Ubisoft: "JK, we were kidding about the whole NFT stuff!"

 Telling lies?

The rise of NFTs has ushered on of the most distinct splits between gamers and developer desires that I might have ever seen in my years playing games. Because through everything that the games industry has churned up in order to slap a few extra bucks out of players, there's always been that plausible deniability so that the truly delusional could twist their mind into thinking everything down here was totally pro consumer. Excessive microtransactions? Well they're adding new content to the game, right? (Never mind that content was unceremoniously exorcized from the core package in the first place.) Season Passes? Well that's every DLC at a cheaper overall price! (Often sold before that DLC has been made so you can never know if it's good.) But NFTs? They were nothing. Less than nothing, for all they cost people. And the world thoroughly told that to those stupid enough to partake. But if you're stupid enough to front NFTs, you're probably too stupid to listen to free advice given by the people who give you money; so it's no surprise Ubisoft went ahead anyway.

Of all the companies that really need a kick up their arse recently, Ubisoft is one that has deftly dodged the righteous boot for an inordinate amount of time. With their workplace misconduct allegations, creatively drained team, squeezed dry franchises and all around scumminess, it's wonder they're still considered 'mid tier' by most gaming fans out there. My problem with them is more existential; they just lack that guttural drive to use their resources to create the uncreated; to innovate. They've trailed others and themselves for so very long now I don't think they higherups could tell you the Oxford Dictionary definition of 'originality.' It's a plague that has afflicted their games, staff and overall company structure and will always hold them back until the fundamental Ubisoft culture can learn to push itself forward to take risks. Oh wait- unless that risk is being the only company dumb enough to embrace NFTs; that would be a mistake!

Ubisoft Quartz was Ubisoft's absolutely full throttle jump into the scam-ridden, wash-traded, rug pulled world of Non Fungible Tokens; and don't let Yves' lies fool you; this was Ubisoft's grand vision for the future. Not only did Yves himself dripple on about how this was the future of the industry whilst his dusty grey matter started shrivelling up and dissolving between his over-cooked ears; but they even rolled out an actual Neanderthal, transported 50,000 years into the future, to tell us all how we were the dumb ones for not salivating like dogs over the prospect of trading worthless digital goods for moronic paymasters. Nicholas Pouard, Vice President of 'Ubisoft's Strategic Innovations Lab' and former Philosophy Teacher (My heart goes out to the generation of Parisian Philosophy majors this numbskull ruined) famously spouted out his utter nonsense during an interview about how NFTs aren't an "Easy concept to grasp" and that "Quartz is a first step that should lead to something bigger." These are direct quotes and I want you to keep them all in mind.

"I think gamers don't get what a digital secondary market can bring them." The man said, once again magically equating the concept of the block chain and secondary markets as interchangeable; without justifying the connection. (Especially given how secondary markets have existed in the past for games.) "Gamers believe it's first destroying the planet, and second just a tool for speculations. But what we are seeing is the end game... about giving players to opportunity to resell their items once they're finished with them." Another curious little snippet I wanted to highlight there. Wherein he identified just two of the major concerns with NFTs in gaming, there are a lot more, and then proceeded to address neither of them. The ecological impact of servers that run these various blockchains, is real. And the speculative market that NFTs consist in, is literally the core basis of NFTs. that's what the thing is; you can't just throw that away as the fringe concerns of someone who 'doesn't get it' when the very end goal you're shooting for is a world resplendent with video game item day trading!

These are words that a project lead at Ubisoft was saying, further pressing on assertions made by the CEO that NFTs were "Just the beginning". And of course, we mustn't forget the fact that Ubisoft tried to pay their employees bonuses in NFTs which is just... my god, that should be grounds for a civil case. Oh, and the NFTs which spawned all of these words of encouragement and solidarity? They were generic military armour pieces for a Live Service game that would cease active development due to lack-of-interest less than a year later. And in that time it's widely believed that Ubisoft sold so few of these NFTs that they likely didn't make back the money to took to mint them on the Blockchain in the first place. So that's the very first in Ubisoft's entire history that it took the initiative, and it turned into a total disaster so beautiful all of us 'haters' couldn't have dreamt it up in our most fitful nightmares. (Who said the String of Fate doesn't have a sense of irony?)

So how could Ubisoft possibly reveal to everyone that their get-rich-quick scheme totally dissolved into nothingness around them without losing the tightly wound community respect that they absolutely don't have? By lying of course! Yves 'le rat' Guillemot recently attempted to gaslight the entire Internet collectively by announcing the company's lack of progress with WEB3 initiatives by declaring that  Quartz was 'just part of their ongoing research'. Yeah, he hasn't walked back his stance entirely, but he's absolute trying to Astroturf over the companies' painfully obvious attempt to change the industry with a bold leap off a cliff. He wants the threat of future NFT propositions hanging over us at all times, without the looming sense of something vile happening at Ubisoft headquarters potentially souring their desperate attempt to reinvigorate their core franchise with an organised reboot strike. Seriously, Ubisoft is in major 'public relations' mode right now with reboot remakes of Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell and now Assassin's Creed, to an extent, all juggling around in various states of embarrassing disrepair.

In some ways this is actually a very damning indictment to the extent to which Yves and his like will bend reality to try and cover for their pathetic Crypto scheme. As much as many are pointing and laughing at this sad attempt to backtrack, I'm looking at a cover up aimed directly at investors. He's telling the money men that his sad profitless screw up shouldn't be held over his head because it was actually a data dry run which just ensure that the next time he swings around with NFTs, it'll actually make money. Unfortunately this is considered 'spin' in the legal sense and not defrauding his investors, but it's still utterly unethical from a moral sense to mislead those financially entwined to your company about the success of your operations so I'm going use this as yet another reason why Yves Guillemot deserves to be pushed out of his own company and left penniless. Yes, I really do hate the man.

Everything that Ubisoft has ever said about digital assets and what it is they want to do with them has been idle mush-mouth gibberish from people who really should know better. Transferrable assets is a nonsensical concept from a deeply base level, unless all the world was to adopt some sort of ultimate one-fits-all game engine overnight. (Which is a laughable prospect.) Selling on in-game items that you're done with to new players seems pointless when any game with basic balance is going to allow new players to attain that same item without spending any additional time whatsoever; Ubisoft might as well just keep selling their insipid 'time savers' packs if that's the angle they want to run with. And the whole 'ownership' angle seems deeply questionable when all of these assets are going to carry a Ubisoft trademark on them, and every sale made with them will kick back to Ubisoft. Seems gamers do understand NFTs quite a bit, eh? At least enough to know a dirty scam when we see it.

Kiryu is back? Already?

 Backstreet's back, alright!

I think the recent Saints Row debacle has made me appreciate the absolute mastery of Yakuza even more than I already did. Now if you've hung around here a little bit that's going to sound like a supremely loaded statement, given that I sing the praises of Yakuza so much you'd think they were paying may way through college; but the truth is that it's the failures of the Saints Reboot that has highlighted the successes of Yakuza franchise all the more for me. When they promised to nail that blend between seriousness and comedy invoking the name of Saints Row 2, I had to scoff at the true king of that balance; the Yakuza franchise, and the perfect protagonist who encapsulates that spirit of the dead pan heroic idol who can front the serious moments, and the affable straight-man off which the silliness can bounce, Kiryu Kazuma.

Kiryu is the amalgamation of all the cliché 'tortured gangster' stereotypes rolled up into one immaculately dressed fatherly package who deftly skirts around the moral issue of belonging to a supremely violent criminal organisation by somehow being unerringly devoted to beating money out of only 'bad guy Yakuza'. I swear, the only time Kiryu ever does anything morally questionable is at the very beginning of his journey in Yakuza 0 where he beats a guy up for loan shark money, but that slight moral darkness is immediately overshadowed by that man's prompt murder by a third party who then tries to pin it on Kiryu. "Oh he beat the guy up? Well at least he didn't kill him like everyone's saying; Kiryu is the innocent party here!" He still strong-armed a man for a slimy loan shark! But we can't bring ourselves to hold our main man accountable because he's just that darn classically heroic throughout the franchise.

Somehow in his entire long career he has never taken a life, with that single line being the major moral foil that Kiryu refuses to cross for that being the one-line which would forever corrupt his character; creating an almost sacrificial or religiously virtuous light on the man as he must skirt the dark corners of the criminal world ever adjacent to death but morally compelled to seek alternatives in his unending search to right the world's wrongs. Also, he literally adopts a tiny girl and a puppy in the same game. Oh, but hang on! We can't have Kiryu, virtuous and Christ-like figure as he, implicated in the debaucherously immoral act of procreation in order to make this girl. He must be virtuous and virtuous, if you're picking up what I'm putting down. (I'm saying he has to be a virgin.) So even though the girl's mother is the love of his life, we must conjure some elaborate scheme to ensure the girl is born by someone else, but is still kind of Kiryu's child anyway because her mother's heart belonged to Kiryu. I know I'm splitting hairs on this but I just need you to understand the extent to which this character is peerless to a hilarious level! He's Christ-like to a degree that Zack Snyder couldn't even dream of!

