dealing mind-bending effects of one of god's tools gone haywire.

The effect that specifications like this would have is in providing some sense of roleplay without making the entire product a 'hard RP' dystopia like you'll find in some of those 'Sandbox MMO's which never seem to catch on too well. Players will naturally gravitate towards activities that they enjoy and assume those roles within the ecosystem of the world, giving them an intrinsic reason to grow attached to the world of Anthem. Now they won't just be logging on to hit the next level cap, they're checking in to fulfil their duty hunting down the overbearing wildlife, or collecting rare materials from dangerous areas of the map. Of course they'll be players who want to be good at everything, and they'll be welcome to try. All that the developers would need to do from here would be to ensure that each play archetype is catered to as development progresses to tell the larger narrative.

But perhaps the biggest change in my vision of Anthem would be how it handles it's narrative. Bioware famously stepped away from their traditional storytelling methods by reasoning they wouldn't be possible within a live service space. Which meant no meaningful choices, no fleshing out your character with personally driven shifts in perspective, no relationship building or breaking with people around you- everyone had to follow the same static narrative because otherwise there would be narrative inconsistency. Well I've figured out the solution and it's a real special one. Get this: Instancing! But seriously, instanced main story objectives is how RPG MMO's like TOR handles their stories and it allows for everything that Bioware said was impossible. TOR has it's choice based storylines, (although I do critique the worth of those choices in the main narratives of The Old Republic. A more narrowly themed game like Anthem could definitely improve upon that part of the formula) companion relationship building and grouping up with friends whilst playing separate story objectives. This simple approach would have let Bioware play to their strengths whilst trying something new.

And finally, in a sort of wrap up of everything I've said: the world of Anthem needed to be more interactive to make it feel liveable. Even simple things like the ability to sit and have a drink at the bar adds wonders to the immersion factor. Read some in-universe newspaper, wake up in the infirmary after getting KO'd and choosing not to respawn at checkpoint in a mission, spotting key narrative members out and about and sharing a few lines of dialogue: this is the heart of a proper liveable world that Anthem, and games of it's kind, are so often missing. Sure, Anthem's problems ran a lot deeper than the game which was in the planning sheets, but in a perfect world with perfect development and a perfect launch: this was the Anthem I wanted to see. And maybe with a bit of luck it will be the framework of a Live Service we'll see someday in the future.

The E-Sports dream bubble is bursting

 goo goo gajoob

E-Sports were first brought to my attention as a bizarre offshoot of the slowly bubbling world of gaming that didn't even feel real when I first heard about it. A collection of people who play games really well being flown around the world to play those same games on stage in-front of crowds of thousands where they call themselves athletes? It kind of felt like some- elaborate long con. Of course, at the time I was used to the common conception of athlete being someone who pushed themselves to the physical limit of their body in a specific field, not... not what E-Sports is doing and has done. It felt a little inappropriate to compare the two, and it still does today. And the distinction between traditional sports and Esports is only becoming more clear as the illusion of the E-Sports bubble is beginning to burst in a very ugly fashion.

You see, what is one of the most commonly accepted factors about traditional international sports teams? That they have a lot of money at their disposal, of course. Money to travel around the world, money to enter competitions, money to pay their talent a salary to keep fit and trained for the next match or event- and this is usually money that appears to be healthy sourced and kept up to date. And this always felt like a pretty safe assumption to make given how long these sports have been going on, the size of their regular events and seasons and the lavish, seemingly stable, lives that their top athletes live. In many parts of the world, striking it big in sports is the only feasible way to escape the dire living conditions you are subjected to and make something of yourself. Why wouldn't the same be true about ESports?

Well, in short- because E-Sports is more held up by spit and sandpaper then the iron-wrought bonds of the sports industry. For all of it's life Electronic Sports has aped it's more active cousin, making plays at stars with lavish over-excessive lifestyles, hosting grand arena events, spending ungodly amounts of money in marketing such that the everyday man was more likely to get excited and pay attention. But there does seem to be a barrier to entry with a lot of E-Sports games- because gaming tastes seem to be pretty temperamental. We haven't yet reached that stage where families of people become inducted from an early age to all be rapid fans of League of Legends, such that they plan and watch it passionately in all their free time. We don't really have any societally accepted 'cult of E-Sports' like there are 'Cults of Football'. So E-Sports was never in that one-to-one position it always wanted to be.

But what's the one thing worse than lacking the perception you want to have on the world? Lacking the funds that you play at having. Which isn't all true; of course insane amounts of money had existed around E-Sports and was being shot about as though out of a giant cannon onto the world around- but it was never earned funds. Rather the E-Sports industry was being thrust aloft on the back of venture capitalists and funding groups that saw themselves as getting on the groundfloor of the next international sporting sensation. They were opportunists worming their way into the opportunity of a lifetime, sinking in hundreds of millions for an inevitable return of hundreds of billions once the E-Sports scene was every bit as big as Basketball or Football. Afterall, games are the most profitable form of entertainment- so they would obviously manage to reach the same accolade in spectator sports, right? 

No! Of course not! Why would you even- sports and TV have been bunk buddies since the inception of broadcasting, from the radio to televised broadcasts, we've been watching people play every kind of outdoor activity from the safety of the indoors since before the time of most of our grandparents. Why is that important? Because TV, and the advertising world which shapes itself to the standards of TV, feel safe with spending their money on Sports; and if you watch any popular sporting even you'll know that it's the advertisers keeping the lights on. Concessions, merchandise, outside funding is great for buying those Lamborghini's for the top percentile, but the daily wages are paid for in the blood of the advertising agencies. And gaming has never managed to make itself advertiser friendly.

It really dates back to the divide between 'new' and 'old' forms of media, terms that have pretty much lost all meaning in the several decades since gaming's inception. Old media found the threat of rising new media as an encroachment on their territory, thus began the scapegoating campaign that alienated a whole generation to gaming. Unruly children? Must be the games. People aren't attending church as often as they once did? Must be because they're home playing games. A horrific gun-related tragedy has taken the lives of people? Must be all that time with a controller in his hand, training him how to kill! And to this day the shadow of that perception still remains, such that violent video games are judged more harshly than films with comparable levels of violence.

And guess what, all those popular E-sports games: LOL, DOTA, COD, Valorant; they're all pretty violent given their focus on competition against others. Of course, not even Call of Duty is violent and bloody enough to induce 'poor taste' censors anymore, but that doesn't matter. Unless they can find some sort of way to generate significant income and revenue without mainstream advertisers, preferably by becoming mainstream, the E-Sports industry doesn't really have that much of a future outside of it's gaming niche. Most every big E-Sports team that was once the belle of the ball five years ago is scaling back significantly or teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. It's getting to the point where FaZe may have to call up that favour which enigmatic billionaire Bruce Wayne owes them after they went on that adventure for his caped friend.

As if to underline how dire the situation is: Snoop Dogg is leaving FaZe. That's right, he's bailing from his position on the board and as part of the roster effectively immediately, forever scarring the team he contributed so much to- what do you mean you didn't know Snoop was a part of FaZe? Sure he was, for about a year. Which goes to show you how dire things are. If old world celebrities are smelling the roses and leaving you behind in the dust, you've way too far gone with the wind. At this point, following this trajectory, by 2024 the single best E-Sports team in the world, by default of being the only remaining team, will be Moist E-Sports. And you know what? That's a world I don't even feel bad about approaching.

XCOM Enemy Unknown versus XCOM 2

 The favourite child

I've made no secret of my love for the Firaxis XCOM games that pit the tactical mind of the player against hoards of AI Alien invaders in an endlessly replayable campaign of one-up-manship. They are brilliant revivals of the XCOM brand, bringing with them a resurrection for that entire sub-genre of games that have spawned an entire cadre of similar style titles across some niche tactical corners of the industry. Though I yearn for the third entry, the first two are just so good on their own- bringing to their favour almost entirely distinct styles of game such that they can be experienced again and again in succession without the titles becoming stale- that I'm perfectly happy for the team to take their sweet time reimaging the idea in another manner that is just as good, and worth coming back to, as the first two entries. But we never can leave it just at that, now can we?

