Okay, I'm going to geek out about Rogue Trader some more

 New trailer, new rant.

Oh, it's no secret how not-immune I am to the throes of fandom and getting lost in the steam of excitement for an upcoming game, but I managed to supress that irrational side of my quite deftly in recently times. Largely because there just haven't been a great many recent games that have caught fire in my old little shrivelled heart; but if there is one that absolutely has; it's Owlcat Games' Warhammer CRPG. You see, I've never actually had a chance to get into Warhammer, for as diverse and rich it's worlds of lore are, the hobby has been this dense and yielding web that no one wanted to open up to me. I knew someone who themselves was a miniature fan, but refused to talk about his hobby when pressed. There was just no avenue into the world of the dark future. And don't even ask me to muscle into the franchise through all of it's heady lore material, endless wiki pages and Books! Where does a guy even start there? And then I found Owlcat.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned what drew me to Owlcat, but it was delightfully circumstantial. I had just started getting into Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and was looking around for CRPGs to pick up once that game was over; not wanting to end my fun with the game genre. I found a video on Youtube just listing off a bunch of CPRGs and one of them caught my eye for the title 'Kingmaker', in which you serve a kingdom as king. "Huh" I thought, "I've heard of RPG's that try similar concepts, but they always turn out undercooked. I wonder if CRPGs could do the idea any more justice." And so I threw that game at the top of my back catalogue list. Fast forward a few months later and I was trying out, and falling in love with, Pathfinder: Kingmaker. A truly unforgiving and challenging RPG unlike any other I'd played before. That was what solidified Owlcat Games as my RPG developer of choice for this age.

RPG developers seem to go through this cycle, for whatever reason. Unlike FPS makers or driving game developers, they're not content in sticking to what makes their games great and enjoyable; they're always looking to change up their craft and become something more. It's admirable, if it weren't also consistently so tragic. Bioware kept reiterating upon themselves and rewriting their core, until they grew and rewrote themselves so much that they forgot how to be an RPG developer in the first place. Implacable iconic RPGs started to become pastiche and flaccid. Depth gave way to bloat. Bioware trickled out into a façade of a developer that shares the same name on the building, but none of the talent inside of it. (A shame.) Bethesda went through something similar, although on an even bigger stage given their fame. It didn't help that they were undermined and outperformed by a guest developer on one of their flagship franchises. But now even their up coming Starfield looks okay. Like a game more interested in treading any waters that aren't RPG related, rather than a AAA evolution upon what an RPG can be.

Owlcat haven't lost themselves yet, and they don't yet appear to be on that path to self ruination. And I want to drink deeply of their glory days for as long as they last because I really need a consistent hit maker back in my radar to renew my excitement in this art we call game making. As such I've given myself over to trusting them fully. I had never really heard of Pathfinder before I played Kingmaker, and allowed their experienced eyes to introduce me to the franchise and what is so great about it next to D&D. Wrath of the Righteous will give me even more of that, once I get around to it, and I'll surely enjoy that just as much. But then they turned around and offered me something I didn't know I wanted out of them; an accessible in-road to the Warhammer sci-fi universe. And what could a growing boy like me do but salivate at the mouth?

Rogue Trader is going to take a very brave divisive step with it's gameplay, they're going full turn-based without stop and pause like their previous titles have had. Now personally I'm a huge fan of games built for turn-based action, as for me it speaks of a confidence in the tactical suite to be robust enough that slowing down the gameplay and allowing the player to go over all their tools, rather than instinctively default to their favourites in the heat of a full action battle, won't unravel the complexity of the gameplay. Having no idea how the Table Top of Warhammer is even played, I can't say whether this is a fitting choice or not, we're just going to have to see on the day of release. I will say, however, that I did not expect the game to go this route. Not with the plethora of guns on hand. I figured that's be ideal for stop and start gameplay; so I'm curious right now.

The scale of the game the team have embarked on is what really gets to me, with a galaxy map that is going to cover dozens of differing worlds across solar systems that I can only assume the Rogue Trade is going to steadily assume governance over as they stamp their Imperial zeal over the cosmos. Making all these worlds feel diverse and different from one another is going to take a hell of a lot of work from the asset department; at the very least. This just might be their most ambitious title yet, and Owlcat has not been a company to lack for ambition in their relatively short career! Already with this game I'm noticing a lot more complexity with environmental textures, as required given the setting, which has the potential to provide some really impressive sights for us once we start getting glances at some of the oppressive opulence of the Imperium. (Although this game does take place far away from the heart of the Empire. As, from what I can tell, does most Warhammer.)

I'm also very interested in the array of companions we're going to be introduced to throughout Rogue Trader and want to just dive into their stories and motivations. I think one of them is an ex-Space Marine, unless I totally misunderstood his character bio. There's also a Sister of Battle joining the crew and even an Alien! (Or 'Xeno' to use the game's parlance.) I roughly know of the very stringent rules of the Warhammer universe, and the intense xenophobia that the dark future dwells in, so I was actually somewhat concerned about the breadth of really interesting and tied up characters we'd get to interact with. It's one thing having companions that are individually interesting, but to have them also tied to significant pillars of this universe, and thus serve as an ambassador for that pillar, whether through their adherence to their creed or defiance of it, is what makes companion characters the best they can be, in my opinion. Right now we're getting crewmates from just about every interesting corner of Warhammer. I'm still holding out hope for an Orc mate though; maybe that'll be the DLC down the line... 

What I've loved about this whole process is how involved Owlcat has been with the community. Dropping beautifully scripted articles going into depth about the factions of the universe and the companions we're going to meet, to frankly discussing gameplay systems and even giving us fun time-lapses of assets being modelled in real time. It's a very unique development-consumer relationship for a game of this size which makes someone like me, interested in both the game and the process which makes it, glued to their Youtube community page. It makes it easy to surround myself in the world of Rogue Trader and never let that candle in the window die out for what I hope is going to be another entry in my list of 'must play CRPGs'. I love the RPG resurgence we're seeing this decade, and companies like Owlcat are, currently, the leading reason why.

Is Hogwarts Legacy worth the excitement?

 Maybe?

It has to be the dream of absolutely any video game out there to blow up to the point where it's the night-time wet dream of so many fans out there. People forever creating hopeful, grass roots, content theorising on it's possibilities and trading excitement until it becomes something of a boiling pot of feverish theories and unquenchable fan passion. And at the same time it has to be the most frightening position in the world to actually be there, locked in the view-finders of so many expectant and hungry fandoms, all with their different idea about what the game you're making is going to be, rubbing their hands with a greed that will so quickly turn into revulsion and hatred when the thing finally drops on some of their heads. It's that space between a rock and a hardplace where only the truly damned dwell. I ponder, because whilst I myself am enraptured by the prospects of Hogwarts Legacy, like so many others I'm really coming to grips with the fact this game has it's obvious shortcomings in the face of that dream they've been, perhaps unwittingly, stoking. Right now I'm just hoping that Warner Bros. Interactive's vision is better than the dream.

But first I have to say that I think Hogwarts Legacy looks to be an absolute godsend for fans of the Harry Potter movies and books, at least in the raw presentation of the eponymous Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Though we've had many Harry Potter games in the past that have allowed us to explore some version of Hogwarts, none have really made the effort to intelligently design and shape the Scottish castle into a comprehensive and gorgeous sprawl of academic function and medieval whimsy. My heart quite literally soars everytime we see Hogwarts teased off in gameplay snippets, like we're catching ankle glimpse of some impeccably elegant yet demure Victorian mistress.  I just want to get my hands on it so I can explore it's every intricacy! Every nook, every cranny, every living portrait, every moving staircase, every grand reference that never even made it into the movies; I want to play the gawping tourist through it all!

Yet by that very same merit it seems as though creating Hogwarts has been the best realised fantasy of the Harry Potter fan; those who've always dreamed about attending Hogwarts, are apparently going to be only lightly catered too with some main mission-based lessons and school events, not in the style of the dynamic and player dependant curriculum of other-classic school game; Bully. People who want to be their very own Harry Potter within the same universe will find an expansive and seemingly robust character creator, but are limited to being a late fifth year; no 'growing up with Hogwarts' simulator like one might hope for. (There are ways to do that in a way that would been creatively fun, but they would have taken explicit planning and clever design to execute) And those who want to immerse themselves totally within a perfect facsimile of the fantastical reality that J.K. Rowling invented will be regulated to merely glancing longingly at all the references to the more involved wizarding world; as it would appear that Hogwarts Legacy has next to no non-essential side activities. No Quidditch, no Wizard Chess, none of those ancillary wizarding games that never quite get an explanation by are inexplicably community favourites none the less... the scope of this game is rigidly focused, in a world that seems so ripe for a less focused style experience.  