He's also practically inhuman. And that's not just me saying that; the creator of Yakuza himself said that comparing John Wick to Kiryu Kazuma was unfair because Kiryu isn't human. And that is something we can see in the gameplay, particularly in Yakuza Kiwami 2 when you unlock the ability to block bullets with your block pose, and then can literally stand through a line of machine gun fire blocking it all with your super-fast wrists like some sort of gender-swapped Asian Wonder Woman. But then even inside of cutscenes Kiryu is a monster. My man has been shot, stabbed, shot again, blown up, shot a few more times, and became so damned powerful that there is one scene wherein he stares down and then side steps two oncoming RPG rockets: I am not kidding. I would not even think of making that up. Also he Tiger Dropped an actual Tiger. You can't forget that.

But why am I going nuts over Kiryu? Well, in essence I'm doing a bit of a post-mortem for a man who's time in the major Yakuza franchise has finally ended. He starred in seven stellar main entries (Even 3 is great once you get past the god-awful combat system) and carried the franchise to where it is today, but now it's time to give our man his break and let him live through his retirement. What is Kiryu, like 60 by the events of modern Yakuza? The guy just doesn't need to be throwing bloody fists around like he once did, or battling tigers and rocket launchers and helicopters and whatever else the sadists at RGG want to throw his way! They wouldn't even let my man get married or even have a romantic interest for more than a single game! At least he can rest. Oh wait, no he can't-

After Yakuza 6: Song of Life, the franchise was supposed to be passed onto the two new leads of the franchise, Ichiban and Yagami; for their dual series of Ryu Ga Gotoku and Judge Eyes. (Or 'Yakuza' and 'Judgement', as they're known in the west.) Yakuza Main was switching to an RPG style of game for the long haul, and Judgement would adopt the action fighting gameplay that Yakuza had become known for. Nothing would be lost, everything would be gained; the world would be happy. But then the unthinkable happened. If you remember when I last covered this, you might remember that Yagami's increadibly famous actor Takuya Kimura, was stuck with agents that had shut down any plans for Judgement to be ported to the PC for some inane fears over brand control, halting RGG Studio's plans for Judgement. So how has the team decided to fill this void? By bringing an old man out of retirement, that's how!

I understand Kiryu's cameo role in Yakuza 7 so that he could pass the torch on to Ichiban, it made a lot of sense. But not that he's done that, maybe he should have taken a bit of a back seat and enjoyed a life without worries. But instead we're looking at brand new Kiryu starring spin-off game, which I'm betting is going to play with that action fighting gameplay that RGG were previously going to reserve for the Judge Eyes games, and Yakuza 8 was revealed with Kiryu in a starring role next to Ichiban. (And rocking the sort of hair you'd expect from a Devil May Cry protagonist.) Oh, and we're getting a localisation of 'Like a Dragon: Ishin'; something I can pretty safely say none of us expected to happen. So are we eating good as Yakuza fans? Hell yeah we are! But is our boy Kiryu getting the rest he deserved? Not really.

This is kind of like if when Witcher 4 comes out, Geralt hops his way into the main story in a support role, and then goes on to star alongside the new hero and get his own spin-off. It would kind of spit in the face of that very touching scene when Geralt literally declares he's earnt a rest after the events of Blood and Wine and then turns directly to the camera as if to say "You got that? I'm about done with all this crap!" Then there was a out-of-universe goodbye from Doug Cockle. All of this gave fans the closure that they needed travelling along with this character for all these years and seeing him get his semi-happy ending. Kiryu has served as an unbending, uncompromising, force of nature for over forty, years (within the timeline of the games he started in) and in all that time he really stopped evolving personally after the events of 2. We still love the man, but unless there's anything more to do with his character, does he need to be bought back into the fold?

Again, I am not complaining about any of the incredible announcements we got because unlike a lot of the western game franchises that are slowly pulling apart at the seams; the Yakuza games have only been getting better and better; I just think there's plenty of room for cool new protagonists that might have more... shall we say... flexibility than Kiryu Kazuma does. I just think that at this point in his career Kiryu would serve best as an impressive backdrop in front of which more human and fallible heroes can struggle and learn to become an ounce of the legend he represents; that way we might see more incredible emotional moments that have us on the edge of our seats, which is something I know this franchise is capable of from past experience. Still, I love Yakuza and 2023 is going to be a damn RGG onslaught at this rate! 

Okay, I HAVE to talk about the Disney Marvel Games showcase

 Disaster incarnate

I have been deftly missing absolutely every single press conference that has come out this year; without the stability of E3 in my life it's almost felt like every single big developer has randomly selected their week to do a reveal event and I'm just supposed to sense it on the wind. As it just so happens I was just skimming the Youtube home page when I heard about the 'Disney Marvel games showcase', a combination of words I never quite expected to see together and so found myself more than mildly intrigued by. Why not tune in to what could very well be the first of many games showcases for the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world that still has a centralised brand image? That could be historic! In fact, I pretty sure it will be whatever happens. So I ended up watching the event and can now, in the literal minutes after it ended, share with you that it was nigh-on atrocious. One of the worst reveal events I've ever seen, only really topped by that Gearbox showcase a while back which revealed nothing and just sent Randy Pitchford wandering around a film set for fifteen minutes.

Now of course, one might be asking exactly what it is that makes a 'bad' video game showcase, and the truth is that there is no definitive checklist, just as there never is in matters of objectivity; but if we look at this mechanically we can actually break down the basic parameters. First of all, the event has to recognise that the ratio between games being shown and hosts talking needs to be skewered in the favour of the former. A showcase is the time to display the games that are being worked on, a deeper dive video needs to exist separately so that those who are interested in that particular product can go look it up. Think of the viewers like fish and the developers as fisherman. They're trying to bait their lines enough to lure in the fish, so they need to show off the goods and keep the line dangling to keep things lively and convince fans there's something interesting here. Let the line sit like its dead, or bait it with a lifeless animatic, and the fish are going to get bored and swim off elsewhere. And let me tell you; for this entire show I felt like dipping.

First off, our illustrious host Mr Blessing wasn't making matter easy. Now there's always going to be a friction between a showcase line-up and it's host, because every second we're looking at the host, we're not seeing new games and, usually, the host is saying nothing of any relevance to the game in question beyond repeating a release date that was already shown off in the trailer. Mr Blessing didn't even have any release dates to rattle off, he literally just hype-manned each game with a 'that looks sick' etc. For every trailer with typically sterile corporate enthusiasm. (In his defence he did, rather cringily, introduce himself as a an NPC.) I think the best way to do a host is the way that Nintendo does it. Borderline text-to-speech disembodied voice over back-to-back game coverage, and if we ever need to see a human it's going to either be the CEO or the game director coming on to beg our forgiveness before they delay Breath of the Wild 2 for another year! (Sorry, I got off track...)

But the second poison pill which killed this conference is something that our Host couldn't have saved if he was replaced with all the charisma of Lalo Salamanca; there was literally nothing to show off. I don't mean there were no new game announcements, because there absolutely were; I mean that of those games, the teams had nothing to cobble together representing the gameplay content of those games. We got cinematic after cinematic incessantly, and the couple of times there was gameplay, it was for games with painfully predictable premises! The Mario Kart rip-off? Yeah, I can imagine how that plays, thank you very much! Hearthstone with Marvel Characters? I don't even know why you're making that instead of just selling a cross-over opportunity to Magic: The Gathering like every other brand does...

The showcase did have some reveals, however, such as a cute looking multiplayer 2D platformer themed in the new Mickey show style. That was decent. We also saw some more of Midnight Suns, and I'm rapidly reaching the point where I'm seeing much more of this game then I ever needed to; I honestly don't know what I have to look forward to in the full release of the game any more at this point. I've seen all the animations, I've seen all their special moves. I think we've had every character revealed and seen how Boss fights play out. I'd just like the game now, please! And we got the aforementioned Mario kart game with a name so forgettable I'm going to guess it right now instead of look it up in the hopes that my short term memory has managed to nail it. Was it... Speedstorm? Oh my god it was! I am a king among mortals!

Also shown were those Avatar games which no one asked for- oh wait, did I forget to mention? There's two of them now, buddy! That first game by Ubisoft is allegoric to showing off footage because I suppose at this point Ubisoft knowns how instantly recognisable their tired formula is and figures that the less they show us, the better. The second game is- wait, really? Oh god. The second game is an MMO RPG, I kid you not. No doubt developed by a team who have totally no idea the amount of commitment required to make an MMO RPG function like it should and who only see the returns of the big players in the industry and simply stand there, gaping with dollar signs in their eyes. It doesn't even look visually impressive, which is literally the key selling point of the Avatar franchise: visual appeal over substance!