Afterall, who wants to just be cordial when you can be aggressive and pick sides in a conflict totally of your own fabrication? Why say both games are perfectly as fine as one another, and XCOM 1 still holds up fine against it's younger sibling, when you can instead pit both games in a death battle against one another, in an attempt to figure out who holds the superior position? Actually, I've pondered for a while which of the two games I like more, and outside of the obvious improvements in elements such as unit customisation and graphical yield, the margin is remarkably thin. It's often said that a sequel is about improvement, but I think one that can step to the side and achieve as high marks as the original and deserve every bit as much praise, if not more so for not retreading what has already been carved out. Which I guess means we're going to have to get objective about this.

Such as by analysing which of the two games handles their DLC better. In which I think XCOM 1 actually might do a superior job. Now I've forgoing the 'rerelease' expansions in this comparison and thinking more of the raw DLC snippets that were injected into both games, for which there is little competition in my mind. XCOM: Enemy Unknown included a few unique operatives that could be unlocked through special missions that were slotted into the rotation of randomly generated missions and one complete chain of quests. It was simple and neatly fitted within any campaign with tipping the boat. XCOM 2 were a lot more ambitious with their DLC, but a lot more sloppy with their implementation. The Alien Hunters DLC is notorious for introducing new Boss aliens that fundamentally broke the balance of the base game, turning the turn based tactical shooter into a randomly luck dice roll for getting lucky spawns. And selling cosmetic packs felt real weird for the PC audience, who had just been given access to easily accessible mods in the same game.

Shrinking into the base game itself can offer us a more concentrated comparison of the game flow, and the way that XCOM 1 has us affixed to the eb and flow of a 'disaster clock' whereas XCOM 2 is more freeform but shackled to an unescapable doomsday clock that limits the length of any campaign with an unescapable full stop. XCOM Enemy Unknown's clock is more of a workable and playable system of managing various countries 'panic' level, which can wind itself into the tactical planning of what mission to pick or when to execute certain 'clear the board' missions that relieve the whole world's tensions all at the same time. XCOM 2, on the otherhand, held it's campaign time limit like a sword over the player's head at all times, unflinching and unmanipulable. Yes, there were small actions to stall the march, but you can only every pause the needle, never halt it. Personally, I prefer the storytelling range of XCOM 1's system, over the static and oppressive inevitability of XCOM 2's.

Character class systems also received something of an overhaul in XCOM 2, both to match the thematic shift from 'protectors' to 'freedom fighters' and to provide greater opportunity for build variation even when playing two pawns of the same class. Now the XCOM line-up of classes does provide everything you need on a basic level when it comes to RPG progression and within the scope of the tactical gameplay that's actually more than enough to keep most players busy and satisfied when squad crafting. However, XCOM 2 does correctly identify that in games like these, the more unique our characters are the more of a soul they feel like they have. The subclasses of XCOM 2, alongside the levelling paths it borrows from one, lay out a better spread of possibility- there's little spin to really apply here, the sequel just does it better hands down.

As these games are built around the concept of replayability, these game's ability to conjure up unique feeling play arenas based on the assets provided to the computer is important to making each playthrough feel somewhat fresh. Which is probably where XCOM: Enemy Unknown really starts to show it's age in an unescapable. It isn't long into anyone's XCOM career when they start to recognise the exact layout of locations they've cleared that were allegedly in another country altogether, which in turn makes the memorisation of Alien placement fairly trivial once you know your areas well enough. The solution to this is conceptually simple, and it's exactly what XCOM 2 does. More variety, both in potential map layouts and the archetype of those maps; creating maps that feel distinct, even when you're treading the same basic sort of themed location you've done before.

There are also the full conversion DLCs. The big DLCs that take the base game and shuffle it around a bit with focuses on whole new factions, or gameplay systems, which typically create the 'final form' of these XCOM Games. XCOM 1's 'Enemy Within' gave us a new faction and questline, alongside a new class of Mech Units that totally changed up the power dynamic of the late game now that players had a foil to big Alien Mechs. But it also introduced a new resource in a haphazard implementation that threw off the carefully designed gait of the basic gameplay too. 'Meld' kind of sucks to collect in the early game for it's time limit, but at the same time the resource ends up being an essential collectible for enjoying all the really cool mech and psionic systems in the late game. XCOM 2's 'War of the Chosen', on the otherhand, is a total powerhouse. Throwing in several new classes, an entire new breed of unique boss that actually works within the established game, reworking some of the badly implemented DLCs that I mentioned earlier and providing a new playthrough full of enough content to feel like a follow up entry. 'WOTC' is a must play for any XCOM fan, 'Enemy Within' is more of a nice cherry atop of the XCOM 1 cake.

At the end of the day, the thing that makes the XCOM games special is that there is no one game that is all around better than the other, as I said they're such different beasts they can co-exist as partners within this expansive industry of ours completely happily. Personally, I'm drawn by my mood to one game or the other, because I favour them both equally, even as one handles certain aspects better than the other. In my mind, the ideal sequel is one that can live like this, in those instances where people throw up their hands wondering how a follow up could even be conceived. Hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, equals in quality and worthy as competitors. And then there's XCOM Chimera Squad. That game was alright as well, I guess...

Music in plot

Play it again, Johnny Guitar.

One of the aspects of the games industry that I love just so dearly is how much of a mash-up it can be of different vocations and proficiencies to create a sort-of superflux of creative artforms. You'll have artists who work on creating the visuals of the world, not just what occupies the main screen but what is scrawled in that small in-descript edge of some far-away corner that no one ever explores. You have sound talent who create massive boards that capture not only the mood of the moment, with stabbing daggers of audio emotion for the right moments, but also background suites of setting tunes that rustle with the wind, influencing the wider world with the subtlest of tweaks. And in the manner of the blog in question today; the use of specific music tracks in the creation of setting and world.

By the use of 'music track', I'm referring to traditional beats of songs, with traditionally understood beginnings, middles and ends, like you might find in an album; but I do want to touch a bit on orchestral suites as well. Because, the use of big bands and musical artists has boomed across the game development medium since it's blossom to prominence, whereas once movies might have been their biggest employers. Career and session musicians can often find their services sought after by all the hundreds of published quality titles each year, a demand driven by people who understand the unspoken prestige of a truly interestingly evocative or fittingly apt soundtrack and how that reflects on the quality of the game in question- as well as in reinforcing the themes of that game.

Big, bombastic bands are best driven to the ambitious and set-piece dripped adventure video games with their scope and scale on their sleeves, whilst synthetic weave tracks weave best into Sci-Fi and the clanging organ works greatest on horror. But we can get even more specific than that when we look within the magic box of artists that are employed to fill the music within the world of a game. Music has always been a means of telling stories, but traditionally they've existed as means of telling one's own story. I'm always fascinated whenever I see music used as a means to convey the experiences of a fictionalised other within the context and world of a fictional world, and I want to discuss just a few examples of this very style here today.

Firstly, who remembers Skyrim's bards? In the game of Skyrim there are a handful of well-known spoken-word tavern songs composed in the manner of sung shanties like medieval troubadours often would- suiting the environment of fantasy Norway that Skyrim attempts to create. Within that thematic template you can get a feel for the role and position that music plays within the game's environment by paying some attention to the lyrics. You'll have your legendary tales and farcical rhymes, like Ragnar the Red or The Dragonborn Comes, conveying the spirit of a people who's stories have traditionally lived on in the spoken word rather than the written. But you'll also hear about current events, like the civil war, sung from the prospective of whichever side the hold you're current within is favoured towards, and even a special song to commemorate the completing of the main story once you've crossed that threshold. History, news and culture, all existing within music and painting out of the people of Skyrim in audible strokes. 

One of my favourite uses of music in plot has to come from the Souls franchises, that attempts to convey many things from thematic consistency to complex story events through music. When battling the Old Demon King in Dark Souls III, the last vestige of a decimated species of demon people born from the blasphemous and hubristic chaos fire which warped those of Izalith, the theme of the heart of that destruction, the bed of Chaos from Dark Souls I, can be heard remixed within the background connecting the two games from the audio level. But even more significant than even that, the final boss of Dark Souls III (Spoilers) famously depicts the move-set of every player in the franchise in fitting with his role as a deific amalgam of every player who has beaten Dark Souls in the past. His second phase, however, reverts the creature to a slightly more advanced version of the final Boss of Dark Souls I (Gwyn) through his moveset, coinciding with his theme quieting down and adopting the key memorable motifs of that famous boss's theme. Telling in music alone the resurgence of the first, most powerful soul, which made up this amalgam to begin with, rising back to the forefront for one last battle to callously hold onto his unnatural grip of the dying fire. Evocative stuff!