Which isn't to say there's nothing to do besides the main narrative. Rather cleverly the team have thrown in a few collectibles system to guide player exploration, but Ubisoft have shown us very much how skin-deep of an open world solution that really is. There seems to be some pages you can collect which touch on the historical significance of places around you, which I find to be worthwhile collectibles at the very least. And there's the gardening metagame within the Room of Requirement, which seems to be tied into the crafting system. There'll probably be something tied into recreational duelling, because the main game already demands a duelling system to be present so they might as well take advantage of that. And there are side quests, with impressively limp lip tracking considering the visual fidelity of everything else the game has going for it. (I think, if your lip tracking is behind the level of the next upcoming Bethesda game, you've got problems.) All and all, I'm glad that this is an open world title, but I'm wondering if the team have really earnt that genre or are just exploiting it. (Like your typical Ubisoft game does.)

But at least the game has it's own combat and that looks... fine. It's your typical Arkham derivative in it's base, but spruced up with a bunch of special spells you can roll out in order to create dynamic situations and- whoops, did I spot the player just using 'Accio' and soaring another student into the air with it? Pretty sure that spell doesn't work on living beings according to the lore... (Oh well, I'll pretend that the 'Accio' spell is pulling their clothes into the air.) What's next, are we going to start summoning perishable goods into thin air? Which, shouldn't really be a problem thanks to the rules of transmogrification which could turn goblets into mice, but according to 'The Deathly Hallows' food creation is against one of the core tenets of magic! (When you think about it, the Harry Potter world is just full of plot holes.) Unfortunately the combat is in one of those positions where we can't really judge how fun it is to play around with until we have it in our hands. It looks flashy and twenty utility spells does sound promising, but how can we be sure all that twenty are fun and dynamic, what if half of them are absurdly situational? Combat looks fun, but will it still look fun when you're fifty hours in? Will there be enough enemy diversity? Pillar questions, all unanswerable until launch. 

When I come away from Hogwarts legacy, I come away with a lot of 'maybe's and 'if only's; but I think the crux of my feelings are thus: I really love the idea of what Warner Bros Interactive are doing here, I just want them to go all out. And considering Hogwarts Legacy is easily one of the most hyped games right now, if the game can manages to live up to some of what it's promising, then maybe there's hope for a sequel where the team can delve more into the simulation of school life and maybe work on the facial animations a little bit more because they're currently making my eyes water... Heck, the protagonist is a fifth year, aren't they? That means two more years of potential school work until they're shoved out in the terminally boring wizarding world that Fantastic Beasts has been subjecting us to for the past few years.

My ideal vision of the Hogwarts Legacy experience is very simple; I want Bully with spells. I love that 'simulator light' aesthetic that Bully presented where you could go to school, or you could not, and the real life repercussions were minimal at best. I like the ability and freedom to do your own thing, make money doing odd jobs, grind for the high score on the arcade machines, skateboard around the town. I feel like in so many ways Hogwarts Legacy approaches that fantasy without embracing it fully, and it just makes me yearn for it all that much more. I mean come on; would Wizard Chess have been too much to implement? Really? But I recognise this is intensely personal complaints, and if this game needs to be focused to nail everything it wants to do then that's what it should be. (But in that case they better nail it like they said they would!)

Hogwarts Legacy is a game that I am going to play, and I'm pretty sure just about anyone in my age range is saying the exact same thing when they look at this game. That's because I actually don't have a choice in this matter, there's no free will involved in this, they made a game hardcoded to my central lobe that clicks the "buy" button without my say-so. Even if the game turns out to be mediocre, I'll still buy it eventually. I just want to walk around Hogwarts, screw the rest of it. But I just know that when I do the whole time I'm going to be on the verge of bliss but not quite there, like a cliffhanger that never gets resolved. This game won't satisfy me, and yet I'm going to indulge it anyway. Is this what insanity feels like?

So the Doom Soundtrack situation

 You're tearing me apart, Id!

I've actually been avoiding talking about this because it really didn't seem like my place and had turned into a real mud-slinging battle of 'he said, the other he said'. The last time something like this made headlines in the news it was the whole Bayonetta 3 pay debate debacle and that whole situation turned itself inside out like a slasher movie victim; and I didn't want to be in the middle of that kind of trap story again. But then people didn't stop talking about it, and then Bethesda threw out a statement! Why, you guys could have kept your head down and let Id handle this internally! I mean sure, Bethesda got shame rightful shame for this situation, but just cynically and corporate-mindfully; sometimes ignoring the bubbling drama is just the correct way to go about doing business! In fact, most of the time I'd say things turn out that way! But I guess now the matter is too bloated to rest.

Now first of all, I'm not exactly in the best of moods right now so forgive me if I get a little unfair with my characterisations. Let me preface wherever I'm about to go with the information that everyone is human here and no one person is some demon in human skin that lives only to disadvantage others; now that's out of the way, why did Id Software go out of it's way to screw Mick Gordon? If you're unfamiliar, Mick Gordon is the talented Australian composer behind the incredible DOOM (2016) soundtrack, the upcoming Atomic Heart and, until recently, believed to have worked on DOOM Eternal. I mean he did. He did work on DOOM Eternal. But it seems he less did work on that game, and more 'struggled to bring that game to life in the soundtrack' whilst battling the business deal from hell, from the sounds of things. Of course this is the follow-up to the whole debacle surrounding the DOOM Eternal OST which disappointed some musically intuned fans, stirring up a mud-slinging saga which has somehow persisted to today.

It started with Mick throwing fingers at Marty Stratton who in turn published a damning condemnation of Mick's professionalism and punctuality, throwing his credibility into question and stoking the fires of the more 'unhinged' fans out in the world. (People were legit sending verbose death threats over a video game OST. I have no idea how these people avoid getting institutionalised in daily life.) Now after years of the matter being settled, Mick has risen from the Twitter ashes to point fingers back at Marty for misrepresenting the issue and laying blame where it was not perhaps deserved. Or at the very least, totally dissolving himself of any rightful blame for the failure of the OST. Again, a failure that only seems to have been perceived by the musically attuned. Really does seem like a lot of chaos to stoke over such a niche issue, but them's the breaks.

The original slap by Marty claimed that Mick was unprofessional and couldn't deliver to the timeframe that they expected. He was uncooperative and ghosted them at the most inopportune moments. But Mick dips a little more context into the situation by explaining why it was that the set deadlines proved inopportune for the work on the soundtrack. According to his side of the situation, Mick was tasked with creating music at a crunch-rate in order to match the pace of development. The task before him was to create music that closely matched the gameplay, only to be given a timeframe in which he'd be making that music months before the levels they were for would be built up and worked on. Which is- difficult to say the least. When Mick bought up these issues and proposed a revised schedule that would better benefit the creative process, Stratton became incensed at his, presumably cost effective, schedule being questioned and immediately took to attacking Mick's credibility. For suggesting an improved work schedule. Sounds like a very 'hinged' man to me, I don't see what the problem is. (That's sarcasm, by the way. The man sounds very un-hinged.)

Claims go on to say that Mick wasn't paid for many months of his work, but he persisted anyway, even to the point where, thanks to the bad time scheduling, some of his tracks ended up being unsuitable for the levels they were blindly scored for, wasting months of work. Then, as Doom Eternal started to become more ambitious, the breadth of required soundtracks also expanded, further adding to the man's workload. From how it sounds Mick was just constantly at the receiving end of a kicking machine that didn't value his contribution to the game enough to take any of his concerns and tribulations seriously, resulting in a rough experience. And from the way he tells it, none of these issues are tied to his working competency, but merely unrealistic and ill-thought out expectations running afoul of immutable reality.