What else, what else? Umm... we got a cinematic for a game featuring some Disney villains with absolutely no details about what the game is supposed to be. They might as well have just posted a screenshot of their trademark filling on Twitter, we'd know about as much about the game as we do now. Then there was... geez this is hard... I think there was some sort of cinematic for a Mobile game featuring more cartoony versions of Marvel heroes... no wait, that was Strike Force, that game's already out... Oh that's right! Niantic decided they want to try and cannibalise their own audience even further with another game to slap up next to the Pokemon Go, Hogwarts Wizards Unite and Pikmin Bloom audience! (Wasn't there a Witcher themed game in there somewhere as well?) So these are all stocking stuffers; what about the big show stopper games that everyone came to this event for? What about the updates to Wolverine, Spider-man 2 or Kingdom Hearts 4?

Well there was one teaser that I think they wanted to be a showstopper event at the end of the conference. It was a big tease featuring Captain America, Bucky, Black Panther and... someone else, I actually don't know, in World War 2 Paris starring in what looks to be some action adventure multiverse Marvel game. Oh wait, Amy Hennig is involved? In that case it's going to get cancelled. That woman is cursed, I swear. How she managed to get out the hugely successful Uncharted games without a satellite falling on the development office, I'll never now. But that was everything. The whole event. No big final showcase, no update to the huge Disney branded projects that are still floating around with very few details, just a few table scraps and a pat on the back. So welcome back to the world of game development after your extended hiatus, Disney; but maybe you should wait until you have something to actually show before you waste everyone's time and energy. That would be sweet, thanks.

The next step for Cyberpunk

 One last hurrah

It's funny, you go so long looking at something down on it's knees, grovelling in the dirt, and it's easy to forget that the game wasn't always there and can't always be. Either the developer is going to give up and move on, or they're going to do their damndest to make up for lost time. Whilst it is true that at least a portion of CDPR has done their duty and moved fully on from Cyberpunk so that they can start work on The Witcher 4 (>sigh<) we've still got that one DLC of Cyberpunk to get through before that project can be laid to rest, and though we know quite a lot about it thanks to the fact that Keanu Reeves' very few lines were recorded so early in advance that they could be datamined, we can all turn around and feign surprise at those brand new update for the cool stuff it's providing as well as the sad break-up which should have come before the relationship ever began. 

Firstly, the Cyberpunk anime is finally out! And it's only been two years... handily that was enough for the show to skip right past a lot of vitriol and now become a beacon of things perhaps turning around for the battered video game franchise. If, indeed, turning around is what people want for Cyberpunk. (A lot of people like to wallow in the misery of a failure. I'll admit, I see the appeal.) Having actually watched a lot of the previews for the anime whilst it was in production I'll be the first to say that the actual animation looks fantastic, with so much clean movement and gorgeous shifting lines and shapes, it's some of the best I've seen. Is that enough to make me want to watch?... I don't know, there hasn't really been that spark of intrigue ignited up by any of these preliminary action sequences. Heck, two years of teases and they didn't even tease what the show was even about, which makes me kind of uninvested in watching it. I want to say I'll get around to it but... there's a lot of other shows that are taking precedent. Maybe I'll skip it, honestly.

And now there's an update to Cyberpunk celebrating this anime through clothing items and a weapon, both of which are fine, and somewhat beyond the call of duty, for what the game needed to do; but this drop coincides with another significant quality of life update for the game. What is added? Well... nothing that changes up the heart of the game, obviously, but just some doubling-down elements. That long-requested Transmog system which allows armour to display different skin so that people can dress how they like with the stats that they need (in a first-person game...) and then there's some more customisation variety included in the game's Ripper clinics that cannot be accessed in the in-game mirror which provides a small sprinkle of that role-play value people felt was originally missing from the base game. Oh, and this is the final update that will be coming to last gen consoles as everything in the future, including the DLC, is for the newer current generation only. (I said there would be a breakup.)

It was probably greed that convinced CDPR management that there had to be a last gen version of this game in order for it to sell well, which in turn became a lightning rod for a lot of the technical issues that the overall development process encountered. Of course that wasn't all, and it doesn't excuse the abject lies that their marketing department dished out, but it's certainly one factor in a equation of mess-ups. Cutting off the last gen is a step that was long overdue and hopefully without them Cyberpunk can start making real splashes with future content. Although we have heard that CDPR are killing off all their work on the engine that made CDPR after this coming DLC, so maybe that's a bit of overly wishful thinking. We're never going to get that open-world simulation we were promised, are we? Not that I honestly still expected to after all this time to be perfectly honest.

But what we are getting is a brand new DLC which is going to go all 'Spy' on us with codenames and pledges to protect the America and all that cool 'James Bond but American' stuff. According to leaks the expansion itself isn't going to take us very far out of Nightcity, which is a bit of a shame, but instead explore some parts of the City that were undeveloped in the course of the main game. What I really want to know, however, is whether or not it will explore buttloads of conspiracy theories translated into video game format specifically so that Cyberpunk can start stepping on Deus Ex's toes. I have to ask because it was only a couple of years ago where a key original Deus Ex developer bemoaned the seriousness with which a modern audience has taken to his fantasy-themed video game and wished he had never written the thing in the first place. Are CDPR bad enough dudes to ignore his warning and throw fuel onto that flame?

Honestly I'm actually quite excited to see a substantive chunk of content hurling towards Cyberpunk 2077 for the first (and likely last) time after launch; as it gives the team an opportunity to really demonstrate what the recent screw-up has taught them about their approach towards development and delivery to their fans. Who can really say what CDPR are cooking up in their lab to wow and shock the world? If this is going to be their only go around, I fully expect it to be at least comparable to the amount of effort and love that went into 'Blood and Wine', in not in size than at least in depth. This might be CDPR's last chance to prove they have their heads on straight before the multiyear wait to hear about their next project, and it would be really nice to end things on a high note!

Obviously we know that Keanu's contribution to this DLC is going to be limited, with Johnny Silverhand's interference being muted during the content through some special McGuffin. I only hope this doesn't end up making the DLC feel like an obvious insert that doesn't gel with the rest of the main story, which I would imagine being a real issue given that the core narrative of Cyberpunk is rather centrally focused around Johnny to the point where the main character sort of gets back-seated by him for some of the runtime. This does leave space for other characters to jump up and become the nagging voice in the player's head, however, which makes a great opportunity to expand out this world to other characters that might actually be able to be bought back in a Cyberpunk 207- whatever sequel ten-or-so years down the line.

In the absence of Deus Ex and the disappearing of all those small indie projects that strutted their funky stuff when Cyberpunk was first launched, this remains the only big proponent of Cyberpunk video gaming in the world right now and I'm happy the game is somewhat back on the way up. The disappointment lingers, of course; but a CDPR that makes the happy headlines is always going to be preferable to the one squabbling in it's own faeces trying to play off the mess as 'not as bad as it looks; guys!' It's just a shame that this seems to be the last step on a road to bettering the game, not the first big one; but then I suppose it only makes since that the team had to cut themselves off somewhere else they'd be tinkering and muddling with this game for as long as the Star Citizen team have been bumbling on; and nobody wants to miss their moment as much as Cloud Imperium has, and continues to do. 

Restoring Assassin's Creed?

 Fat Chance!

For a reason I cannot even formulate; apparently Assassin's Creed wants to go back to it's routes. Somewhat. Despite the consistency of Ubisoft in recent years, both in growth and in the games that they make benign carbon copies of one after the other; Ubisoft are going to rock the boat with their next AC game and I do not know why. Haven't their latest RPG outings made stupid amounts of money even as the average review grade have tended down? I'd have thought that was the perfect trajectory for Assassin's Creed's management because it just gives them an excuse to reap the same benefits whilst denying their employees of bonuses. But I guess one rogue soul in the developers room grew a consciousness because going forward Assassin's Creed is going to be publishing a 'back to basics' spin off title known, at least currently in the development stage because all these games go through a little rename before reveal, Assassin's Creed Mirage.

Such comes from recent leaks out of the Ubisoft development studios, and whilst I'm usually the first one to exercise that all-important grain of salt whenever it comes to discussing the validity of leaks like they're facts, (the GTA VI one about Bonnie and Clyde protagonists is total bunk, mark my words) when it comes to Ubisoft they are, and have always been, the leakiest of ships. There was a time when Bethesda were pretty bad for it, but the absolute lights-off development of Fallout 4 was a turning point for them; nobody knew that game was dropping before the tease livestream and then we all learnt it was due for later that same year! No, there hasn't been a single release in Ubisoft's past ten years that hasn't made headlines months before the reveal; to the point where I'm mostly confident that the Ubisoft teams leak them intentionally ahead of time to gauge public interest before they devote their full attention. It would make more sense than assuming they're just incapable of keeping a single secret ever.