Cyberpunk 2077 is another game that makes intelligent use of it's in universe music with help of the several music artists who were sucked into that humongous production which was Cyberpunk's development. Fitting with the 'fight the power' theme of the 'Punk' side of the genre, Cyberpunk's world is brought to life as much by the music of the frustrated and beleaguered as by the visual construction of the world assets themselves. Hell, one of the archetypal character examples the original table top presented was literally called: 'Rocker Boy'. The screaming punk rock of the game's main band 'Samurai' is fuelled with the raging anger of a people crushed under the foot of soulless megacorps that have succeeded in seizing control of all the world. The ugliness and rawness of the world is split across all the music tracks, imbuing that vibe of the economically dystopian world Cyberpunk that stews around you, all conveyed immersively and intuitively. The power of music, everybody.

Another clever use of the power of music in storytelling is told to us within the flurries of Bioshock Infinite, itself a hugely narrative driven game that takes us across the concept of alternate universes. This comes into play often with the presentation of the 'pastel painted' American post card world we see depicted, with everything from barber-shop quartets to old timey shoe shiners. This entire ecosystem, suspended in the sky, is a parallel of our own, such to the point that the in universe music consists of famous songs from our world twisted into the sensibilities of the depicted culture. That aforementioned Quartet? Sing their own version of the Beach Boys' 'God Only Knows', for example. Later on in the game, as the nature of alternate universes and tears in reality become more apparent; we learn the reason for this. The people of this world found a way to tear their way into other realities and borrow from their cultures to enrich their own. A more tactile use of music in storytelling, but effective nonetheless.

In that same vein, the modern Wolfenstien games have their own narrative to tell through music. Although their approach is less 'subtle' perhaps than some of these others that I've lauded. You see, Wolfenstien has it's own alternative universe to portray, being the classic premise of 'what if the Nazi's had won the war'. Of course, this means that the latter half of the 20th century would truck along better favouring the sensibilities of the Nazi's, with brutalist constructions, industrialist supremacy and segregation through prison camps. Bizarrely, this also means that culturally, we have the same break-throughs in art, through digested through the 'alternate history' lens of German culture. Most notably, this manifests in the Beatles having their same library of songs, but all performed in German. Strange, but logical I guess.

As with all art, Music in another tool in the belt of the storyteller to convey plot, purpose, emotion and theme beyond the obvious means, and that lies just as true in video games as it does in movies. In fact, I think the scope of gaming leaves more than enough room for an entire language of music to exist and thrive on it's own; and in those times when it's finely tuned the synchronous connection with the finished product is simply unmatched. The greatest of the greats in the gaming space are a labour of love touching so many incredible vocations, all of them firmly deserving their exceptional spot of recognition for how they play a part in the collaborative effort of our favourite video games. It's no wonder why the Game Awards take so long to run each and every year!

The Bartle Taxonomy: Killers

 Killing it

When it comes to designing games with the type of player one has to mind, there's few resources more helpful than that handy 'Bartle Taxonomy'. A spread of four archetypal moods for potential players that are drawn to certain styles of gameplay systems and genre tropes, helping to elucidate the potential reaction to created systems before they've even been put down to paper. Bartle's 1996 paper was originally created to help define the player bases of the proto-MMOs, then known as MUDs, but in the current age it's breadth of insight seems to work just fine on single player games as well for the definition it provides touching on player psyche. Of course, these definitions are not exclusive. One player can be a mix of player types, some players can be hard affixed to just one, but everyone has a shade of these perceptions within them when the time comes to sit down and play a game.

Killers are perhaps the easiest to grasp archetype in the Taxonomy, for all you have to do is identify them as the 'PVP Lovers' of the gaming world and everyone who has ever touched those style of games will know what you're talking about. They'll probably also have their own preconceived biases to the culture around such types of players and how it is to play alongside them. (Personally, not a fan.) But the definition is not as constrained as that. In fact, some people might find that the full breadth of who Killers are actually shines a little on their own philosophies towards playing games. I know certain games certainly bring out the killer in me, and I'm not talking about Hitman. Well, actually I am talking about Hitman, but not in that way...   

In basic breakdown, Killers are the types of players who use the consequence free environment of the digital world to unwind their pent-up frustrations, typically through rampant bouts of causing carnage and chaos. A killer strives to dominate and defeat, which is why for this kind of player the typical biggest challenge they can face is a character controlled by another human, because overcoming the wits of someone else is the ultimate theoretical challenge. These are the types you'll find popping around the PVP only zones or arenas of MMOs looking for their next victim, soaring to the top of the scoreboards in death matches, and challenges players to duels outside of main city. It's basically the archetype for those that have something to prove.

But again, Killers have a point of purpose in single player games too. Notably, killer's are driven most to the extremes of 'Power gaming' in order to push themselves to the top of leaderboards. They are most likely to play the 'hunter', swerving down destructive and villainous paths in RPGs; whatever allows them to cause the most mayhem; and a Killer player is best satisfied by roleplaying paths that give them the chance to satisfyingly be as disruptive, and sometimes evil, as possible. Which is perhaps why Killers are more often associated with multiplayer games than single player ones; because not many RPG developers have the gall to provide solidly laid out 'burn the world up' paths in their games and narratives; so Killers aren't usually as well fed in these genre type games.

Subdivisions exist within the 'Killer' Taxonomy. One such being the 'Politician', being a player who acquires their gaming thrills by amassing a large reputation for themselves and their skills. These are the kind of gamers you'll find joining and leading big competition-focused guilds, and probably even the breed of person who'll turn up to E-Sports tournaments one day- if there is still such a thing as E-Sports a year from now with everything that's happening in that world. They are pillars of activity who you'll become familiar with for their deeds alone. The big names floating around League of Legends and other communities will have their Killer traits.

And then, of course, you have the 'Griefer'. Pretty much the moral filpside of the Politician, a Griefer amasses infamy for how they can troll other players around them in the most significant fashion. I'm talking career gankers, murder clan members, inconvenient pranksters. The kind of people who discover the most disruptive way to interact with other players and revel in pushing that to it's limits. From the simple days of dumping buckets of lava atop someone's Minecraft base to the complicated extremes of invading a roleplay server for the sole purposes of disrupting the fragile ecostructure built by people trying to enjoy their game, so you can force your own terror ontop of them. When you think of the concept of a toxic gamer in action, you're probably sizing up a Griefer Killer archetype.

What I find most striking about the concept of a Killer Archetype, is the way that they interact with the game itself. Whereas most other archetypes seek some level of immersion and becoming lost within either the fiction of the game or the interactions they create, Killers never like to give themselves over to the throes of total immersion. On some level killers always see the boxy confines of the digital world around them and use that to drive their supremacist desires. All they play are systems to be conquered for the prestige of being a name on a leaderboard, rather than for enjoying the fiction of the world they've settled within. For a narrative designer, these players are pretty much one's absolute worst nightmare to develop for.

Of course, never forget that no archetype can be considered a total summation of any one person, and certain people who are Killers at one game might be Explorers in others. From my own experience, the only game where I feel any real competitive urge to score great points is the Hitman games, wherein I will cut every split second out of a perfect assassination in order to get in that top percentile of level finishers. But in practically every other game on the planet Earth I just couldn't care less. Still, the clever developer knows that true potential lies in a title that can stroke the ego of the Killers in gaming with promise and challenge, or brutalist freedom. How many systems in your favourite games appeal to the killer archetype? Take a think and you might be surprised.

Of Monsters and Lawsuits

 And bad faith.

The relationship between art and court has been... tumultuous across time, but in the modern world we have of ownerships and profits, it's a necessary link to forge. Artists depend on the work of the courts to protect themselves from some of the most dastardly threats they can face in their day-to-day, such as plagiarism, whilst maintaining that typical aloof objectiveness that is requisite for all walks of law. But just as with any legal branch, there is nuance to be taken in account, loopholes to be breached and bad actors who seek for nothing more than to take advantage of the letter of the law to break it's spirit. By and large this is why the Law doesn't operate as a cold machine of arbitration, and instead is populated with mediators and debators who argue it's points to keep it's heart. And it's going to be in the hands of these lawyers and Judges to knock the sense back into people when the conglomerates start getting the idea to use the law as it's own blunt instrument.