But heads butt into each other during the crazy task of making a game, and one might be able to see scenarios where the bull rush allows an element to slip out of sink. I mean, making sure that doesn't happen would be the job of a competent producer; but let's not start questioning anyone's competency, eh? That never ends well. Where it starts to get vindictive is where Mick tells that after a falling out in which Mick learnt some of his pulled tracks were being used in marketing for the game without him being compensated, apparently Stratton reached out to offer a six figure settlement to encourage Mick not to speak about this situation publicly. Which would seem like a nice way to bow out of this total mess, if one of the conditions wasn't also that Mick had to publicly accept blame for everything that happened, including the poor mixing of the OST that apparently happened after he cut ties with the developers, basically tanking his own reputation in the industry forever more. Stratton basically offered him a retirement settlement; which is actually a little evil, if true. It doesn't matter how much you pay an artist, if they're blacklisted from the industry they love and have to struggle to book new roles from that point forward; you've destroyed that person. Mick really does paint out Stratton as a cartoon super villain in his take of events. 

Furthermore, this is just his take isn't it? As such, Bethesda went out of their way just recently to condemn Mick's statement as 'one sided' and 'incomplete'; whilst just hand-waving the fact that Stratton already provided his side on the matter. Heck, if we now have Mick and Marty's side on the same situations, why then that would make this a... two sided debate, then wouldn't it? But Bethesda haven't exactly made themselves out to be paragons of intelligent thought recently, so this utterly unhelpful and self-sabotaging butting-in to a situation in which they had nothing to add really does just fit their recent MO, doesn't it? Seriously, some one needs to find Bethesda's PR manager and have a real sit down about when exactly it's appropriate to self flagellate oneself on the public square. Which is never. It's never appropriate for a company to do that.

Soundtracks for video games should not be controversial, and I definitely shouldn't know the full name of your senior producer and composer. Mick Gordon is big enough for someone like me to know his work, but the second Stratton starts making headlines you know something had gone sorely wrong. Whether this story blossoms, if Stratton can claw any respectability back for himself, everyone is coming from this embarrassed and covered in egg over a game that was, let me remind everyone, a huge success. Widely loved and adored. I'm not saying that the success of the game in anyway invalidates the struggles that the creator's took to get there, Cyberpunk 2077 demonstrates what happens when you adopt that mentality; but you'd expect controversy this deep to be attached a train wreck like Saints Row or Gotham Knights; not Doom Eternal. Maybe after this is out of everyone's system, we can stop review bombing a frankly fantastic game and get to enjoying the love of the craft; that'd be really nice.

Yuji Naka has been arrested

 Yeah, this is happening!

This just in; Yuji Naka has been arrested. That's right; superstar director of smash hit game, Balan's Wonderland, has been arrested because of just how ungodly terrible that game was. Such to the point where he needs to offer reparations to the people of the world that were subjected to it. Over the next few years he'll be transferred to various international prisons on a rotation basis so that he can serve time for every country in which Balan's Wonderland was sold- wait, no I'm hearing reports that wasn't the reason why Yuji got booked. (Shame, I guess that's going to be an upcoming conviction.) In that case, I can only assume he was brought down by the Sega guard dogs as he attempted to break into their offices and rescue the Sonic franchise from the hands of the genuinely confused Sonic Team that have been playing hot potato with it for the past two decades. No? Not that either? Then what in the name of the speed god Savitar, did Yuji get the cuffs for?

Insider trading? Wha... really? Is the man who created Sonic really so hard off for cash? Of course, as with most people who cheat in life, it's actually the somewhat gifted who choose to take shortcuts in order to maintain or push forward their prestige; but still! It's such a boring crime to get arrested for! If I ever got under investigation for insider trading, I would absolutely book it down to the local bank to get a more interesting 'bank robbery' charge on my rap sheet. Anything to give me that 'street cred' down in the clink. (I hear you have to attain certain levels of cred in order to wear the finest clothes... or am I thinking of Sleeping Dogs?) It's just embarrassing is what it is! It's such a blue collar crime you might as well hand in your artist's card on the way in, because you have no right calling yourself a starving artist on the way out. I know Sonic embodies 'sticking it to the man'; but still I think Yuji missed the point with the stupidest grift imaginable.

But how did this inside trade work? Simple; back in 2020 a company called Aiming were revealed to be the ones behind a new Dragon Quest project called 'Tact'. Now despite the fact that Dragon Quest is one of the most boring well-known fantasy properties to come out of Japan, this game was a crappy mobile grid based action game and thus was destined for the big bucks. So much so, that anyone who was invested in Aiming at the time would be thrilled about the sudden windfall of interest surrounding the latest developer to stumble upon the infinite money glitch of life called 'develop a terrible mobile app that leeches off a well-known brand'. And wouldn't you know it, Yuji Naka just happened to be one of those investors during that announcement! He reportedly just happened to have 10,000 shares in the company which he bought literally just before this announcement! 

Quite the foresight, Past Yuji had, to suddenly choose to invest in a company which, as far as I can tell, had never worked with a publisher before, had never made anything for a huge brand like Dragon Quest before, and hadn't released anything for three years before Dragon Quest Tact. They were relative nobodies before that surprise international game announcement. I guess Yuji just threw a dart at a board and got lucky! Well, either that or... more likely... he had a contact on the inside who tipped him off to the announcement before it went public, and Yuji really thought he could come up with a damn good reason why he found Aiming so worthy of his investment money. Maybe he just really liked the name? 'Aiming'- how modern-sleek and goal oriented! Yes- with a brand like that I imagine they just vacuum up the investment money every quarter from all angles!

Obviously I'm being excessively facetious; this is an adorably clear cut case of insider trading; assuming that the facts presented are indeed accurate, and our man is probably going to have to pay a hefty fine out of his pocket for being a naughty trader. But I can't imagine much of anything will come of this. I'm not sure how the Japanese courts treat Insider Trading, just by the merit of their societal norms I'd imagine it's harsher over there than it is here. (People there have a 'favoured enemy' bonus against corrupt businessmen) But he's something of a known name, and the second your name hits headlines it's game-over for legal ramifications. They'll never be able to keep Yuji in the brink; his weird fans will be on the case of any organisation who so much as attempts to peel a page off the book to scrunch up and throw in his general direction.

Whatsmore, I can't imagine Sonic's Freedom Fighters allowing their literal father creator to rot in prison without mounting an breakout attempt of their own. Imagine if that was one of their own locked up- oh wait, in Forces Sonic himself gets locked up for half a year without anyone coming to back him up simply because the Freedom Fighters were too busy watching the world fall to pieces whilst they stood around and felt sorry for themselves. In fact, Sonic's Friends were so useless that players had to write their own OC into the narrative in order to bring Sonic back into the story, just so those numbskulls would remember how insanely fragile and pathetically weak all of Eggman's vast forces are. As well as the game Sonic Forces, that too.

Heck, if I were a true cynic; I might even propose that Yuji Naka himself ratted out his activities to the police at this specific time so that his Icarus-like descent from grace could serve to distract some Sonic fan's attentions away from the recently released Sonic Frontiers. A game from the brand he invented published by a company he is no longer on good speaking terms with. But this is pure speculation, I'm pretty sure if Yuji really wanted to draw attention to himself he'd just paint himself blue, glue some paper spikes to his back and run down Akihabara completely nude screaming "Gotta go Fast! Gotta go Fast! Gotta go Faster, Faster, Fasta-fasta-faster!" Alas, seems the man hasn't quite reached his breaking point yet and this is just an honest to goodness money-making scheme. What a shame.

Personally, I have no love for grifters and even though I struggle to care all that much about an Insider trading case, this situation is endlessly funny to me for no other reason than who is involved. I hope the next super-star developer to get arrested just does something a little more flashy, like Randy Pitchford hijacking a plane so he could perform a magic trick to disappear all the passengers out of it before its emergency crash landing in the desert- that's the kind of panache I want to see! In many ways, I'm being harder on Yuji for being so boring with his crime. Still, at least this gives me hope that at sometime, maybe soon, perhaps the cogs of justice will turn to arrest Ken Penders for his many crimes against the world of Sonic and the core of art in general. 

Weighing options.

 Discussing diets.