So when I hear tell of an Assassin's Creed Game that is going to be set in the wide city streets of Baghdad; is going to try and recreate the massive crowd technology of Assassin's Creed Unity in order to achieve those streets and is aiming at a return to the stealth action the series was based on, I know that it's for sure what's happening. But then I have to really confront what is being said here and ask; do Ubisoft really have the ball like they think they do? I mean sure; stealth was a big part of old Assassin's Creed that got stepped on by the newer titles, but there was a fair bit of being that hood-donning whirlwind of death in those games too. Assassin's Creed 2, Brotherhood and Black Flag, each some of the best in the franchise, each lauded the absolute brutality of their action combat as key selling points. Move too far away from that to underpower the player and you get... well, fittingly enough you get Assassin's Creed Unity and it's slow and frankly annoying combat.

But there is a charm in going 'back to basics'. No more discount 'Nemesis system', no more painful 'over arching' metagame that forces you to relieve the same endless 'do this task' over and over and pretends it's content. Just back to the focused high quality main campaign will small chunks of content... spread over a world of mindless collectathon items- look, the Ubisoft Formula had its roots for a while. If they want to make an Assassin's Creed to break the mould, going 'back to basics' is only the beginning. They need to evolve, take risks, be different to the games before it; and maybe spend a little more time planning what they're going to make before they just jump into development and allow the muscle memory of ten years to kick in like they have always done up until now. I know that's currently impossible with the sheer rate of output that the Ubisoft machine demands out of them, but maybe that's evidence that Assassin's Creed needs to tone down that ungodly churn!

So what lessons can this bold new face of Assassin's Creed learn and where can they learn them? Well there's some fundamental theories of basic world building that Breath of the Wild is a masterclass on, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima and any action game of that calibre can teach them how to make action fun and stealth? Well if they want to get creative with and add that dose of approachable ingenuity they've been desperate to nail since the whole 'black box mission design' disappointment of Unity; 'Hitman: No Subtitle' or Metal Gear Solid V. Both different styles of game but with an incredible amount of replayability in the way they designed fundamental systems that interacted with each other in a way that designed gameplay opportunities rather than orchestrating highly scripted sections of gameplay with specifically designed alternative routes. None of these inspirations and ideas are easy, and absolutely none of them can be replicated in the same timeframe that Assassin's Creed games are usually developed in; which is why a change needs to come.

Is there hope for Assassin's Creed in the coming future? Or is this all just another waste of time where people get their hopes up for a Ubisoft that plays like they're going to listen before letting us all down for the hundredth time? Well, I'm not confident. I've said it before and I'll say it till I'm blue in the face; there's something rotten at the top of Ubisoft and that withers each and every one of their fruits before they can reach the store shelves. All the talk about 'accountability' and 'fixing themselves up' has been idle pandering; they've let the world and themselves down consistently. Giving them the benefit of the doubt at this point would literally be like laying your whole body down in front of a serial killer elephant; not a wise move.

Ubisoft absolutely will screw up the basic narrative, making all the characters surface deep and quirky so they can stuff as many faces in the plot as they possibly can. They will find some way to monetise the game in the most infuriating way; pawning cosmetics under the vain belief that just because they're no gameplay effecting, that makes them harmless, disregarding how that excuse only works in free-to-play online games; in a single purchase single player game we except the good stuff in the thing we bought! They will fail to strike a balance that keeps the gameplay loop feeling fresh and end up egging the player on for so long they lose interest, making the final ten hours, and the proceeding DLC, a soul-sucking chore to go through. And they will disappoint in their core promise to reignite what made Assassin's Creed promising. Because falling short is just what Ubisoft does best.

The problem with this franchise is, contrary to Yves insistances, Assassin's Creed never had a plan for where its franchise would go, and when you're developing a connected narrative mega universe, winging it as you go is kind of a fool's game. They had no spine or soul to limit their ambition, which in turn would allow that ambition to be fine tuned into what makes the series work best, and so Assassin's Creed just became another mis-match of ideas that the current development team thinks might workfor the moment, and it kind of does for a bit before it gets boring because at this point the fans don't even know what they want out of these games. The identity is just so damned muddy that fan's own desires are a mystery to them. Mirage has some big shoes to fill if it's going to magic us all back to caring about this franchise and personally, I'm pretty confidant it's going to fail.

The strange appeal of School-based games

Saved by the bell

When you're the one in School, the only thing you can possible think about is getting the hell out of there as expediently as humanly possible, but the second you're spat out the otherside of education into the harsh and unforgiving world, it is that very comfort of scholastic structure that you find yourself longing for. Which may lead into one of the reasons why so many out there find the school-based style of video game so very appealing to their sensibilities; because it reminds them of a time where it felt like anything was possible and the world was boundless. Both things which, as anyone above school age will tell you, are not preeminent truths of the world. But to the point; isn't it strange that such a theme is present in some of the most popular and/or beloved games of their genre; is there something transcendent, or simply just profound, hidden in the formula of the school system? And no, when I'm talking about this style of game I'm not lauding up games like 'Yandere Simulator', I'm more talking classics like...

Life is Strange. I know I have my issues with DONTNOD and every single one of their games, and the original Life is Strange is no exception to that rule, but I would have to be delusional not to see the profound effect that series has had. Heck, it's got three games and a spin-off related to it's characters; that has to count for something! Only the first Life is Strange, and the spin off, is school based, but it remains a favourite in many people's eyes for it's characterisation of a young girl going through the year of her Art School university whilst struggling with fantastical powers and the doom their coming has hastened. DONTNOD made heavy use of the typical power tropes that arise around School structures in order to explore sensations of being outcasted and popularity dynamics in a lesser sense, and explore relationships and how younger people connect on a deeper, and consequentially more painful, level to one another. I think they didn't really did anything meaningful with that position; but I am in the vast minority, it would seem.

One such game I have a much easier time getting behind is the Rockstar classic Bully, because of course. Bully is a game that takes the typical open world formula of Grand Theft Auto, completing missions across a slowly expanding world as your social prestige and means increase, and shrinks it into a tightly packed town dominated by Bullworth Academy. Here Rockstar explores the tropes of school society again, although through their typical hyper exaggerated lens that blows up this image into school factions defined by their tropey identity, which are toyed about with throughout the narrative as hardcore competitive gangs might in other Rockstar games. Bully painstakingly goes through each aspect of School life to make it work as an open world game, from having a time-table for which ignoring it earns you the ire of School Prefects that will hunt you down as Police would, to attending lessons that present you with minigames which award abilities that upgrade the open world exploration experience for completing them.

Bully presents a fantasy where the player, a delinquent who has been kicked out of every school they've ever been to, is a scrappy underdog in a world of liars and cheats where School is an extension of the hard streets outside. It feeds into that fantasy of school life that some like to indulge in, which mixes the comfort of living in a world of structure with the thrill of being that wrench in the system who stands up to the motes of power and 'breaks the wheel' to quote that one series. There's less an examination of actual School life in Bully, and more a use of it as a blanket on which typical GTA worlds are projected; but given how attractive those worlds of crime already are, the translation prints out perfectly and then some. There's something honestly a little insightful about portraying the social hierarchy of school-life as a literal microcosm of adult society which helps make the Bully package just infectious with it's charm. That's probably why people have been eager for a sequel for so very long now.

But of course, this idea could not exist in my head for a whisper of a second without Persona soon following suit. The ATLUS spin-off from their much more existential JRPG franchise, Persona has blown up into their main money maker on account of the premise and execution being just so darn approachable. You don't have to get into some strange new universe where people have cat ears on their heads, or it's entirely acceptable to have half your body covered in blue paint; instead you're lured into a seemingly normal scholastic world that is slowly turned on it's head by the introduction of over worldly elements in a manner not so dissimilar to the set-up for 'Jojo's Bizarre Adventure'. Which is fitting, because apparently Persona was inspired for some of it's choices by the good work of JoJo. Which makes sense; the way these games use Personas is actually quite similar to how Araki uses Stands.

It's the school setting in particular which is perhaps the biggest hallmark of Persona in it's distinction from Shin Megami Tensi; because whereas you can expect your big JRPG battles to play out with the very familiar and fun 'weakness'/'strengths' elemental combat system which ATLUS rock, the downtime for these games are almost just as, if not more, important than the action. You attend school on the daily, plan out your extra-curricular activities, work on building yourself as a person, and grow closer to the community all around you. It's a recipe for self improvement that feels utterly idealised when read out as a laundry list, but when gamified like ATLUS does it, that concept becomes approachable and heartfelt. The terrestrial school-kid setting of Persona humanises the setting and the characters so that they feel real and their struggles become just as real. Identifiability is really the key here.

By and large we keep coming back to this sense of 'grounding' that the school trope brings to the stories it's implemented in. Because attending and learning at school is a sort of experience that most everyone can relate to, and thus requires less of a investment to become attached to. If you want to then use that setting to tell some mundane story about school life or an exaggerated commentary on societal cliques; the way forward has been smoothened by the intrinsic personal connection that the player has immediately established with their setting. Of course with that comes risk, as some people find the setting to be too mundane or pastiche; but for the moment it would appear that the general winds of fandom have blown to favouring these styles of story for the moment; which is why even as companies like ATLUS expand their horizons with other styles of games, it's the tantalizing promise of a Persona 6 which has most of their western fans frothing at the mouth.