I'm sure you've heard of Monster Energy by this point in your life. The huge 2000's era company responsible for their giant market share of the energy drinks market, which they abuse with a flood of a mediocre concoctions of electrolytes and bile. I do not like Monster Energy drinks. It's a matter of taste. But lately I and the Internet have been gifted a purely objective reason to find the brand distasteful as well, and as I've prepped you all for- it's to do with the way that the company has taken control of copyright law in an abusive fashion to lord over their apparent ownership of the word 'Monster'. Yes, you heard me right. One of the most common nouns in the English language, and Monster Energy believe themselves it's sole arbiter out into the world. How bizarre.

A company and game I'm certain you've not heard about, unless you've literally looked up this exact story before, is 'Dark Deception: Monsters and Mortals' by Glowstick Entertainment. Actually, you may have heard it bubbling in development about thanks to it's brief time circling the horror-game scene on Youtube, back before the 'Monsters and Mortals' subtitle. (It's the game with the giant monkey clanging it's symbols, if you were a viewer of that sort of content around it's hey day.) And as I'm sure you've picked up on, this game is finding itself on the business end of a lawsuit thanks to that very subtitle they slapped onto their title, thus bringing this issue roaring back to the forefront of industry minds. Quite galling considering the game has never seen more that 300 players at one time.

Now if you've ever seen a 'these names are too similar' lawsuit before, you probably know exactly what's coming next, don't you? Monster are claiming that the use of 'Monsters' is similar enough to their own brand to cause confusion in potential customers who might mistake one brand for another. That's right, I remember all the times I go to the shop hoping to score a can of warm radioactive waste and accidentally slip my phone out of my pocket and buy a game on Steam instead; truly this grates hard against the spirit of copyright protection as an institution. But can Monster slide by anyway with their sheer might as a giant litigious corpo? Can we live in a world where the 'drink of gamers' (gamers who love their computer rigs so much they want their insides to glow multicoloured) is itself a subjugator of the very games they propose to represent?

Now the reason that this lawsuit is starting to really blow up in the here and now is because those who are being attacked, Glowstick, want their plight to be the lighting rod incident that turns the tide against the litigation trolls over at Monster. They've reached out to the media in order to make sure everyone is well aware of the simply ludicrous proposition of owning a commonplace term, and perhaps in doing so help turn their own case over to an advantageous position. And I have to agree, not just because of the customary 'big company bad' stance I tend to take, but because it truly is utterly ridiculous for Monster to throw their weight around like this. Particularly towards a game so very tiny that they could have only come across it by browsing around the Steam store looking for a fight to pick. I'd hardly call that a threat to the recognisability of their brand, would you?

They don't just prey on little fish either, we've already known that Monster pushed themselves upon Ubisoft when those developers were in the process of publishing their game, Gods and Monsters, which quickly changed it's branding to the messy name 'Immortal: Feynx Rising' because there isn't a backbone in all of Ubisoft management combined. I can understand the sort of position that Glowstick must feel like they're in at this point, the latest morsels to be chewed up by the legal sharks held at the Monster offices- how can they possibly stand up to someone who made Ubisoft quake? Well, in perspective perhaps their case isn't so awful. Afterall, for all of their attempts to seize ubiquitous control over the name 'monster', the term still exists far and wide as far as I can remember. 

When is Monster going to knock on Pixar's door and demand royalties for Monsters Inc? Or are they afraid their slapsuit would get them crushed if they want against someone who actually had the means to defend themselves the letter of the law? When are they going to poke at Pokemon and try to get their blood money from- no! They already tried it? And the company still exists? Now that is a miracle; the Pokemon Company must have been feeling extremely generous that day. It turns out the Japanese Patent Office has it's head on far straighter than their American equivalents, because when Monster went after both Pokemon and Monster Hunter, the courts wouldn't even give the cretins the time of day. Which would be a moment of sombre reflection for a sensible mind, or a villain origin story for a true waste of breath.

For those picking up on the subtilties of my speech and wondering why it is I'm getting aggressive, you might be wondering if Dark Deception simply has me passionate. Whilst it is true that I feel slightly more attached to a game I actually remember from it's early demo stages and it's slow growth to where it sits today, my vitriol are for the lowest of the lows; frivolous lawsuit filers. Actual pathetic wretches of creation who exist only to desperately claw at the efforts of their hard working betters. I don't like Monster Energy, but I loathe the base beggarly bandits who weaponize antiquated law for their own enrichment. Honestly, the good ending here would be the absolute gutting of their entire brand protection team for being the actual scum of the earth. Do the world a favour for once, why don't you?

E3 suffers final death

 For real this time

When last we spoke of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, we were already sizing it up for the event's Mahgony lid coffin. Because what else are you going to do when all of the major developers either pull out or set themselves up with convenient E3 alternatives on the off-chance that you pull out? Covid changed a lot of the power dynamics of live event shows, and reminded the world of gaming that most all of it's audience live exclusively on the Internet: which therefore makes it the place to be if you want to reach and appeal directly to that style of person. What is the point of spending thousands renting out a booth crammed with others where you have to fight and vie for attention when you can take that time for yourself, only show off exactly the content that your studio is ready to show and save those marketing dollars for a trip to Vancouver or something. The point is that the ESA won't be hoovering up money for doing nothing more than renting out the convention centre that they themselves rented.

And you know what; couldn't have happened to a more decrepit and internally corrupt group of suits- and I mean that. For a board that was originally designed to help protect the industry during the rise of government scrutiny after the violence of Mortal Kombat, the ESA has grown depressingly partisan and fangless over the past decades. I'm not even talking about the accepting of various high level game studio executives into their ranks, because I understand the need to have relevant professionals to keep the discourse feeling relevant and up-to-date: I take issue more with the idea that ESA are somehow above the law and thus don't have to impart the same diligence to protecting it's consumers if it might hurt their bottom line. Who remembers their absolute refusal to stick to their own guns by labelling EA games that preyed on the addictive properties of psychological manipulation to make their FIFA money? Preying on a game that is categorised as playable for children, yet cranking down on Pokémon for having a fictional, virtual, casino depicted in game. Guess Gamefreak should have paid more bribe money, eh?

For a time the literal only thing that the ESA could do right was put together the E3 showcase, and that was largely because they didn't have to do much of anything but organise an itinerary and send out invitations. For the most part it was Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and whomever else was big enough to secure their own showcase, deciding on how to set-up their show, who to invite and where best to position themselves within the rented space. The only time the ESA decided it was within their prerogative to get involved was during the aftermath of the Cyberpunk announcement, where it was apparently their 'brilliant' idea to reach out to traditional world celebrities to host after the success of Keanu Reeves' surprise appearance. Unfortunately that was an inkling which lived on in Geoff Keighley- resulting in the Game Awards with Al Pacino. I mean I love Pacino's movies and all, but really?

But everything changed when the Covid nation attacked. That initial sweeping wave was far too sudden in the year for the ESA to react. The very concept of 'remote shows' was still looked on as a low-rent cost saving measure back then, not fit for the pretentious snobs who thought themselves irreplaceable in an industry that ran totally without them. The Game Awards had far less problems moving to the virtual space, which is how Geoff managed to neatly steal the crown of 'gaming event of the year' from the ESA due to their lethargy. When the ESA finally did manage to throw a show together, it was largely a disappointment probably best summed up by Randy Pitchford's appearance for his Gearbox showcase. You remember, the one which recycled footage that had already been revealed the previous month and existed simply to showcase Randy touring the Borderlands movie set squealing like a school girl at things he wasn't allowed to show the camera. Prime time E3, everybody!

We have the summer games fest to fill the void, a festival which actually manages to sync up to the gamers around the world in a very real way thanks to Steam integration, providing demos and early looks that anyone with a Steam account can play free of charge, which is of course something that E3 was never able to do. You see, E3 was very much a holdover from the old world of conventions, where the biggest interaction that the consumer could expect with the creators were in ESA's formal presentation standard. Now we have social media routes, and official Youtube channels and Twitter threads and Steam blogs and personal online event shows, and everything that the industry needed to totally blow past E3 and appeal directly to the people who love their games. The success story of titles like Vampire Survivors, Valhiem and other E3 absent games are proof that the grass routes can sometimes be all that you need.