Role playing games have risen to be some of my favourite experiences ever, for the times when I just want to get lost from the present playing some far flung fantasy, there's nothing more engrossing and enveloping than a fully immerse RPG. You can get so addicted to that style of world, with the character creation, the choices, the personal development, that sense of self-worth, that it can be easy to take every aspect for granted and not really think about the individual elements of an RPG and how they slot together. Or even if they slot together! What if you start to examine some of the independent enfranchised features which make up the typical RPG design front and find them wanting and lacking? What if what you've believed to be the ideal RPG design for so long is no more than a smokescreen fooling you into complacency for a broken cog in a working machine, not enough to grind the whole system to a halt but a flailing and useless extra limb, nonetheless. What if there's literally no good reason for weight systems to exist in RPG games?

My introspection was inspired, as these so often are, by a rant. Not my own, but somebodys. Somebody I don't know, somebody who was complaining about the RPG Encased on Steam Reviews; which got me thinking. 'Inventory management as a game mechanic' he sang, condemning the state of modern RPG as pulling themselves apart under the weight of inventory picking and weight limits. Of course, I wouldn't go that far, and our man himself admitted to having a little bit of a hoarding problem with RPG games. I think it's rather transparent to say that our player here lacks the restraint to prioritise loot gather and has subconsciously thrust blame for his self-control issues upon the designers of these games; but even in his exaggeration he did highlight a interesting topic. Why do we still accept weight limits in our RPG games?

It's the classic question of 'why do we endorse systems that get in the way of the player and the instant gratification that they seek', with the philosophical answer being that the fulfilment of a reward delayed and restricted is far more enriching than the reward easily and readily given. But it's never quite so simple as the bare basic philosophy in matters like this, now is it? Red Dead Redemption 2 ended up being far more polarising than a literal masterpiece should be, simply because people loathed the idea of enduring a narrative that took it's time to tell a complete and blossomed narrative rather than a consistently action packed game. Grand Theft Auto 4 has been memed to high heaven for it's focus on seemingly mundane aspects of a open world simulator. And Death Stranding has been, although largely hyperbolically, been declared as the worst game ever for it's central gameplay loop of delivering instead of something classically exciting like shooting guns.

It's very easy to fall into the trap of assigning the general upset as a symptom of maturity deficits, assuming the maligned are simply those that lack common patience and simply want the world of entertainment to conform to their standards rather than meet it halfway. But in honesty this really comes to a matter of personal taste. I love a full bodied experience that feeds weight and intent behind the action and gameplay so that it lingers and lasts in my heart instead of just tickling my dopamine levels. But by that same merit I get bored of multiplayer games very quickly, because dopamine hits are all they offer. And though we currently flirt with higher topics and ideals of the topic right now, I think the heart of the conversation on seemingly antiquated and played out hold-outs of RPG game design like 'Weight Values' and 'inventory customisation' lies in recognising and understanding this as the background of the conversation.

Weight values are the limits enforced on how many items the player can carry on them at once, and their inclusion creates a system where the player is forced to think about how much they can carry and deposit that which is too much for them. With weight systems, you cannot lug around every tool the game has to offer and merely browse your inventory for the exact tool to solve each job, you also can't pick up everything not nailed to the ground like a greedy magpie. You'll inevitably end up in situations where you're caught short, left without a tool which might have been perfect for this specific fight because you planned for other encounters. You might have to get creative and work with what you've got and you can't realistically expect to power mindlessly through all the action in the game from one set-piece to another without ever stopping to rest until the credits.

And, predictably, those are also most of the reasons why I like weight limits in my inventory systems. Storing useful items in home bases and preparing for an outing is a part of the build-up element of an adventurous gameplay loop which makes the exciting adventure feel more rewarding. Making informed choices about what you want to pick up and what you need to leave behind for carry space is a give and pull concept which encourages sacrifice and imparts extra value upon the loot you choose to keep. Getting caught unawares by a challenge you haven't packed for can be annoying, but it can also spur some of the most dynamic and exciting encounters in the right games. If you can stand a game with more varied pacing, then I don't see why weight values and inventory management is a problem for you.

Of course, there are points where inventory management becomes a problem. Ironically, most modern RPGs know how to create a divide between meaningful loot and random trash, even Bethesda titles are really informed with this; it's more the genres that dabble where they don't belong which screws the pooch with inventory management. Live service games tend to drown players in endless loot drops with insignificant stat improvements that are so inconsequential that they typically come attached with a 'gear value' rating so you can ignore the specifics and just pick the bigger number always. The RPG-fied Assassin's Creed games have come with endless rows of utterly pointless loot systems, where you get clogged up with crappy weapons that are all eclipsed by the Legendary tools you'll pick up throughout the game. Proving the entire loot system to be utterly redundant because you never even engage with 99% of pick-ups. These are the sorts of titles that make me shudder when I hear the words 'inventory management'.

 

In conclusion, I'd say that those who grumble about messing with their inventories in an RPG game, assuming that it's a stop-gap in an otherwise action filled game, might be missing the basic point of what these systems are supposed to be, or are just conflating the worst of this practise with the best of them. I'm not going to pretend that Fallout games don't suffer from rather poor inventory menus, but I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater critiquing them. Besides, I play on PC. Mods are pretty much essential. (Why haven't Bethesda literally just seen SkyUI and make that mods features standard in every game? That can't be too much of a hassle, surely.) I value weight systems and think being restricted in what you can carry is an overall more enriching game experience than the more haphazard, and decidedly messier, concept of 'shove it all in my bag and let god sort it out'. But I suppose this really is an 'each to their own' sort of matter, now isn't it?

Sequels forever

And ever, and ever.

What's better than a video game that you love? How about a sequel to that videogame which builds upon everything that the first game did and improves it whilst carrying on the story to it's next logical step? Why that's just- an intensely traditional viewpoint for how Sequels work which I suppose is largely outdated in the world today, now isn't it? Movies have taught us that sequels are so often ancillary and limp when they finally hit the stage, achieving little more than tugging on nostalgic heart strings so much that they deaden the human spirit's ability to feel whimsy. But video games tend to have an easier go of things. Narrative isn't as important as improving gameplay and scope, and if you're a company like Ubisoft that literally means just trying your hardest to cram other modern development trends into your aging game engine. But when making sequels is that easy; what's there to moderate and temper your ambitions so you don't end up spitting out endless sequels forever? Nothing? It's nothing, isn't it.

I think Ubisoft comes so readily to mind when I discuss this because Ubisoft are just the poster boys for the 'endless sequels' problem. Their entire business model is built on finding something that works, wringing the blood out of the product entry after entry, attempting to zap life back into it with a new engine and repeating that process forever. They don't try anything new, they recycle ideas, and if their modellers weren't some of the best in the Industry the entire Ubisoft pantheon of gaming would have literally nothing to it's name. It's as though not a single person in that company knows the definition of temperance and moderation or, here's a big one, pacing! Yes, this is a very fresh complaint from a man who has just gotten around to playing Watch_Dogs Legion; I've never known a product so desperately calling out for a cutting room floor as Ubisoft's recent games.

And it's not just Watch_Dogs. The latest Assassin's Creed also squeezed out it's narrative to last across a belated and repetitive campaign across England that introduced no new ideas, enemy times, gameplay methods, or basic ingenuity concepts which make up basic game design. They just threw in an RPG system, watched the numbers go up and call it a day. So how can these games still persist as they do, doing nothing clever and creative, and still getting inexplicably great scores from industry games reviewers who quite obviously didn't bother finish the product they're reviewing? Sequelitis. It's a sequel to a long running franchise with beloved and enfranchised fans who conflate anything carrying the brand name with the great memories they once had playing the thing rather than the reality of the bloated monstrosity it has now become. And that, is the allure of sequels.

Creating a new property or concept is hard, unbelievably so. Creating worlds that people care about, concepts that aren't done to death, characters you can come back to; all requires a level of dedicated and creative freedom not accessible to a great many people out there. And it comes with so much risk. What if all this time and effort and money invested into bringing this idea to life ends up coming to nothing? What if people don't like it? What if they hate it? How can I be certain that my vision will reach the audience that doesn't even know it exists? What if it doesn't have to? What if I make my dream fit into a guise of a product that they already love so they flock to it by default? I may be making this sound nefarious and manipulative in how I'm framing it, but these are actually very logical creative routines that I don't actually have any problem with. It's the consequences of this thought pattern which concern me.