There's definitely an art to nailing this style of presentation and a balancing game stringent on the genre you're working with. I happen to think that the Bully version of this trope is perhaps a tad annoying with the whole 'truancy' system, and I think Life is Strange is just generally hammy in most of it's significant direction choices (particularly the supernatural stuff; but Max being a cookie-cutter 'not like the other girls' protagonist didn't help things) and Persona is my Golden boy because of course it is, I love that thing. But everyone who is a fan of school-set games have their own compunction, whether because it reminds them of the structure of school life that they love, or see games as a wish fulfilment for how they wished a personally turbulent part of their lives would have gone; there is something special here for everyone. Unless you hate school-based games and wish ATLUS would spend their efforts on literally anything else. Those people exist too. I see you.

Killer Klowns, huh?

 We're doing this? Okay...

Adaptions are sort of fast approaching a well-earned status as the lowest of the low when it comes to creativity. Or at least; the video game adaptations are. I'm hearing that the new Lord of the Rings and House of Dragons are supposed to be great, but unfortunately Game of Thrones killed any excitement I'm capable of having for main stream fantasy anymore; I just don't think TV have endured enough fantasy to know how to get it right like over mediums have over the years. But what about when the adaptation is on the other foot? What about when it's a video game adapting a movie into it's world? These were the dreams that Geoff Keighley sparked on the night of his Gamescon show where he sent imaginations racing for what movie franchise could possible be making the rare leap to interactive play. And that franchise was... Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Which, if you're anything like me, probably made you ask: What the hell is 'Killer Klowns from Outer S pace'?

Killer Klowns is a 1988 comedy horror film spawning from a period in American film history where B budget movies were tripping over themselves to spawn anything with that kicker to stand out from the crowd. This one would have a really cool poster that teases the, inevitably disappointing, monster effect; whilst that one might take a set of adorable children's cartoon characters and turn them on their heads in a horrifying reimagination. (Huh? What do you mean 'Garbage Pail Kids' wasn't a horror movie? That film was terrifying!) Or in the case of this particular movie, maybe you'll come up with the name whilst your drunk one night and assume the name alone is going to be enough to draw in crowds. Which it was. Good job. Oh the tribulations of making a movie that got attention back in the eighties! Imagine if they required to actually make a good product as well! Gosh, what a headache that would be...

Now to be fair, Killer Klowns was made with intent to be silly with it's horror, hence the very intentional addition of 'From Outer Space' in the title. (Because apparently 80's movies were so bad, audiences would just naturally assume a movie called 'Killer Klowns' was meant to be taken seriously. But space? Nah, that's place is pure wack, bro!) Now increadibly; this is a movie with an actually positive reception on the stage of it's peers, with audiences and critics praising the amount of technical talent on display and the well balanced tone which made the whole movie fun to watch. In fact, the movie was so well received that it attained a cult status and demands for a sequel which never quite ended up panning out. Well, until today that is; because I guess this video game is the long-delayed follow up to the '88 cult hit which nobody was expecting, least of all those who liked that original.

But I have to be the arse who asks the question that we're all thinking but are too polite to voice; who actually asked for this? I mean, really? There seems to be a coming trend of the most nonsensical adaptations for videogames of all time, spurred by the recently release 'Evil Dead' game, which at least kind of makes sense for a video game in a very twisted way, and then bloated by that Texas Chainsaw Massacre game. When you hear that movie franchise is getting a video game then there really aren't any rules or limits anymore, are there? It's only a matter of time before someone makes a 'Wolf of Wall Street' game or '12 Years a Slave' or- wow, my movie references are crusty as heck. I really haven't gone and watched a non-marvel film since 'Uncut gems.' Geez...

Now as with any game in a genre of this type, the first thing you're going to be asking is what this game even is, and I then informed you to think of the lowest common denominator; you would immediately know. Yes, this is another asymmetrical Multiplayer game wherein one side of the match plays as the Klowns and the otherside play as humans. I swear, this style of game is quietly becoming the 'Survival games' of the modern world, only exclusively for video game movie adaptations; and I don't know why. It's not like it's easy to make a game like this, in fact balancing can be a nightmare, not to mention the active player base you'll need in order to make it somewhat of a success. I can only imagine it's the most conceptually easy to pitch to a room full of investors; so like it or hate it, we're stuck with the concept for the foreseeable future.

I just feel that if you're going to go out of your way to adapt a movie you might as well sit down and have a unique spin on the concept. Because otherwise you might as well just sell your franchise rights to Dead by Daylight for an add-on pack like everyone else did. Do you think Hellraiser would have made a good asymmetrical multiplayer game? No! It would have been generic and boring as all heck! But Dead by Daylight exists as that medium for horror movie franchises that want that extra kick up the ass! Do you want to know how most asymmetrical multiplayer games end their life? It's not a great secret; they end up fizzling out after a month or two. Predator Hunting Grounds? Forgot it existed. Evolve? Taken from us far too soon. Arkham Origin's Multiplayer mode? Yeah, I bet you didn't even know that was a thing! It's a recipe for disappointment.

And though all we have is a teaser trailer with brief snippets of gameplay to go off of; Killer Klowns doesn't look to be breaking any bold new grounds for what it offers. Aside from, okay this is a huge deal; there appears to be more than one clown to a map. To be fair, most asymmetrical horror games are one murderer versus a team of survivors; this set-up makes it look more like a deathmatch. Or 'Spies Vs Mercenaries'. Does that mean it will stand out? Not necessarily. I don't think it's so much the idea behind customising this style of game that rubs people wrong, I think it's the actual subgenre itself. It just feels a little played out and never quite reached it's potential. Dead by Daylight is okay and all, but it's no supreme trend setter that really awakened what the subgenre is capable of. (That game could have been Evolve; if Turtle Rock hadn't been so eager to kill it dead with every one of their bad decisions.)

But I can't pretend to know the winds of the multiplayer landscape; I'm a single player gamer. (The only reason I liked Evolve was because it allowed me to play as a single player brutally hunting down a team of players.) Maybe Killer Klown's latent cultist fans will dribble out of the woodworks to turn this game into the smash hit its longed to be for all these years. I don't know. I don't know why we keep doing these adaptations. I don't know why people keep paying developers to make them. I don't know who's asking for a Killer Klowns adaptation. I don't know what movie property is going to be next in the entertainment industries desperate ploy to slide into the lucrative video game market pool. But I'm making this blog my official petition that the next adaptation should be of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. I want to run around as Atticus Finch serving court summons to racists! 

Assassin's Creed Overload

 If I ever hear the words 'Hidden Ones' again, so help me god...

Do you remember the age you were when hearing about not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 new upcoming Assassin's Creed games would have still been exciting? Do you remember that? Because I can distantly recall a moment before Valhalla, before Origins and before Unity when that would have sent me spinning around the moon. Now it makes me groan as I picture a market totally saturated by low-effort, rapid production, video games that slowly drown out the sense of the world with their incessant repetition and squandered creativity. Ubisoft is not a big enough company to successfully pursue 4 major projects at the same time whilst giving them all significant enough amounts of attention to be the games they are meant to be. Assassin's Creed is going have what little life the games still had in them sucked dry. This was a grim showing from the Ubisoft teams.

It's such a shame as, there was some genuine excitement bobbing about a brand new Assassin's Creed game that was coming to bring back the franchise to it's roots, a game that was codenamed Assassin's Creed Mirag- wait, that was the full name? (Damn, Ubisoft leaks are getting wild; I wonder if there's a single development team in that entire company that doesn't have a direct line with leakers... It really does make it hard to surprise anyone nowadays.) But all that excitement seems kind of muted thanks to the dual fact that we have absolutely no gameplay proving their affirmations that this is an Assassin's Creed game back in the style of the old games that we loved, and that there will be twenty million other Assassin's Creed projects getting in the way of this singular one which is supposed to be good. Having your cake and eating it at the same time is really what's going on here. Ubisoft want to reach out to old school fans, stroke their RPG fans, bolster their mobile game fans, and wrap them all in a merciless Metaverse designed to trap you in a never ending dance of hooded murder hobos.

First we do have a pretty cool looking cinematic in Assassin's Creed Mirage. It's Baghdad streets seem eerily reminiscent of the origins of the franchise; Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus, with a bit more of the richness and volume of Revelation's Constantinople. Our new hero is a Valhalla alum, just as the leaks teased, meaning we already know his story is going to end with him becoming a master assassin just like Ezio's did; but considering we're on the whole 'play the hits' train, I can understand why the team went for symmetry there. Stealth is said to be the focus this time around, which means a renewing of the all-powerful hidden blade and the need to run as well as fight; which this trailer plays some lip service to. I just wonder if it's not just a bit too familiar. (Hah, this is a Ubisoft game, so I suppose that's kind of the Modus Operandi, huh.)