The ESA, on the otherhand, were mere weeks away from the event before they had to cancel it, meaning that the LA convention centre was already booked in their name and it probably cost exorbitant fees for cancellation. But probably not as much as they were set to lose after literally everyone bailed on them, including the company so pitifully bad with it's business decisions that they've gone full Crypto of late. (Never go full crypto.) Of course, this decentralisation of the 'show' format is going to have the knock on effect of further segmenting and isolating fandoms of certain companies- (I can never figure out when those Playstation events are happening until the night after) but the relative release of load on the brunt of the actual studios making these games is probably better for the health of everyone.

As a culture we had begun to get sick of all those times when a company with nothing to show for an upcoming title has been forced to scramble about and haphazardly stick something together that they know is going to be a disappointment but they have no choice because E3 is a deadline that cannot be moved. Show everyone a pretty CG cutscene that you hired an external studio to put together and hope that keeps the wolves at bay and busy whilst the real work goes on frantically behind the scenes. Or maybe even cut out some time from real development to work on a vertical slice that is going to be pulled apart and dissected by a public audience as though they're a gladiatorial retinue deciding the fate of the game. Along the way, maybe you'll do a Ubisoft and create a slice of game far beyond what you've already made and probably beyond what you're even capable of achieving on current hardware- still, you'll have won over the ravenous crowd for today; and that's good enough, right?

I already buried E3 in my heart back when it was delayed following Covid, because we all knew the direction it was going. When Microsoft and Sony pulled out of the 2023 event, it was without a batted eyelash that we all just accepted the news, because of course they did- who even knew it was still happening? It's honestly quite galling that the ESA waited for so long to pull the plug on every one else, as though Ubisoft were the only glue holding the event together. "Oh no, it can't possibly be a successful show without the obligatory too-long 'Just Dance' showcase that Ubisoft always pulls! Guess we're going to have to cancel it..." I don't feel sorry, and I don't like the ESA so I don't feel bad. I actually look forward to reading about E3 as the historical footnote is should have been 8-10 years ago. Good riddance.

Wasting my time

Burning my life.

The other day I mentioned how time is the most valuable resource that a player can have, which is why so many games go out of their way in order to convince a player that they are making some scant progress with theirs no matter what it is that they're commiting to. Only Dark Souls and it's ilk really have the true grit to pull out that last hour of gameplay from under the player's feet and tell them to deal with it without that decision being then lambasted as bad game design. (Probably because the general design of Soulslike games is so geared towards intrinsic progression as well as extrinsic, such that taking away all your 'Souls' is a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of 'gitting gud') But there are certain games out there that not only care little for respecting your time, but go out of their way to spit on it with systems called 'Time gates'. Let's talk about that.

Explaining a time gate is best done by examining the kings of this particular crop: Mobile Games. Who out there has played a mobile game and reached that point where they can't progress any further because they have to wait for a timer? Maybe it's a a bar of energy that refills 1 unit every 15 minutes. Maybe it's the building process of your barrack upgrade that's going to take several hours, or maybe even several days, to complete. These are time gates. And typically a mobile game will design itself to slowly introduce these inconveniences in order to slowly wring the patience of their free-to-play players just as they were starting to get hooked on the gameplay loop in order to manipulate them into spending money to skip the wait. That is the most cynical version of time gating, but it's not the only iteration that gaming has ever known.

In fact, MMOs have themselves been very familiar with Time Gates for a decently long time now, with the concept typically existing in conjunction with daily or even weekly activity limits. Here the reasoning is a lot less nefarious, you may run a certain dungeon and only be given full rewards the first time a day you complete it, or the first time a week if it's a raid. Most of the time this exists in order to expand out the lifespan of that content in order to stretch out player retention. Grinding for gear drops is the draw of these higher difficulty content patches anyway; and as that loot tends to drop randomly, if you limit the amount of 'pulls' a player is privvy to, you automatically give them a reason to keep coming back day after day or week after week in order to pull the exact right piece of gear with the right stats that they want. By the time that player rolls their ideal drop, they'll have already established the pattern of logging into that MMO everyday.

In a very similar vein, I've noticed that APRGs have begun following a very similar trajectory even with their much smaller grasp of online functionality. Games like Diablo are built around the thirst and hunger for loot drops, as the very gameplay loop from the get-go revolves around hunting after that 1% increase to that one special attack you can do every minute and a half. Sometimes you'll have special gates that unlock during a season of the game, which in itself is tied to a system of FOMO offering unique drops that can only be found in this season through these special dungeons you can only run once in a given time. This way there's an aura of excitement and pressure built around the time gate, where the player is hopped up on the desire not to fail and risk the chance of getting these limited time items.

And to take a more contemporary and specific approach, who played Hogwarts Legacy? Without going into any spoilers, there comes a point within the narrative where the player earns themselves a crafting space within the Room of Requirement. The only hang-up? Crafting, growing, brewing, rearing and breeding is all tied to the limitations of a time gate that ticks along as you play the game, but in real time; alongside the ingredients it takes to make any of this stuff to begin with. The time gates are typically miniscule, and if you set everything off before you leave by the next time you have enough free time to peek back in all the relevant stations will most definitely have popped; but that it even exists like that in the first place is surprisingly out-of-character for any modern open world RPG not on mobile phones or handhelds.

 

Time gates work by tying the interest and investment of the player to a location and activity without any active engagement to that particular point, allowing that pressure point to fester and nag at the player long after they've moved onto other things or, in the case of mobile games, other activities entirely. They work by dragging the player into a relationship of expectation where they are responsible for keeping up with something, which means the game needs to be in a position to remind the player of their timers in order for the mechanic to be effective. Mobile games typically demand notification space to spam you the next day whilst you're sitting on the toilet, and other styles of game either place visual timers in heavily trafficked areas of the UI or have the important pressure point present in a key hub that the player is going to visit often.

But the question I keep asking myself whenever it comes to these systems is thus: Should they even exist? In a world of modern design sensibilities, what actual gameplay value is built for the player through time gating? Nothing. In fact, it's often seen as a lazy way to pad out content, such to the extent that some developers, such as Bioware when they made Anthem, try to hide their gate by creating menial fetch-quests to at least create the impression of meaningful gameplay. But it's so often just an act, or an illusion. Smoke and mirrors to expand the narrow constraints of what the developers could develop for the player to experience. But then again, that's not always the whole story, now is it? It can't always be that nefarious.

I think that the very currency that time gates play with, the free time of the player, turns what sounds like a very simple concept into a much more complex dilemma by it's very nature. Some games have very sensible reasons for not wanting their players to grind through all available content as quickly as possible, and it is true that activities which take someone longer to complete do inherently feel more valuable. But I think there's a very important scale that can be easily tipped with systems like these, and a game that wants to ethically respect it's players time needs to know how to be exceedingly sparing with their usage of time gating as a mechanic lest they cross the very thin line from enriching small systems to annoying everyone with grating meandering. 

Conflict and MMOs

 I brought you a gun!

The landscape of the massively multiplayer world is well trodden by just about every single style of game that one can feasibly come up with. We've had MMOs that based themselves on the rigors of colonialism, several set in vast fantasy worlds that span dozens of interwoven cultures, giant sci-fi MMOs that throw players into the cold reaches of space and sets them off to explore its depths, MMOs that take roleplaying as such an integral part of it's systems that it's developers throw themselves into the game and roleplay as high level quest givers, and MMOs based on famous books and movie franchises with giant overarching narratives to explore. But throughout all of the grandiosity of the MMO genre, it's actually quite surprising to find that the core successful  few MMOs all seem to revolve around the same simple ideal: Player driven conflict.

Now you might frown a bit and recount how all stories are driven by conflict in some manner, and you would be pretty much absolutely right- but what I'm taking about here is player driven; and I'm not limiting myself to the scope of the narrative. I'm talking about the games that base their audience in one of several camps, typically at odds with one another, and uses the momentum of that natural competition and conflict between opposing teams to fuel the player base (and retention) beyond and between major content drops. It's a similar heart beating in the chests of some of the biggest MMOs out there, and within that may lie the secret to creating a functioning and sustainable MMO formula that at least has a chance to exist in the very inhospitable space that MMOs inhabit in the modern day.