One of the inevitable casualties of un-ending sequel syndrome is the death of all meaningful narrative that always comes from a narrative stretched too thin. The exact thing that happened to the Legend of Korra, only usually not handled by creatives clever or inspired enough to forge something watchable out of a frustrating situation like they were. Assassin's Creed is a prime example of this, once again. Having killed off their main protagonist and utterly failed to capture a core narrative story connecting their entries ever since. The overall narrative has since danced from Aliens to reincarnated human-alien hybrids to immortal god Assassin's, and none of it has any weight because it feels like the writing team are just making it up as they go along. There's very little set-up and pay-off between entries, and even the single game assassin narratives feel rushed and undercooked now. Do you remember when Altiar and Ezio's journey used to flirt parallels to Desmond's? Modern Assassin's Creed doesn't...

And beyond the story, the innovation of the games inevitably stagnates too. Who remembers when Call of Duty was the most derided franchise running for it's utter insistence of bringing the same core game out every year to their audience? When the creator's don't need to challenge themselves to succeed, they typically won't, and soon the well of creativity runs still and new games start to feel stale. You can't reinvent the wheel to the same car year after year to make it better, eventually you're just going to be repainting the same wheel and calling it a day. (Does the wheel analogy still work there?) New contexts, new stories, new settings; that's how you keep things fresh inside the development room and the playerbase. It's riskier, for certain; but risk always fits the reward for a job well done, doesn't it?

Another potential situation to consider is one where, like I've discussed recently, the existence of a sequel threatens to dilute what makes the first game special. Recently I bought this up whilst talking about Tyranny, a game which will never get a sequel. Tyranny's plot is perfectly laid around a great many plotpoints and mysteries, one of which being the very basic nature of the eponymous Tyrant. Any sequel would be forced to dispel that mystery slowly, or risk the plotpoint becoming stale, which would in turn demystify the original game forever. Going back to Assassin's Creed, as annoying as it is to repeatedly do so; the interesting conspiracy plotline which was introduced in the original games has been totally scrubbed to the point of toothlessness by magical space aliens that seem to eclipse any threat that Abstergo and the Templars presume to have. Anytime the aliens are reintroduced into the story, everything previously established in earlier games becomes worthless and unimportant; because now you're not fighting secretive cabals, you're saving the world from evil aliens. Increasing stakes sometimes step directly ontop of the predecessor in their unchecked zeal.

We all love our favourite franchises to go on, but eventually there has to be a stopping point. I adore Yakuza with every fibre in my being, but at some point you have to look at Kiryu, realise the man is approaching his sixties, and wonder what he's doing adopting an emo haircut and changing his name to Joryu. All great stories have their great conclusions, and if you don't conclude them, then the story is destined to run itself off a cliff. Look at Resident Evil 6; the product of a franchise out of ideas. That game bombed so badly the franchise literally started again from 2 and is still remaking itself. (They're going to be on to Remaking 6 by 2025; I'm fascinated to see if the team go for the challenge.) So my overall takeaway? End your damn series'!

Fake trailers

 Hey... there's no KOTOR III!

We live in an age of copycats and shapeshifters; where our eyes can no longer be trusted to discern the real from the unreal anymore. A world of lies and mistruths, in which the shiny new teaser trailer for a game that was just announced turns out to be just another damn 'concept trailer' put together by someone who's only qualification is "I've watched a bunch of trailers and I sort of know how they go but not really." If I'm being honest with myself I'd say that this is more of an issue for the movie trailer than the video game trailers for the plain fact that I'm pretty much ontop of the video game industry and known pretty definitively if a game has a trailer or if I'm being punked; but I still remembering being absolutely blasted by a 'concept' Metal Gear Solid 3 Remake trailer, in the heart of the remake craze, so I'm not about to just forgive and forget. Oh no, I'm going nuclear.

Clickbait is not a new phrase by any stretch of the imagination, or a new concept; and in fact it's something I've never had a huge issue with. Typically coined in reference to garbage side bar articles leeching off legitimate news sites; the Youtube iteration of clickbait has been mostly inoffensive and predictable for the most part. It started off with videos that posted scantily clad women in their thumbnails to farm clicks, then someone discovered that adding yellow arrows and red circles helped draw the wandering viewers eyes. Recently there's been a trend of borrowing people's thumbnail art style to try and invoke the same sort of viewer that other video would; such as the SunnyV2 drawn-style image for shortform Internet personality documentaries. I can deal with all of this, these are just the ways in which the influencer game is played. What I can't accept, are the liars. 

Where my finger points with that accusation is at Youtube channels like Screen Culture or Teaser Play; channels that I'm sure would scream to the high heavens how they put 'concept' in the teaser or description so as to not mislead people; and then go to pains to copy studio logos and thumbnail flairs to catch the unobservant off guard. (Also, they always stick the 'clarifier' adjective at the end of a long title or somewhere in the description that requires you to click to see it; which belies their true intention rather nicely.) Their 'concept' defence is a pale and gutless excuse to score some desperate and mislead views, or rather, Screen Culture's is. Teaser Play actually has some positive buzz around it for some absolutely incomprehensible reason, but I get to them in good time. First, let me talk about the movie rip off artists.

If you follow any of the blockbusters of the day, or the MCU, then you pretty much know every single movie which is going to hit the cinema screens over the next few years. You may not know exactly when they're coming, but yearly studio release windows and predictable sequels are there own crystal ball in the movie business. As such, all it takes is one bad actor with decent skills at photoshop to steal the names of known upcoming movies and fabricate a trailer with a convincing thumbnail and a runtime comprised of completely recycled show or movie scenes poor stitched together in a boring fashion. I cannot stress this enough, there's not a hint of artistry or ingenuity behind the actual footage of any of these trailers, so I can only assume the 'concept' all these videos hide behind is the 'concept' of being a literal emotionless computer putting together trailers to ill effect. And whenever they do try to come up with their own ideas, you get fake trailers like "Iron Man 4: The Rise of Morgan Stark" which is one of the absolute worse titles for a Marvel movie conceivable, whoever dreamt that up should be actually ashamed of themselves. That is truly pathetic title-work.

And what about 'Teaser play'? Well, those guys work more with fan expectations for video game sequels and Remakes that could feasibly exist in the very near future, what with the world of cyclical creativity the industry has made for us. How do they capture this world? With what are known as 'Unreal Engine 5 concepts', which to explain in plain terms: It means that they scrambled together increadibly rough assets to put together a small video that sort of resembles the product they're teasing. To their credit, Teaser Play puts in several worlds more effort than Screen Culture ever could on their best day. But considering Screen Culture literally just cuts together copyrighted footage, that really isn't a high bar to clear, now is it?

The Unreal Engine 5 toolkit is increadibly pretty all on it's ownsome, and our trailer maker makes great use of that fact, and a whole lot of stock assets and/or extracted models, to stage the least impressive looking visual 'teasers' a game could have. I mean sure, you'll find content starved games journalists bragging about this so that they fill the void between pathetically trying to disparage Naoki Yoshida for answering a complicated question in a manner too intelligent for their tiny brains to follow and knocking the Spiderman game for not condemning the corrupt institution of the New York police force enough. Why not praise a vapid concept trailer for merely existing? We've got no credibility or respect as it is!

As it stands, if you watch any of these unreal concepts you'll get exactly this. Shots of the protagonist player model slowly walking through environments that vaguely resemble the game world you remember using the exact same walk cycle even when it's abundantly clear that this cycle doesn't work very well on most of the models. Maybe you'll see some rough running and jumping or driving, or a bad money shot of an unconvincing face model, or all manner of assets that aren't correctly configured. HUDs that display incorrect information, static mini-maps. And then you'll scroll and see people in the comments totally blinded by their love the original property and the glitz of Unreal 5 singing their praises of the talent on display and holding this up as the example for the industry to live up to. I can't convey how upsetting that is, that people look at these heartless, lifeless, passionless, borefests and eat them up like kibble treats. I wonder what you'd find if you compared their Silent Hill 2 Remake with the actual Silent Hill 2 Remake which was announced just weeks after their 'concept'? Do you think that would be enough to shake the enraptured from this channel's snare?