What I mean is; we've already explored a couple of settings eerily familiar to this one. When we look across the skyline of Baghdad and we can see many shapes similar to Constantinople, obviously because of the architectural heritage of the places. Even the Assassin's Tower, where we'll be taught how to stab good by the mentor character portrayed by Shohreh Aghdashloo, which the Ubisoft team wanted us make sure that we knew, looks similar to Masyaf from afar. There's going back to where it all began and then there's re-treading the grounds we've already walked before, and the gaming community has already been forcibly fed that bitter pill after the whole 'The Last of Us Part 1' debacle. (At least I don't think Ubisoft have gone quite so crazy that they're going to start throwing 70$ price tags at us. They'd be opening themselves to war if that were the case.)

But that's just one of the projects that Ubisoft are eager to drown us all within. There's also the big new RPG style Assassin's Creed game flying our way that is going to be set in Ancient Japan! Yes, after all this time we're finally going to that one time period that Ubisoft said they'd never travel to because it would be too obvious. (Of course, that was before they hit a slump and started pissing people off.) It's called Codename Red for the time being and... that's about it. No word about what they're going to do with the game to try and claw back some interest, especially now that they've faffed around so long that people have 'Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice' and 'Ghost of Tsushima' to compare it against. Honestly, their 'RPG done light' style of development is kind of emblematic of everything wrong with Ubisoft as a company; so the less I see about it, the better.

Oh, and then there's Assassin's Creed Codename Jade... we're really doing the 'codename' stuff, huh... Here is a game set in old China, and it's a mobile game. Oh no. The team were very excited about this game, enough to actually show some in-engine gameplay where they wouldn't dream about such disclosure when it came to the real games, Mirage and Red. They also were so excited to talk up a big game about how it's going to be the first Assassin's Creed game where you get to make your own character, that they screwed up and lied with that very statement. The first game to do that was the short lived mobile bomb, Assassin's Creed Identity; and this game is just a reattempt at that sort of project only with considerably more resources thrown into it. Isn't it telling when even Ubisoft can't tell the difference between their own products...

Then there was Assassin's Creed project Hexe; a game that we're already seeing people declaring their favourite looking game out of the line-up. Kind of upsetting, given that all it showed off was a twig-made Assassin's Logo hanging alone in the woods and literally nothing else besides. Hexe means 'Witch' in German; great, big whoop. If you literally can't even be bothered to share the time period, why announce the damn thing? This is like Bethesda gabbing about The Elder Scrolls Six when the game was still probably more than a decade away; there's nothing to talk about! Oh, and of course there's also Assassin's Creed Infinity which is their whole Meta-connected platform so they can try and hook people into a never ending live service that is going to be crammed full of MTX that will start small and then begin to build until it gets unbearable, normal folk will be driven away from the service for greener pastures and the game will continue to be supported by whales until it ultimately withers because of lack of general interest. There, I just summarised the entire to-happen lifespan of that crappy idea; can we scrap it now and pretend it was never announced?

Taking on too much at once is a recipe for screw ups. And even if every game turns out to be the very best that Ubisoft can possibly manage, which is 'above average', it will just lead to Assassin's fatigue even more than we're already seeing. Just as with the MCU, people get tired of the same thing too often; and this is looking like an oncoming army of the same thing upsettingly regularly. Even if they had just announced Infinity that would be concerning enough on it's own. But one game looking back, one looking forward, one for mobiles and one for mystery? Who exactly is going to make all of these games? Your staff? Because unless they've all sold their houses and families and grown four sets of arms, that seems unlikely without working their whole bodies to nubs. At the very least I can say that Mirage is trending towards a direction I like in theory, because we're still yet to have any tangible gameplay, and everything else... it all sounds like Ubisoft is heading towards a brick wall at high speed. 

Is #fire343 an overreaction?

 The climate is changing

I have had my eyes on the turning and changing world of video games for a very long time now, ever since I started noticing some of my favourite franchises not improving from entry to entry, but slowly getting worse, and wondering why that might be. I still remember when I first encountered the concept of a Season Pass and wondering what that was (for me it was in Bioshock Infinite) and of excessive DLC, soon to be coined 'Microtransactions', during the rise of Modern Warfare 3. I don't just remember how I felt in that time, I remember scouring the public sentiment to try and figure out what these terms were and how other people felt about them, to disseminate how much of a concern these issues should be to me, or if this is just how thing have always been. Hindsight of course informs me that videogame fans have been more permissive than they should have been in the past, but even in their most vitriolic and upset I can't say if I ever seen as visceral a fan backlash as the 'Fire343' Hashtag.

When first I heard of this, my gut reaction was very similar to what I've heard a lot of mediators voice; "That seems a bit harsh, doesn't it?" I saw one post in particular who quoted this as a typical case of 'taking things too far' and reiterating that 'firing 343 won't help Halo Infinite'. But then I got to really assessing this movement and considering whether this is just a wild flare up that had sporadically caught on. I mean, no doubt this is a small fire started by one individual that caught on when others saw it; there's no way that everyone had the same 'burn the forest down' plan when it came to handling 343 at the same moment. But extreme actions don't pick up fuel for the sake of them. Usually it's the extreme takes that shake the level-headed out of the lurch and make them go "Yeah I'm pissed, but I'm not that pissed." Somehow this hashtag managed to cross that sense barrier and hit the nerve of the general public. I don't think people are blowing their emotions out of proportion, I think they're finally voicing what they've been feeling for a while. But why do they feel this way?

Well, as I discussed previously, 343 were handed a franchise that was red hot when Bungie left it behind. It's hard to quite picture now, especially for someone who wasn't a Halo fan back in the day, but when I think back I do remember Halo as one of those games that everyone had. Right next to Red Dead Redemption and the GTAs; Halo was just a staple of the gaming consciousness. I even hear some people claim its fame was to the point where even non-gamers had heard of it, but I can't confirm that from personal anecdotes. Still, I wouldn't be surprised. Halo was bigger than big- it was positively massive; and what has become of all that? In the years Halo seems to have shrunk into a, still big, but not outgoing cult game. Halo fans still flock to the franchise, but they're rarely crossing the hands of new players. I wonder how many younger gamers even know who Master Chief is, whereas that would be a ridiculous thought to have in the early 2010's. And some believe 343 is responsible for that drop-off.

Because, well they sort of are responsible! Bad release after bad release that fans don't want to shill for has led to a community shrivelling up and a fanbase not growing like it used to. Halo hasn't totally vanished into the ether or anything, it's still a big title; but nowadays it's not even in the same league as Call of Duty; whereas once it was a genuine contender. The failures of 343 were long and well documented up until the release of Halo Infinite, after which people just hit their boiling point. Maybe it was indignation of having waited upwards of 5 years for a game that launched feeling incomplete in one of it's most core pillars, the multiplayer. Maybe it was the gall of inciting and recycling Bungie's infamous 'Ten year journey' speech in reference to a live service that hasn't managed to impress for a single year. Maybe it's the abrupt cancellation of co-op despite making implicit promises that it would be coming, and the apparent simplicity of such a feature feeling so galling. Maybe it's a little bit of everything, but fans have had enough.

It is a little gauche, to go around calling for someone's blood, or indeed, their job; but I understand the desperate anger of aggrieved fans.  Bare in mind that this isn't just the kneejerk kick off after one failed project that didn't live up to what fans wanted; this is a decade of falling short of promises. A decade of bad decisions, bad direction, bad narratives and bad performances from a game company that is devoted solely to making Halo games. It's kind of galling that it's taken fans this long to turn around and question whether 343 deserve to still be on the job. As many people have pointed out; normal people don't get ten year's worth of leeway under the impression that they have to get it right eventually. Normal people get fired.

The most common sense refute of this has been what I mentioned earlier; the argument that Halo Infinite won't be saved by firing it's developers. But the rebuttal comes just as easily; there is no saving Halo Infinite. 343 have rotated through countless staff, including key personnel, and every iteration of the company over the past ten years has kept one thing common to it; being woefully underprepared for the projects they embark on. Whether that was rebooting the franchise, Halo 5 or trying to turn Infinite into a Live Service; every step along the way has seen a falter and slip up to the point where it's obvious that something fundamental isn't working. This isn't a case of "Oh, they just need a few more years to get used to the franchise" nor is it "Just a bit of reworking will really put the team back on track." This is, "tear out the infrastructure, open up the brand to other developers because we need some new blood up in here!"

The straw that broke the communities back was the moment where one of the 343 team shared the team's renewed focus in extolling the competitive nature of Halo's Multiplayer, like the franchise has always championed. Only, no. The fans, former Bungie devs and anyone with a history in Halo had to scratch their heads at that one, because Halo was designed as a 'party game' to be enjoyed between friends of differing skill levels and experiences in a fun enabling environment before anything else, competitive play was never it's sole heart. It just speaks to an inherent and systemic dissonance between what fans who love Halo think the franchise represents, and what it's current caretakers want to create for it; which is a recipe for friction and disaster as the last decade has proved extensively and repeatedly.  If they don't even know what the franchise they're working on is; how can we trust them to keep it healthy and alive?