Of course, whenever I'm thinking of MMOs the first that comes to mind is going to be World of Warcraft. There is a game within which the player base is split between the arbitrary line of 'Alliance' and 'Horde', between those party lines the various playable races are scattered. The narratives of the game were originally heavily driven by the conflict between those two factions, even providing exclusive areas and questlines for each side, as established and built upon by the Warcraft games. Whilst that is always important in the heart of the story, some of the as later expansions have taken a more lax approach and brought those two sides together to battle against common foes more often than not. (Player bases don't like being split down the middle, afterall.) These faction lines decide who's going to facing the other in the arena, as well as in the general struggle for minigame side activities across the world- fuelling some natural space for players to provide their own motives and goals.

We also have Star Wars The Old Republic, which is an MMO built within a world that already had a very workable divide of 'Dark and Light' to split it's players between. Just as with WOW, players of either faction have their own selection of classes and race, which would influence the places that players start, where they explore, and even the majority of the narrative they resolve. And, once again, players would find themselves going against each other in PVP sectors of the game, and coming together for later-on PVE crossover expansions. Again, relying on the conflict for between-content fuel, and subtly ignoring it when it's easier to introduce a wild third NPC faction for everyone to beat on. (It's easier than designing distinct routes for each faction and class within that faction everytime you want to drop some new content, I suppose.)

Perhaps the most recent example of this sort of MMO set-up would be for Amazon's New World, which doesn't explicitly establish battle lines from the moment that the player spawns in, but does build the majority of it's higher gameplay ideals around the movement of factions known as 'companies'. These organisations battle for territory and market supremacy in a dance that can feasibly be entirely ignored by the solitary player if they so choose, but there's no pushing forward to the best gear sets and facing the toughest challenges without getting embroiled in that political hot plate eventually. Still, the conflict of PVP drives the decisions of the endgame content producers, although additional content has been PVE geared for the time being.

And then there's my MMO of choice, The Elder Scrolls Online. From it's very concept this game was based around the three faction war, split between the races of Tamriel and presenting three entirely separate questlines across distinct tacts of land. The centrepiece of the game was even a giant board of 'secure the territory' played across all of Cyrodill in a brutal no-mans-land that was PVP heaven to a lot of the 'killers' in the playerbase. This was a direction that Zenimax even stuck with for a while, with the first official expansion being the Imperial City, through which you could either battle with enemies both player and NPC for the above-ground districts or mount strike teams through monster littered dungeons. Of course, this was only for a time. Eventually one Tamriel released and broke down all barriers allowing any faction to visit any land and leaving the 'war' to PVE only sections.

What we're seeing consistently is the way that MMO's seem to work best when they stoke some interaction between players, typically conflict. And as I've alluded, I think the reason is simply because it allows the player base to keep themselves completely busy whilst actual new content is made behind the scenes. Although, interestingly, most MMOs know that further development is better served veering towards the wider player base of those who don't want to engage with the pressures of PVP, which creates a strange dichotomy wherein for a lot of these games, the PVP landscape doesn't really change as the game around it evolves to complete distinction. But a game that practised what it preached would end up simply backing it's potential for growth up in a corner, so what is there to do?

As it happens there are endless unique ways to handle an MMO that don't get the chance to shine so often. I'm often left in complete awe by the likes of The Matrix MMO wherein the server hosts played 'Roleplay' with the ordinary folk to stir something of a narrative within their world, or 'Star Wars Galaxies' wherein the draw was to literally adopt a role within the Star Wars Universe and simply evolve within that. The sideways progression MMO's are woefully underserved in the modern MMO market, and only the unhinged kickstarter pipe-dreamers seem interested in giving that style of development a shot anymore.(Well... them and JAGEX) Perhaps a game that doesn't rely so heavily on the aura of conflict wouldn't need to betray it's own identity quite so often. But that's just food for thought, I suppose.

AI faces the event horizon

 Virtual Intelligence 

There are few topics that elicit more darkened eyes in the field of artists than that of AI; not just for what it's already capable of today, but for where we all see it heading in the very near future. We all see the rapid access the world has been granted to use quick AI models for painting and writing, but what if I told you that we're on the verge of having every major main form of art impacted by the influence of AI? What if I told you that the current stigma of "Well, it isn't the same if the human aspect of pain isn't driving the work" is already being eroded under the sheer wave of improvements that push past the perceptible human ear to counteract it. And what if I told you that there currently is literally nothing any of us can do about it in order to stem the tide of chaos?

Writing is a medium directly under attack by AI, whether we're talking about research articles or educational assignments. We're already hearing stories of students trying to forgo coursework by submitting piles of computer generated work, which fits neatly with the dry style that most non-English majors have anyway. For the time being actual creative writers are safe, and the current trajectory of AI will certainly make it difficult for models built on training to create anything in the vein of the literacy new authors possess, but when we come to bid-writing, email correspondence, technical articles, research papers; there's a very real possibility the end of those professions has already been toiled by the mere introduction of common-access models like ChatGPT. Ubisoft have already demonstrated how quickly ostensibly creative companies are to seize on the convenient.

Art is another big victim that hardly needs any introduction if you've been paying any attention to the world of StableDiffusion. Learning models built of existing work basically makes it so that any artist who does not develop a wildly unique style of their own, and perhaps covets styles that resemble certain disciplines or real life imagery- are on the route to becoming moot. Yes, for now there's still an instinctive hint to the computer generated that betrays it to the human eye, but it's a factor that is slight and being stamped out. Small efforts are being placed to try and stop this, one such is by installing a certain copyright filter that tells Learning algorithms to ignore new works; but proliferation has already overcome this. So many learning models are independently coded and simply ignore such warnings- visual art has no real means to defend itself.

Song is the other big angle we've seen of this in recent weeks. Voice training has come a huge way since it was released out into the wild, with what once to took days with thousands of audio sources being reduced to hours with only a few. The Dagoth Ur voice training algorithm is based on the performance of a character in Morrowind that has barely ten minutes of recorded dialogue, and yet people had managed to get him to read all kinds of brand new dialogues with near perfect tone and vocal variance. (With some editing on their part, obviously.) But even without creating fresh dialogue, there have been those able to mash the sound of their own voice with that of another with AI. The world was unnerved with the example of one Twitter user who created a fresh Kanye track over his own rap with nothing but a trained algorithm in order to say things that Kanye would never say- like admitting he was wrong. Imagine the effect on the music market from that alone!

Now if we were to do our best to be charitable about this, we could say that AI voices for musicians could help an artist live on after their death; but on the otherhead is that even something that we want? Some other artist wearing the voice of a person we love writing in lyrics that they think that artist would have wanted to formulate? In that Kanye example I mentioned some people already found themselves a little uncomfortable over the fact that the voice over artist wrote one line about Kanye's Deceased mother; which already clearly presents the dichotomy between what a person can say about themselves and what others can say using their mouth. Dead actors are already being brought back to retain their roles, dead artists will become a new liberty to cross for everyone.

Honestly, this whole situation brings back to mind that time when Kanye West thought it just an insanely romantic gesture to film a hologram of Kim Kardashian's dead father for her birthday. A hologram that Kanye then manipulated in order to talk about how smart her current husband was, (meaning himself) which in turn conferred her some meagre display of second-hand intelligence. Now every relationship can only be understood by the people in it, of course, but I think we can all see how objectively unhinged that is. And if it's worth anything, Kanye is no longer with Kim- so... yeah. But we're just talking about the silly applications of this replacement software, what about when we start getting to the philosophical?

Playing Cyberpunk 2077 recently has conferred to me a rather interesting parallel, in that the very idea of 'capturing the soul' of someone is a key point of the narrative. In that game, there's a special chip that is full of all the neurological data of a deceased person, allowing their loved ones to live with a virtual recreation of their long lost relative. The question rising there being whether this facsimile of the person who was counts as a real person, or is simply just a clone. I think what we're seeing of AI today isn't quite at the point yet, but it nudges along that line. What we're seeing is a near perfect mask of a person who once was, now all we need to do is to come up with a silicone husk to live behind it and soon we'll all be asking 'are friends electric'?.

So we're on the verge of a revolution of AI that threatens to redefine what it is we consider our humanity, our ability to emote with genuine intention. The entire prospect of art exists to share what it is that we feel with others around us, and if we're using computers to depict that feeling than the fabric connecting our hearts is thinning. How many layers deeper do we need to go before machines are creating the mimic of feelings that it's sharing with other machines to react to, and does that create something akin to a mechanical soul or simply a ghoulish cycle of answer-and-response that ultimately leads to nothing? And what of the free thinkers and artists of that proposed dystopia? Grim tidings await our lot, mark my words.