The allure of fake trailers is predicated on lies and misdirection, often utilising fabricated images, company logos and falsified 'TM's. In essence, they're a peddler of mistruths for that quick first click, hoping to ride on other's brand recognition for good press. And it works, that's the worst part. These channels get their views, they make their money and clout, all based on the crooked spine of abject untruth. These are the sorts of creators that give honest creatives, those working around the teeth of the fair-use bear trap, an awful name; eclipsed only by the straight reposters. Rip-off artists and dream peddlers and I have zero respect for any of them. My advise, avoid them like the plague. At least until they learn what an actual 'concept' actually is.

Why do I keep coming back to Mount and Blade?

 On the saddle again.

It is the year of our lord 2022 and we're moving onto 2023; and here I am coming back, once again, to a game from 2010. Why? All it takes it a little push for me. Today that push was seeing that Mount and Blade Bannerlord has just released itself out of beta, so I might as well play through the original! It's like a chronic disease that flares up when I least suspect it; everytime that I, a man who loves story based narrative adventure RPG games with oodles of depth and character driven plotthreads and set-piece confrontations and challenging encounters; ends up rocking up to a game with no real story, paper thin characters, and a world you really are tasked with making your own way within. It's the prototypical simulator medieval game, but I can never get enough of the bugger. And to this day, I cannot rightly explain what hooks me so often.

Mount and Blade is a game where you take on the role of a mercenary captain operational in a smorgasbord of medieval kingdoms that are haphazardly stuck together. You'll find desert empires and snow-drenched kingdoms about two days ride from one another; and an ecosystem of lords and ladies all trading routes and starting wars and calling truces all around the player with no input from them whatsoever. This is something of a rare style of game, probably because it's difficult to really sell what the end goal is to developing a game with an ecosystem that runs independently of player interaction, and even more difficult to design the sort of ecosystem that reacts with an sort of coherent dynamism to the machinations of an unknowable player. The original Freeloader proposed a space world with a similar play style, and Kenshi presents an unendingly fascinating post apocalyptic alien world within this genre. And yet here I am, playing the medieval equivalent.

I suppose a part of that appeal for me comes from that innate fascination with medieval kings and kingdoms that all us Europeans are inflicted with, often causing us to romanticise an era where a simple infection could kill a man dead. There's a grit and grime associated with the medieval period, or perhaps more a layer of thick muck splattered over the gills; and more than any of the courtly dramas and period piece BBC romances; that is the side of European history I like to see represented. That's the reason I love The Witcher, because it's fantasy setting is grounded by it's grimy European cynicism. And I suppose that's why I love the struggle to become someone of note which is the core gameplay loop of the Mount and Blade franchise. That and fighting tactically in a system that seems to really hold tactical gameplay in low regard.

Seriously; I'm no tactical expert myself to any stretch of the imagination, but I've always found it grimly laughable that tactical combat is the key to Mount and Blade's progression, and yet all those tactics have to be pulled off within a battle and whilst leading that same battle. I do what I can, put my forces at the top of a hill, position the infantry infront of the archers, lead the Calvary around for a pincer once my forces are engaged; but it always feels like your struggling against a game that doesn't want to listen to you, rather than a game with tactical cohesion at it's soul. Perhaps I'm just used to full blown tactics games and 4x's, such that the more realistic, in the moment, tactical decisions irks me to no end. But still I play it. In fact, maybe I play it even more because the frustration seems fitting for the period?

A certain allure of the underdog tale certainly starts with the prospect of 'starting from the bottom' as it were. Being that lowly nobody who rises to become a huge figure of the land, slaying armies and commanding hundreds; whilst once being nothing more than a spit-on peasant. Who doesn't love the rise of the belittled? Of course, Mount and Blade is very particular with how lowly you can start. You can't quite be a mercenary for someone else, you always are the merc captain, but the idea of rising in skill, fame and competence persists through the handy RPG systems and the growing rooster of companions you can slowly facilitate and the fiefdoms you'll end up earning to the armies you'll end up raising and overthrowing. That's a commonality in all of these styles of open world sandbox RPG games; you are a self made hero or villain my the merits of hardwork. Typically that means a crap ton of grinding too; and a scaling element of risk the further you go on because the more you gain the more you have to lose. And all that heightens the elation of being the one who conquers in the end.

There is an undeniable lack of variety in what you can do in Mount and Blade in order to improve, which is where I think this particular sandbox RPG wavers a bit. In most of it's kind, every skill you choose to divest in is deep with a progression element to it; but in Mount and Blade there's only really trading and fighting. And you trade in order to afford better tools for fighting. Renown is the currency of value across the medieval Mount and Blade land and being really good at flogging stuff to strangers is not the best way to earn a name for yourself. But maybe that is also a drawing element for a brutalist like me. At the end of the day succession is earned in blood; what could be more fitting for a medieval simulator game than that?

The one thing that Mount and Blade doesn't have, is any sort of overaching story or narrative to contextualise the world you're living in; which is both liberating and limiting. Liberating in that you can craft the story you want in a world just flexible enough to allow for that, and limiting in that it's really hard to find a reason to care about this world. I usually spend my time as a factionless mercenary jumping from nation to nation, because none of the nations have enough of a personality or grounding contextual narrative to make me care about them. It's a shame because I could really see a very special little medieval universe brewing in this game, but when it comes to the gameplay I'm just seeing names I can't be bothered to remember constantly being captured and released and wars being started and ending and none of it meaning much of anything. At least the game is fun regardless.

Mount and Blade is as much a platform as a game. A platform for living your very own medieval fantasy story in a fictionalised world that glorifies all the storybook aspects of the age, 'fighting in huge battles', 'finagling royal dynasties', 'turning over villages for cattle to sell to other villages' and sidelines a lot of the other stuff. (Dying of a scrapped need, poverty, starvation, etc.) It's rough, rudimentary in a lot of places, and ugly in a manner that is, strangely, typically the case for this style of game. But it's also functional, robust and malleable to the fancies of an active imagination.

Tweeting the Twitter

 Swirling the drain.

Hmm? How does Twitter connect to gaming? Oh, well that's a very good question you see... the thing is that... well many game developers and big companies actually make use of Twitter in order to post announcements about... look, just leave me alone okay, I want to talk about Twitter! It is, you see, commonly referred to as the modern day Forum of the Internet, probably because Reddit is designed in such a manner that it locks people within their own vacuous echo chambers whereas Twitter at least makes it possible to interact with the rest of the world. (Although it is still a place for echoing opinions if you go to the right corners of it.) I'm not a huge Twitterer myself, I have a couple of accounts and I've only Tweeted once in the past five years and it was for this blog. But I can't just not be interested in what happens on Twitter; that would be wanton and callous negligence of the world around me; and I ain't just like that.

Going on just a few minutes ago has revealed that, just like I heard, the front page has changed into a trending tab so I got served news about the latest Elon Musk Tweet despite avoiding the man like the plague. Such is appropiate in Twitter's algorithmic mind because Elon is now the de-facto ruler of Twitter ever since he pledged to buy it, whined about his pledge, dedicated several months to whining about and devaluing the company, and then turned around and bought it at a wildly over-inflated price. (Don't point out how stupid that sounds; his fans are like loyalist cultists; they'll die for him.) Elon has fired everyone who was running Twitter before him, probably somewhat due to the frustration he went through to buy the thing in the first place, and is now left making as many rash and ill-thought-out changes as possible to try and buff up his ego and prove how results driven he is. (If only he was that 'results driven' when it came to creating true self driving, or building that robot to the standard he said he could. Or the Cybertruck. Or Rockets that can match what NASA's can do. Or literally anything substantial he has teased over the past half decade.)

Most like myself assumed that Elon Musk was only signing on to Twitter so that he could fulfil his role as the platform's next absent father; but it would appear that we all have egg on our faces after it's become readily apparent that Musk intends to run the platform with a mix of selective committee votes (He's addicted to public approval; Twitter really was the perfect match for him) and childish bouts of wanton fancy. The home page was just the beginning, because now it seems our South African Billionaire has his sights on changing the landscape of the Twitter world under the guise of securing monetisation. Which at the end of the day would offer him mere pennies when it comes to making back the several billion he spent acquiring the platform. (But big changes start small, right?)