Microsoft and 343 are doing their best to roundly ignore this, probably somewhat hurtful, rise of dissent in their consumer base in the hopes that cooler minds will prevail and everyone will forget what they were angry about. And honestly, they probably will. People move on quickly like that. But after people forget, the core issue doesn't get magically solved; and people are just going to get more disillusioned by the game franchise that they used to love the next time it messes up. This is a call to Microsoft to take action to protect a franchise that they themselves supposedly consider the heart of Xbox, and if they're not willing to do it then maybe Halo doesn't deserve it's forever prominent place on all Microsoft marketing for the example and expectation that it sets. Is firing 343 the way to start changing that? I don't know, but letting the public know they recognise the problem would at least be a solid start.

Madden and the future of sports gaming

A step in a direction, maybe

Gaming and sports don't sound like they should mix. In fact, they literally sound like water and oil slipping off each other and never crossing into the same gravitational pull as one another. And then I remember the existence of Esports and my analogy starts to unravel, but I'm going to put that segment of gaming to the side for a bit. (No offence to E-athletes and all the dedication they put into their craft, but I just don't know enough about them to give them a fair shake in this discussion right now.) There seems to be a actualisation of that feeling, that gaming and sports don't mix, in that most every single major sports themed video game is a godawful grift attempt made by soulless businessmen puppeteering a catatonic development team.  

Now first I need to belabour the point that I'm talking about 'major' sports video games; as there are plenty of smaller efforts by actual talented creators that are fun and silly to try out. Heck, I would never dream of besmirching the good name of the Blood Bowl series by including it in the same breath as one of EA's sports franchises, that's about the line in the sand I want to draw as my distinction. When you get to the actual 'simulation games', the licences for which are all jealously guarded by the industry elite, you find yourself in a whirlpool of mediocrity spinning downwards and put with enough flurry and activity that, should you not be paying attention, one might think there's some sort of forward progression in these franchises. Let's collectively dispel that shoddy illusion right now, shall we? There is none, there never will be progression, now whilst the sports game public remain complacent to being fed actual faeces.

But how can I say that? Haven't I see the shiny graphics? The updated models? The extensive in-depth videos of the new Madden's touch-sense, or play sense, or whatever vague marketing gimmick they want to try and wave in your face as a new feature. Like writing a single sentence and parading it around like you've made serious head-way; only doing that for years on a multimillion dollar franchise. These are just spinning wheels. Have you noticed how every year the big standout feature is always something to do with AI or controls? Something esoteric where the team can simply say that the AI is 'better' or the controls are 'tighter' and as long as they feel even the slightest bit different to the last game you have to concede that something was done behind the scenes. But is anything actually being done? Does Madden have an actual fully employed development staff?

Year after year we see evidence to the contrary; and this recent Madden release has been no different. With screenshots of posters for events that happened in the real world more than two years ago, the exact same rotation of selectable heads in the character creator that has been around for more than half a decade now, tons of visually identical assets as have been used for the past 8 or so years during the last generation of consoles; and so many logic bugs it's incredible to think this is a game that has been slightly touched up and tweaked by the staff for all of their professional lives in some cases. In fact, this year's Madden has been so bad that you've got the actual players tweeting about their feelings on the bugginess; and those are the guys that get paid to promote that crap!

So, surprised Pikachu face abounds; this year's Madden is a mess. Although that pill is an especially foul one given that this year's entry was dedicated to the founder of the franchise himself, John Madden, after he passed away. Which actually makes this the second sports game in recent memory to try and take advantage of the death of a celebrity in order to sell their sub-par product more. Seriously, how do people actually defend this with a straight face? Surely there has to come a point where you look around and realise that you are being screwed over; the company is treating you as their Guinea pigs to see what they can get away pulling off on the rest of the industry, and buying the next game without thinking is only ensuring the status quo will remain.

The only thing that surprises me is that Madden had no NFTs- and that... well that's actually something interesting, wouldn't you say? I do not idly claim that Sports games are the testing grounds for what games companies want to pull on the rest of their fans, we've seen that play out before us with season passes, lootboxes and online-only DRM. So isn't it fascinating that amidst all Madden got wrong; they didn't include any NFT functionality at all? Even after saying that the future of Fifa and Madden was in NFTs just about a year before the new Madden's release? What could have possibly happened in the interim to sour such a staunch and headstrong impression- oh right, the worldwide crypto market fell off by actual orders of magnitude...

So if we use the sports gaming industry and it's lack of integrity as a dowsing rod to judge how the waters of the industry are flowing (Is that how dowsing rods work? I've seriously got no clue.) we can ascertain that the NFT future has fallen off dramatically, and that this pull-out happened so abruptly that EA and it's like couldn't implement a replacement scheme; because currently this year's Madden doesn't look to do anything worse than it's predecessor aside from be buggy. And less there's some bubbling scheme from game's developers to make their games intentionally unplayable for... some reason... I supposed we'll just have to take this year as a win of convivence. The needle isn't getting pushed into our face once again. Or, we just won't see the next scheme coming because EA will use it's main industry as test-tube-animals in a dry trial run...

To call the future of Sports gaming a future at is to bury the lead. Many will point out that Sport Games are still going through the agonising process of slowly reading a bunch of the features they had before the great reset of the generation before last. Whereas what I want to tell you is much the opposite; they're adding a feature here and quietly phasing one out there so that they can go around in circles in this neverending game of incremental updates forever more. If any company were so inclined, and they are obviously currently not, they could create a single 'Warzone' style football game that is updates entirely within the provided software and players would enjoy the exact same level of innovation between console generations. If things are moving that slowly, you might want to stay confronting why exactly it is you need the newest sports game at all. Simple, you don't. But if you've read this far then I'm just preaching to the choir.

The Metal Gear Remaster rumours have come back to haunt us

 Dormammu, i've come to bargain

There's nothing more sad than being a die hard fan of a franchise that was all but killed in the executive backrooms of some staunchly little business deal. It's demeaning, scrabbling around in the dirt begging for new coverage or interest, singing your flat-note tune about how "back in your day this franchise was the bees knees." Saints Row fans are a few short months away from that reality after the inevitably disappointing DLC drop for their game is followed by a 'We're moving on and am likely never going to touch this franchise again until at least 2028- bye!' message. But Metal Gear fans weren't even given the courtesy of a proper goodbye, in any of it's outings. The last Metal Gear outing was Survive, pretty much a desecration upon a corpse we didn't even know was in the ground yet, and before that came Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain; which quite famously didn't actually have an ending. When do we get our closure?

If Konami gets to have their way, we would never be given a new game in the Metal Gear pantheon purely because of some childish dispute between Kojima and some unnamed executive that millions of fans now suffer for. They don't want to touch that franchise with a ten-foot pole, and honestly I don't think anybody really wants them to change their policy on that either, because even after all these years the distaste of what Konami have become still sticks to it's image. Nothing short of a total rebranding and rebooting of all of it's major franchise could dig their reputation out of this pit, which is part of the reason why I take news of an upcoming remaster for MGS 1,2 and 3 very suspiciously. I mean I've mentioned these rumours before, but now that they're building up and we coming to face the reality that they might, in fact, be real; the defences need to go up as we ask ourselves just exactly what it is we're willing to accept from Konami.

Because as simple as a remaster pack would be, so simple that there have already been three or so packs of their kind in Metal Gear's past; the very vindictive nature of Konami leads us to believe they'd find someway to screw it up. "What's that? People just want to play the Metal Gear they remember? Well how about we get some mobile dev to make rough approximations of the game that they liked. How is Grove Street Games doing for work these days?" Maybe they'd go to sell each game together for some ridiculous $70 price point. Maybe they'd really go the 'scorched earth' route and put in new skins that need to be bought for Snake. Or crap, maybe even restrict some of the unique skins that are already in the base game so that they can't be acquired without extra funds. What I'm basically saying is that a Metal Gear Remaster would need to be a celebration of the franchise to be good, and I don't there's enough love in all of Konami to celebrate anything. They're a company without a soul.

Metal Gear Solid 1 would be the most interesting of these purported remasters, because as far as I can tell that original has never been touched up since it's launch. The Nintendo Gamecube saw a remake of the game that added weird cutscenes that some felt distracted from the style of that original classic, but even that has been left out a lot of the collections that came later on in the franchise's life. Personally I would love to see that classic touched up again, but I feel this is probably more of a 'Resident Evil' type situation where the company just wants to pretend that the remake was the original all along. Not least of all because it's probably easier to touch up a Gamecube game than it is a PlayStation 1 title; even if that means the Remaster won't accurately convey the evolution of the franchise. But you'd have to be seeking care and attention to pay any credence to that nonsense; and I don't think Konami have either of those affectations in their company dictionaries.