Nexon- the indie squasher

 Dark wings, dark fires.

If you've any sort of history with the decades of social multiplayer games that have existed since time immemorial, then there will be no doubt that you've heard of the Korean development conglomerate known as NEXON; or rather, that you've heard of NEXON's flagship game which once existed on everyone's PC: Maplestory. There was a game that took the very simple premise of socialisation in a 2D environment and turned it into one of the most successful titles of it's kind in a time when no one quite knew what a game like that might even look like; the prehistoric age of 2003. Do you know how far back in the history of gaming that is? That predates Gears of War, Bioshock and freakin' World of Warcraft! Nexon was doing massively multiplayer before the game that practically birthed the modern face of that genre! Which, as you can imagine, makes them something of the giant fire breathing lizard of the Korean gaming scene. And as any fire breathing lizard would, NEXON have thrown about their weight of late.

But before I go further into that, let me introduce IRONMACE. Now IRONMACE are a much more recent, and much more indie, studio that came up from a small 'merry' band of developers looking to cut their teeth on a fresh and exciting project. Luckily for them, IRONMACE landed on a hell of a title to show off with the near over=week success of their in-progress alpha title: Dark and Darker. (Now I know you've heard of that!) An extraction-type game that takes the decently fresh subgenre of Battle Royale and extends it to the natural range of- the other typical style of fiction. If the original game was a Sci Fi- you just need to make yours a fantasy. And Tarkov is... well not exactly Sci-fi but the philosophy still works just fine.

Dark and Darker is one of those tiny games that really could, cobbled together with Epic Store assets and dreams but packing a solid construction that found it's audience increadibly quickly. Players are thrown in a dungeon as a typical fantasy archetype character from which point they pick up loot, cobble some sort of build from that loot and fight their way through traditional fantasy trash-fodder and even other players in order to extract with that loot. Right now it's very front facing and straight-forward, nailing that basic premise with as much singular mechanical dedication and precision as possible before going the distance of custom making an entire game's worth of assets and throwing in story and lore and all that extra nonsense. What we have right now is basic, functioning and most importantly fun. Which is the issue.

A fun game is a popular one, afterall, and popularity breeds jealously. Popularity is like a drug, and when it's drip-feed buzz begins to fade from the system, symptoms of withdrawal start to pollute at the mind. NEXON lived their entire lives under the light of clout, and seeing the industry blossom out but not funnel directly into making Maplestory as big of a gaming icon today as it was two decades past- well, that's going to smart at the winged monster, isn't it? At least, that's what I can presume is the reason why NEXON have spent much of the last year, and probably a lot of time before that, relentlessly pursuing and throwing hell towards Dark and Darker and IRONMACE, high on trumped up claims of plagiarism based on one common employee the companies shared who left the Korean conglomerate with a distaste in his mouth. On the past few months alone, NEXON are setting themselves up as scourges of the industry.

Accusations are one thing, of course. One very petty way to get back at someone who left under a haze or doubt, but NEXON weren't happy with just accusations. Seeing as how the employee in question was a remote worker and thus received data on his personal server, (which according to him was perfectly allowed and monitored) NEXON saw that as suitable grounds to have the police raid the Dark and Darker offices searching for stolen data. Of course, the police aren't miracle workers so they failed to conjure the missing data out of thin air like NEXON wanted, but that was by no means the limit of their dastardly plans. They also went all out and got Dark and Darker pulled from Steam by way of legal notice, which is veering on illegal if their sporadic hunch of theft is as wrong as it very much seems to be.

For their part, IRONMACE have retaliated to the accusation in perhaps the most full way that a small indie development studio possibly can; with a list. IRONMACE posted up a list of every single asset that NEXON accused them of stealing and provided a definitive source for each and every one, neatly showing that a lot of their assets belonged to the Unreal Engine store, not the mysterious 'Codename: P3' game that NEXON has been working on behind the scenes and is now accusing IRONMACE of stealing and rebranding as 'Dark and Darker'. Not only that, but for assets that shared names with Nexon's assets, IRONMACE explained how each name is a generic fantasy trope following a standard asset naming convention that several fantasy titles using the Unreal Engine probably use. (They even matched a few with another fantasy game who have the exact same asset names) In broadstrokes, IRONMACE went out and came back with a laundry list of checked and double-checked receipts.

But NEXON can't back down from this, they've slipped far past the point of no return in their dedication of reputation and monetary investment. It rarely gets so black and white as a giant conglomerate trying to brutally stamp out the little man because they missed out on an opportunity they seized on. IRONMACE even teased going so far as to explain how their smaller team managed to get out a product in a reasonable amount of time whereas NEXON have been lumbering along with their p3 game at the speed of molasses. It really does seem like these indie devs are running circles around NEXON and making the company look like bad-spirited fools. At least that's a slam dunk in the court of public opinion.

Yet that's where the good news ends because, guess what: none of that matters. Who's right doesn't matter in a world where the richer guy runs the courts. NEXON were able to send off the Korean police like lapdogs to breakdown the doors of IRONMACE's studio, what else do you think they're capable of doing? Certainly wrapping up IRONMACE in fruitless litigation until the studio runs out of money and ends up going bankrupt. Because that's simply the way of the world, if a megarich scumbag wants to go ahead and to ruin your life to make themselves feel better, well you can count on them having the means and knowhow to pull it neatly off. That's what you get for believing in the fallacy of a grass-routes success story in a system rigged from the top.

Who's afraid of PC gaming?

 I am.

The PC playerbase can be downright unpleasant at times. Elitist, narcissist, classist, toxin-stuffed wind bags wheezing about their moral, financial and personal superiority over people they know nothing about based only on choice of gaming platform. Honestly, their extreme elements are an antiquated and tasteless lot as trapped within the mind virus of early internet cringe as the entire populace of 4chan. This I say as someone who as been a full PC gamer for the past 2-3 years now. But do you know what else PC gamers are? They are a sector of players so beleaguered by the inadequacies of their content providers that most of us don't even bat an eyelash everytime a perfectly fine game on every other platform is spat out our end as a misshapen abomination of man. For the supposed land of the 'master race', the state of modern ports makes this landscape feel like something out of 'The hills have eyes' most of the time.

It is becoming less of a trend and more of a rule, hardwritten across the laws of physics, that any sort of high effort, big budget PC game has a better chance of falling apart in the hands of PC gamers that it has of being a well formed and full functioning title. When a game does actually function, it earns no praise for achieving that bare minimum working state, but when it explodes in bloody glory: that's when the rage of a regularly disappointed dragon is stirred. Because at this point, is there really any excuse for messing up this often? Why is it that those who on the PC are treated as second-class consumers, charged the same but serviced less? And why is it also the case that in most everyone of these situations, with bad and non-functioning ports, there is never any actual recourse? 

Almost everytime, the way that a game drops will always be hard ingrained with the flaws it carries for life. Take Arkham Origins for example, (I wish somebody would, the game kills me!), even today the thing is a mess to get running with any consistency. Splinter Cell Double Agent is sold without a key patch necessary for the game's upgrade system to function. (Which I only realised when starting the bonus mission, myself.) Even Cyberpunk, with it's near two years of dedicated fixes by a repentant developer, still feels janky at times. It doesn't crash like a drunken sailor around riptides anymore, but there's still regular issues of AI going haywire, T-poses in cutscenes, lip synching failing altogether and that god-awful 'Can't save at this time' bug which is a pain in the ass to fix. Is there really no piecing a broken game back together?

Of course, the actual complications of developing for a PC audience plays some significant role in the problems. Consoles are fairly static systems running on consistent OS's with a linear hardware progression. It's easy to see what works on the hardware available and see where the game is at in testing, which is why when Cyberpunk ran bad on consoles- it was clear evidence that QA dropped a massive ball. PC is a more fluid infrastructure with countless dozens of set-ups, hardware improvements, and various hardware manufacturers that all never want to shake hands with one another. You're designing games for a hundred different set-ups at the same time with PC development, which is where the problems can start to set in. Still- some developers can pull it off, so you'd have thought this landscape wouldn't still be a veritable landmine to traverse for consumers in the modern age, right?