The big change now is based around the famous Twitter verification checkmark; but unfortunately I can't get all "in the weeds" about what he did without explaining the mark itself. The checkmark was invented as a tiny badge that would be forever visible next to the name of recipient so that the person in question can be verified at a glance during a conversation. This was devised in a time when copycat Twitter accounts taking the names of celebrities and using their reputation to flog scams were common, it was a way for those famous people to take back their name. However, the general public is incurably dumb and the name-stealing grift is still very popular and somewhat successful. However, the blue mark eventually developed a new meaning. It became a badge of recognition and endorsement from the Twitter HQ, and a mark of genuine authenticity that can even go so far as to increase a influencer's chance of being sought out for promotion deals. Those without the mark have a tendency to assume it's purely a vanity symbol, because it's natural nebbish nature to assume the worst of everyone who isn't you. But there's a bizarre functionality and genuine professional value attributed to the mark totally unintentional of it's creation. 

Alas, at least that's what the mark used to be about. Elon Musk has declared a seismic shift in the universe with his new plan to apply a monetary value toward the check mark functionality so that anyone who wants to have one can pay for it, and any one who already had one needs to pay a monthly fee for upkeep. It's a neat little scheme to make literally pocket cage in revenue, but one he wants to try and make standard across the platform so that everyone starts paying a monthly subscription and what starts as a miniscule profit turns into the big profit maker of Twitter. I just don't know whether he's trying to supplement ad support or circumvent it all together so that he can be free to do whatever he wants with the platform without having to worry about kowtowing to ad suppliers. Either way, the plan will only be a success if people adopt it.

Which is somewhat hard to justify when it's so clear how utterly disorganised Elon is being with this plan. He declared it to be introduced in a matter of weeks with a $20 price tag, only to lower it to $8 monthly when challenged by Steven King. (I suspect this is a classic over pricing haggle method, but it makes you look extremely unprofessional when you do it on the public forum.) Now he's trying to convince us that we're being cheap if we don't shell out for his $8 dollar plan, and in fact that's about as much as we would spend on our Starbucks Frappuccino. Now first of all; what kind of brain-addled moron spends $8 on coffee? Those who do need to have their bank accounts seized; they're a danger to their own finances! Secondly; comparing food with a subscription to a social media platform is an infantile level of arguing. They're entirely incomparable, and doing so dismisses the fact that Twitter has historically always been free. Last I checked; Starbucks ain't never given it's drinks away for free!

But it's an opt in service- right? Well only for now. As it turns out, Elon wants to start making the blue check marks take priority in conversations and algorithms; with anyone who doesn't have the almighty mark being relegated to the plebs at the bottom of the feed. "That's the trolls and bots" says the man with the receding braincell count. So to summarise; Elon Musk is trying to commercialise a free speech platform so that you have to pay up in order to be heard on the same stage as other's who pay. Essentially spitting in the face of everything Twitter once stood for, all in a desperate attempt to squeeze a profit out of a unspeakably bad purchase. If the secret rumour that Elon wanted to buy Twitter just to shut it down were even remotely true, I'd call this a genius move. But the man isn't that smart; as he's happy to prove time and time again.

Some said that Elon was talking a big game with all but hot air, and that he ultimately wouldn't end up changing Twitter one bit. They were wrong. Elon has currently given a major ultimatum to the platform that is either going to tank it completely or utterly change it's identity. Whichever the direction, Elon has just committed to murdering the Internet's forum in cold blood and turning it into something cold and heartless; like modern day Tumblr. All of which makes me wonder if, at the end of the day, this isn't just Elon getting back at that one twitter account that dedicated itself to tracking his private jet usage across the world to point out the hypocrisy of the 'clean energy' car CEO. An account he tried to get banned for no other reason than he didn't like what they were saying, completely contrary to that 'free speech' malarkey he claims to care about. Oh, and he's already banning people who change their name to Elon Musk with a check mark to prove how moronic his system is... He says "free speech" so often, I don't think that word means what he thinks it means.

The time Bethesda got that Lawsuit on.

 Taking a walk in talk.

Oh good golly, the skeletons in big brother Bethesda's wardrobe are about to come tumbling out for all the world to see? And just when they were settled on the slow road to redemption through their plodding pushing platitudes about Starfield and convincing everyone that this is going to be the 'return-to-form' we've waited more than ten years for at this point! Why, if someone is going to ram their way in-between all of that good will I can only imagine this is a serious and perception shattering lawsuit! Clearly Bethesda must have been responsible for selling firearms to criminal insurgents or defrauding the American public out of their tax dollars or... maybe this is one of those suits filled with exaggerated language and neatly stretched out half-truths that makes you start to question if the legal system is really a backbone of intelligent modern society or merely a speech-check game waged by overpaid proxy soldiers we call 'lawyers'.

I'm going to be honest with you, me and Bethesda aren't on the best of terms right now. We haven't been on the best of terms for a good long while, but the recent kick to the nuts I received when they, entirely out of the blue, decided to slap us with a random update to Skyrim Anniversary Edition more than a year after the last update, is still rubbing me raw. Let me try and explain what my problem is; everytime that Bethesda updates anything from their end, every mod that uses the Script Extender. (Which is basically; all of the good mods) Which means you have to seek out work-arounds and updates and all manner of headache inducing nonsense; all just to carry on my ultimate Skyrim playthrough which I had been enjoying for months at that point! And I still can't bring myself to do it, there's just too many mods to update and some of them aren't worked on anymore! I have to play 'inbetween mod updater' all so that Bethesda can add, what was it again... fixes to their Creation Club content? The community uploaded fixes to them months ago- are you serious! Although I suppose this tangent isn't entirely out of the blue because, lo and behold, this actually has something to do with the Creation Club.

But we're flying too fast, let's slow down for a moment. First I have to ask you: What is a Season Pass? An all inclusive ride to every extra journey slapped onto your favourite games whether those experiences be worth the price you paid or not? A cynical cash scheme to lock a purchase out of people for content that hasn't even been developed, or in some cases even brainstormed, yet? A 'press and forget' option for the sorts of games where you already know you're going to end up buying everything regardless of the quality; so that this way you don't have to fumble about for each arbitrary release date? All of these things, in truth: for the Season pass is a complicated little cuss. And for our bereaved today? The Season pass was also a glittery trap leading to a den of cobwebs and lies.

If this is ringing a bell with you, it's because this case popped up back around in February in 2021, and I may have briefly mentioned it in passing around about that time; but what I'm talking about today is really the idea of what it is to challenge a mistruth. Both a mistruth as this client sees it pertaining to Bethesda and the mistruths I think the client is perpetuating for their own clout gain. But first: the case. The client purchased the Fallout 4 season pass and happily enjoyed all the content that it had to offer for the time, only to roll up several years later and find out that Bethesda have been shunting out new content in their 'Creation Club' plan which, in the eyes of the client, draws a distinction between DLC and Creation Club content where none truly exists. It's a lie to get out of the season pass promise. How very scandalous!

From the perspective of the suit, the season pass did launch with the very clear language that it would contain every piece of DLC content for Fallout 4 that Bethesda choose to launch. The language did not change years later when the Creation Club slate of content started to launch, and yet none of that content was even entertained for Season pass inclusion. Other games have launched Season Passes and managed to live up to the promise therein, more or less, so why should Bethesda be liable to skimping out based on entirely self-perpetuated language about what exactly constitutes DLC and what constitutes Creation Club content? DLC stands for 'Downloadable Content', and every bit of Creation Club content is extra items that need to be downloaded to be accessed. Seems pretty case-closed to me...

But then I look at the otherside. The season of content for Fallout 4 ended literal years before the word 'creation club' was so much as coined by Bethesda, and as the name-sake will tell you; most Season passes are designed to last a single season of pre-planned content. Even today you can find examples of companies releasing follow-up 'Season Pass 2' pre-purchase schemes whenever their post-support plans change. (Such as with 'Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous') Whatsmore, all Fallout 4 DLC was created by the core Bethesda team, whilst Creation Club content was specifically created in conjunction with talented creators and/or non-essential development teams. The content is more compact, smaller, and transparently distinct from DLC. They didn't try to hide the nature of the CC; they lauded it.