Metal Gear Solid 2 is another matter. That is a classic which has been in collections that have transcended their original platforms to wind up on Xbox! Whereas complications with policy and software means that MGS4 will likely never be ported off the PS3, and thus will remain unplayable for the foreseeable future, MGS2 can rightly wind up wherever it wants as soon as someone is willing to port the thing. Nintendo Switch, PC; heck, you might as well put the thing on the Ouya! It is a classic of the franchise, being the game to successfully pull a bait-and-switch on it's entire audience, and seeing that running on modern resolutions will be a great send-up to the Matrix-inspired age of pop-culture from which that game spawned. Also we'll get to see a naked Raiden doing cartwheels whilst cupping his genitals in 4k. What more can you ask for?

And then there's Metal Gear Soild 3, the myth, the legend; the mountain goat carcass being feasted on by a white-rumped vulture. I don't need to tell you how much I adore Metal Gear Solid 3; it's literally my favourite game of all time and I take any effort to work upon it very seriously. During the PSVita remaster, I was actually somewhat disturbed by the game's addition of crouch walking. (Not least of all because it allowed people to circumvent the vulnerability of crawling whilst still moving stealthily and quickly; upsetting a carefully designed balance.) For the life of me I cannot conceive what Konami would possibly do with a remaster, but I feel like anything more or short of just porting the HD collection, would be a mistake that I will complain incessantly about. I will buy it though. Whatever the damage, there's no escaping my inevitable purchase.

Each one of these games are going to be manhandled by Konami in an attempt to earn some cred back with the community they've shunned, whilst simultaneously stomping on Kojima's legacy by removing all of his names from the box art, because at this point that's just company policy. They'll probably cut any corners that they can in order to try and maximise return for the least amount of investment, and somewhere down the line this effort will tie back into their cynical NFT projects that I have not forgotten the team tried. I will not allow the wool to be folded over my eyes when it comes to Konami, both who they are and the many globules of crap that they stand for as a company, because one singular good release does not erase the years of actual super-villain level conduct the company has been responsible for. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if this remaster was a Metal Gear level conspiracy to try and brain wash the community into associating the talents of that legendary series with Konami, despite literally no one who worked on those games still being present in any part of Konami. Maybe they want to subliminally plant some sort of mind-control code in our head to make us more susceptible to pachinko machines and grubby MTX schemes. What? Why are you looking at me like that?

I am not crazy! I know Konami have scrubbed all the Metal Gear box arts of his credits. 'A Hideo Kojima game', as if I would ever forget that. Never. Never! I just- couldn't prove that they had done it. They covered their tracks. They printed out brand new physical copies of MGS V with a clean byline. You think this is something? You think this is bad? This? This- chicanery? They've done worse. Those employees! Are you telling me that people who spoke out about being mistreated at Konami just happened to also get blacklisted from every tech company in Japan? No! They orchestrated it! Konami! They monitor their employees movements twenty-four seven so that they can stamp down on 'excessive lunch breaks'! And we ignore it! We shouldn't have. We go out to buy their games everytime they stick 'Metal Gear' on the box even without Kojima's oversight. What were we thinking? They'll never change. They'll never change! Ever since they were founded! Always screwing employees out of a competitive wage! But not our Konami! Couldn't be our precious publishers of Metal Gear, Silent Hill, Castlevania and Suikoden! Burning their employees dry! And now they get to publish a Metal Gear Remaster? What a sick joke! We should've have stopped them when we had the chance, we should have done something. And you, you have to stop them, you-

Wanted: Dead has questionable VA

Cold and shifty eyes

Wanted: Dead is one of those little games that you catch passing you briefly in the hallway in a scene out of a movie, your eyes lock and a singular primitive hunger instantly descends upon you; you must have that game, whatever it takes. Unfortunately, more often than not these days I'm getting those 'animal brain on' moments for games that aren't long for this world at all. Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 has been entirely reworked, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is on life support in the hands of entirely new studio due out for 2025 at the absolute earliest... heck, I even ended up falling for that Batman: Damian Wayne game and that thing never even entered development! I'm just a hopeless wreck for the projects destined for doom which is why even though I hear no one ever talk about this game and it seems to have an audience of less than 10,000 whenever it shows itself off; I really don't want Wanted: Dead to fade away into the cruel night.

If you're not familiar, and despite the fact I've gone over my thoughts on the game before when it was first revealed I hold no grudge against you if you don't; 'Wanted: Dead' is an action movie of a video game that was probably born from a board-room style pitch held entirely by blockbuster enthusiasts. "What if there was a girl with a katana and a gun" is literally the only part of this game that had any pre-thought before the thing went into production; and you can see that sort of unburnished child-like creative glee from the restrainless mirth present in the gameplay presentations. Of course, ambition is nothing without talent, and this is a team that worked on the Ninja Gaiden games in the past so they sure know how to throw an action game or two at the gaming public. 

There's also some heritage of Dead or Alive left in the freshly born body of this game, and you can really see it in the tightness of the animation suite on display here. These are the kinds of great chorography that only a fighting-game alum would design, featuring overly complicated, but superbly pleasing, acrobatic feats of both sword and gun when practicality would say a simple 'point and shoot' approach would clear rooms so much quicker. (But what is efficiency worth when the cost is style?) What the Dead and Alive heritage hasn't granted the team is a hint of it's visual appeal, both graphically and design-wise. Although I feel that latter is probably an intentional choice, scantily-clad ninja girls probably wouldn't sell the grungy splatter-action vibe so well, the former is sore spot when the game is looking rough.

I'm not a graphics hound, far from it; but there does come a point where a visual style slides out of the realm of 'distinctive' and just lands on plain ugly. I don't think that Wanted: Dead is quite in the danger zone there with what I've seen so far, but it is very close for comfort. When I look at the graphics this game is going for, I can't help but be reminded of the washed out painting style of Babylon's Fall; a game that fell so hard it not only made Square Enix totally revise their business model but averages around 6 players a day. There was only 1 on the Steam version of the game when I last checked. So that's not exactly the company you want to be keeping in people's heads; but I'm sure that this is just an unfortunate comparison and Wanted: Dead will prove itself far more memorable in it's gameplay if not it's looks.

But the question of how shoddy this project is never really does seem to rest, and they were highlighted for myself once again after the recent story trailer. If there were any world shaking reveals about the premise of the game hidden in this gameplay snippet, you'll have to forgive me for missing it; but I was too busy staring flabbergasted at the sheer awfulness of the voice over work for the game. I mean we heard a bit of it before in previous trailers, but honestly I just assumed that was placeholder work meant to be replaced by actual professional recordings later. But it's been a year; the game is approaching release; I'm thinking that Soleil really intend to ship the game like this... which would be a... bold move to say the very least.

When we think about the absolute pits of voice acting, there isn't very many steps to go before we land at the original Resident Evil; and whilst this game is obviously nowhere near that legendarily bad all-around performance- (One which easily crosses the Rubicon into 'so bad it's good' territory) this still manages to get nearly everything wrong too. The cheesy action-movie dialogue is a given, that comes with the territory of this style of game; I'd be upset if it wasn't that way. But the actual performance given by someone who both doesn't appear to speak the language their reading in, at least not fluently enough to act in it, and cannot summon an iota of interest in her voice; as the lead! That's a problem. As is the fact that she's only one of the bad voice actors. If their recent trailer is anything to go by, this game is full of them. Oh, and the recordings sound bad, and the trailer is sound-mixed badly so you can't hear the voices clearly. That's about every sin of video game voice acting guys; all we need is several scenes where the dialogue and subtitles don't match and we'll have Yahtzee!

In full honesty, I am actually somewhat glad that the supporting cast appears to be as bad as the main actress, because there's nothing more painful than a cast trying their all to bounce off an actual brick-wall of charisma. But at the same time I do want just a little bit of love and magic in my ears when I play my games. I don't want a Bob Odenkirk level routine where I'm drinking every word like a thirsty man in the Gobi Desert; I just want to be able to immerse myself in the world without frowning everytime a character reads a witty line like they haven't understood a single word that has just come out of their own mouth. Just because your game is an action game that doesn't mean all forms of acting are totally inconsequential to the gameplay experience! Heck, even Cyberrunner had decent VO work. 

But maybe being bad is the plan? Getting my conspiracy space blanket on for a moment, and covering myself from all the electromagnetic disturbance that might trigger my very real condition, perhaps Soleil know that being a laughstock is as much a draw for attention these days as being a masterpiece. Maybe they hope to draw more attention to their work by seeking out a cast that sound like they were picked off the bench fresh from jury duty. I mean sure, I was interested in the game for it's own merits but I'm sure someone out there only watched the trailer for 'Wanted: Dead' because they heard about the zombie voice acting and wanted to listen to it for themselves. In fact, I'm betting my editor has already stopped reading this blog to go watch it just from reading about it here. A story is infectious, even if it's a story about how mediocre of a job your doing in some departments. At the very least this better mean the game knocks it out of the park in gameplay; you know, considering they plundered the budget from the VO department to make it work leaving them with nothing but a couple of dusty buttons and an IOU food stamp.