But then Naughty Dog publishes 'The Last of Us Part 1', and suddenly we're back in the stone ages once again! Some incredible how, the game that the vultures at Naughty Dog were so utterly indignant was worth re-releasing at $70 that they lambasted us for our very discontent then they turned around the onus on us, for feeling as though Naughty Dog had forced their overpriced deal onto our plates- (You know, the deal which is the only way that people on PC could ever get a chance to play The Last of Us? Yeah, it's not like we were forced to pay that stupid price...) somehow that game is a fiery mess of apocalyptic proportions. Those self righteous pretentious blowhards hopped up on the pricey prestige of their remake of a release of a ten year old game managed to fart out a barely functioning dumpster fire and still had the gall to charge above full price for the thing. For shame!

The game is a horror show. It's freezes up regularly, the engine throws random effects in completely nonsensical cutscenes, the shader compiling sequence has lasted more than two hours for some on less powerful systems! (And I thought the three minute Hogwarts Legacy compile was rough!) The universal image of this latest release of the much squeezed to pulp 'Last of Us' game is the lowest setting rendering of Neaderjoel, a brutish and ugly facsimile of a once beautifully complex and morally delicate character. Naughty Dog have thrown up their hands and gone 'whoops' but as far as I can see the game is still very much for sale, with their limp 'deluxe edition' DLC to really drive home how much of a soulless crash grab this endeavour always was. Another corpse in the house of PC.

Persona is a franchise that similarly is getting it's long awaited port to PC, and as far as I've heard every single port has been greatly received- except for Persona 3 Portable. And why? Well, for some utterly incomprehensible reason, the team decided to port over the version of Persona 3 without the animated cutscenes. Now yes, the animated cutscenes weren't incredible in the original, but they were an attempt to spruce up the presentation of key narrative moments. Without out them the game turns up feeling a little flat in it's emotional moments. Was it really beyond the pale for ATLUS to compile a new version of their game which hadn't been touched since 2009? Was that beyond their budget? Or just beyond their capacity to care now that they've got a Gatcha spin-off on the horizon?

This is the PC landscape, and the other end of the scale to balance out all the grandstanding and eye-rolling 'poor shaming' these people are notorious for. There's an old adage held that a good game takes time and lasts, whilst a bad game takes less time and stinks- or something to that effect- and if PC games took just that little bit longer to perfect I truly don't believe many people would be that upset. There was a time when the 'PC Release' of any upcoming game was looked on as the definite version, but can that really be said anymore in a world where the PC version of games like 'The Last of Us' take multiple hours to boot? There's probably a shifting in quality standards that needs to be addressed on an Industry wide level, if anyone has the compunction to do it.

 

Sonic: The Revival

 Well I'd never...

I've spoken quite a bit about the steady resurgence of Sonic to our screens as the blue blur struggles to earn back some of the respect he lost after years of mediocrity and disappointment. Even after stepping right for once with the simple pleasure of Sonic Generations, our man hit perhaps his lowest point ever after Forces came out as one of the worst money-value propositions imaginable. (The game was 80% cutscene!) But since then things are turning around. Frontiers was good enough to be considered for the 'Game Awards', even if that award itself was stolen away at the last second thanks to supposed 'bots'. Sonic Mania was a return-to-roots better than anyone could have possibly imagined. And the Sonic movie franchise has been strong enough to potentially kickstart a whole animated video game cinematic universe if Nintendo have their way; all of this lays the perfect groundwork for a potential coming revival.

You see you might not believe it, but Sonic is actually one of those franchises where the creators are very overly careful about every single piece of their brand in how it's marketed and who it's shown to. I know, thinking back on the absolute trash the franchise has gone through over the years would make you seriously question if anyone is in charge of Quality Assurance, but I have it on decent authority that there it's not quite a murderous free-for-all up there just yet. SEGA have final word on everything for what characters are shown in promotions, (blocking out any and all characters from products the company deems controversial in any manner) every single accessory worn by every on-screen character, (Sonic need to be wearing the exact brand of shoes to match everytime) and even the wider narrative beats of their titular characters so they stay consistent in every piece of media. (Sonic is not allowed to rizz on anyone. Boss' orders.)

Which is why it's so very surprising in the year of our Satan 2023 to find a complete reversal on a lot of the stringent measures that SEGA have put in place for so long. Knowing them and how they operate, this can't be a slip up of draconian standards, meaning that SEGA are intentionally promoting all of these 'brand risks' that hadn't been touched for perhaps decades beforehand. Most notably for me at least being the acknowledgement, after all this time, that Sonic 06 was real! Of course, being one of the worst received games in the franchise SEGA wouldn't exactly want to draw attention to the title, but for a long time they suppressed nearly everything born out of the game. Only Silver the Hedgehog managed to escape the media purgatory because he was pushed hard enough during the time of it's release that his character didn't seem tied to the game exclusively; but everyone else- forgotten land.

Which is why key villain 'Mephiles' has never once been brought up again in the main story, even during the scene in Forces when Infinite recalled a procession of past Sonic badguys, including people from games that came out before and after Sonic 06. (If it's any consolation, Shadow's unique sludge monster badguys from his game have been totally AWOL as well.) The last time we saw Mephiles was as an Easter egg banner character for Sonic Runners, hardly a glowing endorsement of how seriously SEGA takes him as a character. But then, lo-and-behold, in 2023 SEGA just randomly drops a piece of promotional art featuring a chibi version of Elise ice-skating with Knuckles. You know Elise, the girl who made-out with a dead Hedgehog, breaking two taboos at once, during one of the most controversial, and eye-rolling, moments in all of Sonic 06. (Also, that's canonically Sonic's first and last kiss. Just saying.) Suddenly the past is free reign now?

Of course we also have the news of Sonic Origins Plus, which is going to be reintroducing the world to all the terrible Sonic media that time rightly forgot. With prejudice. That means all of the Tails starring video games, and the bad original series ports, flying towards your common consumer like a spinning pig-skin with a fetish for nasal cavities. I guess there was never really an order within the company to ignore these old games per se, but given their lack of attention until just this point it's pretty safe to say that SEGA wasn't really proud of any of them. Let's put it this way; the announcement of these returning titles elicited more of a confused and half-hearted cheer than Capcom would have gotten if they randomly remastered a Castlevania classic or something. Or ported all those DS Castelvania titles over.

But that's only the side story anyway. The real big news of the Sonic Origins Plus announcement would be the caving in to what must be decades of fan pressure at this point. We're getting Rosey Rascal as a playable character in Sonic, a classic iteration of Amy Rose that SEGA have most definitely refused to acknowledge recently such to the extent that people began to believe she wasn't even canon anymore. (Thanks to the time travel plot of Sonic CD being questionable in it's canonicity in general. Sure, it introduced Metal Sonic- but why has Eggman never time travelled again if he's known how to do so all this time? Kill Sonic as a cub- come on! Or just expose him to pro-deforestation propaganda to brainwash him into being 'on team'.) This Rosey appears to be fully playable, has her own fresh sprite and a slightly improved version of the insta-shield that utilises the classic Amy hammer. (Which I think would be a combination of the old Rosey concept with the 3D era Amy accessories. Exciting!)

And then there's the April fools games. Yep the one that dropped today. What could I possibly have to say about this thing? Apart from the fact it's a whole VN based on the Sonic franchise, but I guess that isn't wildly out of the realm of SEGA's release slate- they allowed Dark Brotherhood to exist afterall. You know what is though; allowing Knuckles to appear with a cowboy hat. A freakin' Cowboy hat? Do you know how insane that is? What, you don't? Okay, let me explain. This isn't the first Cowboy hat our Echidna friend has ever worn, in fact he was famously depicted wearing that hat in the first Sonic movie, the OVA anime. A heavily buried piece of classic Sonic media that featured everything you love from the Sonic franchise including preppy one-liners, a frankly horrific death for Metal Sonic who graphically melts to death inside of an active volcano, and a spunky cat girl princess because this anime is from the 90's.

SEGA have lived their lives so commonly ashamed of their heritage that it's actually quite surprising, and a little bit unnerving, to have them change course so suddenly like this. Is something happening? Are they dying? Am I dying? Someone has to be dying, because otherwise this makes no sense. I know very well how scary it can be to throw everything at the wall and have nothing stick, which means a part of me also finds sympathy with the cold iron grip that SEGA have demanded over their franchise lately. But by that same merit, it feels so nice to have that grip be released and breathe in the diversity and culture of the rich history that Sonic has lived. Embrace all the past lives SEGA, they're what makes Sonic great! Except Lara-Su. You can... you can let Ken Penders keep her... please...