The very fact a suit like this could even survive does, however, highlight the kind of weirdly odd nature around the Creation Club. Designed as a way to encourage mod creator's making money to live off their art, without touching on the whole 'paid mods' debacle that failed to live past a single month on Steam. In trying to tread the water between Mods and DLC, Bethesda birthed an betwixt monster of content too small to warrant genuine excitement and too expensive not to warrant the critical eye of a dubious public. The smartest move Bethesda ever did with it's Creation Club stuff was slap it all under the Anniversary Edition of Skyrim and flog it in one package. But even then, Fallout 4 doesn't have a deal like that yet for some reason, so the dichotomy of mismatching remains.

I think that the filer of this suit likely knew exactly what the Creation Club was, and knew their Season pass obviously wouldn't entitle them to it's content. They probably understood what Bethesda were trying to do and had little to no grips with it beyond the obvious. ('This stuff shouldn't cost this much, this feels over-cooked. Etc.') In my mind; this lawsuit was just a more public dunking on the haphazard system that Bethesda tried to introduce, highlighting another inconsistency with what they envisioned and what was created. "If this isn't DLC; then why does it have a price tag?" Fair enough, if muddied behind a frivolous lawsuit that just makes the 'aggrieved' look like the dumb one in this equation. But this saga does serve as a helpful reminder, should we need it; Starfield really doesn't need a Creation Club, Todd. Thanks.

Kevin Conroy passed away

 The Knight passed.

Shocked doesn't even begin to describe how I felt when I saw this news slip past in the grim dark of last night. How do you sensibly quantify the shattering of reasonable thought and coherence when a pillar of the world as you've known since childhood just isn't there anymore? How do you reconcile yesterday with today, and is that a distinction even deserving of definition; or is the fact that this is a world without the iconic voice of Batman so stark a contrast that we should actively recognise how vastly the voice acting scene has now shifted. Like many others, I grew up hearing Kevin Conroy's iconic performances on my TV screen during the animated series, relaying it in my head whenever I read Batman comics and amateurishly mimicing whenever I regurgitated classic Batman lines. More than any other actor has before and likely more than any other actor will have the breadth to do in the future, Kevin Conroy encapsulated the Batman role fully.

There's always room for interpretation and iteration, and of course those who brought the voice of one of DC's most famous mascots to life before Conroy's tenure; but how many of them rose to the level of defacto premiership over the role? To the point that every performance since has learnt something from his timbre, timing and measured delivery? Just as Mark Hamill's Joker is a pivotal and definitive performance around which all others branch, Kevin Conroy is that spine that supports the eclectic Batman vocal casts we've had over the years. Gravitas, stoicism, personability, humility, sarcasm, seriousness; all captured in the performance of an irrefutable icon. And it's an absolute crime that Kevin only got the chance to legitimately play an on-screen version of the character just once; and even then not wearing the cowl but an exosuit wireframe.

As with many actors of his calibre, Kevin Conroy was a Juilliard alumni with a great many other notable to-be-stars from the same age and spent much of his formative years trading roles on stage and on TV until his casting as the main role of the Batman Animated Series. That series in itself was something of a seismic shift to the way that America and the West looked at the role of cartoons and the way they treated their source material, with the Animated Series going so far as to try and challenge it's viewers with more mature narrative and subject matters to fill the space between Batman's bouts of violence. It was also an incredible feat of sustained high-quality animation which didn't take a lot of the usual shortcuts for shows of that size, belying a level of standard that pushed the rest of the industry to improve. And the voice behind the animated face of that franchise was provided by none other than Kevin Conroy.

Before the animated series, Batman's contribution to animation had been... limited. There was the silly Adam West animated adaptation of his live action show which rather intentionally took the edge and serious nature out of the Batman mythos to play up the absurdity of grown men running around in bright suits with silly masks. The mood and gothic routes of Batman had been reintroduced to the wider public through Tim Burton's movie, but there was little belief that a more straight-faced and serious version of the Batman character could persist on the small screen also. They'd need a personality with the gravitas to match Micheal Keaton. And for my money; I'd say Kevin matched and surpassed that standard with unending gusto and sustained talent.

One of my favourite childhood videos that I kept and watched again and again was my copy of 'Batman: Mask of the Phantasm'; a legendary animated adventure that still very much holds up to this day. But as someone with a rather obvious passion for video games, I also own a great many more copies of some of his performances in the form of the Batman Arkham series. Another, I'm going to use the word again, legendary entry to the Batman mythos that left an irrefutable mark on the culture of video gaming when it dropped. And, of course, it was Kevin's rumbling tones that bought the man in the cowl to life through all of these products. The only Arkham game that Conroy didn't act in was the supremely underrated 'Arkham Origins', in which he and Mark Hamill (Joker) were replaced with Roger Craig Smith and Troy Baker respectively. Although even in that instance, go figure, both actors based their performances heavily on the example of their senior castmates, leading from their example to depict younger versions of the same characters.

Kevin's contribution to the role of Batman was so significant, that during the CW's major crossover event during which they slammed all DC cinematic universes together and drug every reference they could to the forefront; the team couldn't help but throw a big piece of the excitement Kevin's way. We're talking about a crossover event which drew in cameos from Burt Ward (60's Robin), Brandon Routh in the Superman outfit (Not quite as impressive considering Routh was already a member of the CW DC cast) and even a incredible moment where CW's Flash (Grant Gustin) met the movie Flash of Ezra Miller! The scene had supremely odd dialogue and didn't make any sense, but no one cared because it was such an incredible moment. (This was before Ezra went crazy.) And amidst all of these live action performances bought back, (and a few more besides) the showrunners knew it was in their power, and in many ways ordained to be their duty, to bring Kevin Conroy into the crossover as a live action version of 'Kingdom Come' Batman. A man who was known for being the voice of the role, but proved so synonymous that everyone knew he deserved to be his face too, at least once.

All of which is why it's so utterly shocking that this Superhero icon of the voice acting craft passed away at such a shocking age; 66! It hardly seems real. It doesn't seem fair. The rule of reality is that everyone comes to pass at sometime and we'll all find that moment where the artists who helped build the magic of our youths start to wither and die, but surely that moment shouldn't come so soon! Perhaps it's a selfish denial of being forced to confront one's own mortality, which makes loss ring so foul for us. But even I, someone haunted everyday by my own ticking clock, struggle to rationalise such abruptness. I wish we'd had Kevin Conroy around for longer, and that guttural disquiet is going to linger with many of us.

Undoubtedly the man will be fondly remembered for his role, I think it's safe to say he was already hailed as a legend. Future Batmen stepping behind the mic will do so atop the groundwork he was instrumental in laying and voice actors across the industry are already mourning for him. Yesterday we lost Kevin Conroy, it's only right that today we do our part to immortalise a figure who deserve it in the role that he defined. For though it might be presumptive of me to say, I think the majority can agree that there will never quite be a more encapsulating Batman than from the man who brought his shadow off the page. Or animation cells, as the case may be. What an unexpectedly sad blog I was compelled into writing; hopeful they'll be some time until another of it's kind.

Innovation

 Recreation.

Innovation in design is a topic I talk about quite a lot on this blog; although mostly disparagingly in order to insult Ubisoft for their lack of it. But that's only because innovative ideas is one of the few things that can keep push forward a medium that is reaching the ceiling of graphical fidelity more rapidly than it wants to admit. Making games wider isn't going to be much of an option going forward in development, at least according to Sony, who want us to believe they're barely making minimum wage up in their platinum-plated space-station offices. So if we're busy subsiding the absolutely terrible development costs that has Mr Yoshida hunting down stray galley rats in order to cook and feed them to his destitute family, I guess the only way games can improve is by becoming smarting and more complex. By innovating, instead of expanding. Which is an idea that had me thinking about the best innovations in video gaming past. Innovations like the unified control scheme.

Before there was any sort of consensus on what a video game 'genre' was, or how a certain type of game should be designed; there was absolutely no consensus on how video games should control or play; which inevitably led to some collisions in intent. Maybe for one video game the button to shoot your gun will be the red circle; maybe for this other one it would be the blue cross, maybe, if you're lucky, it'll be the trigger button! Some games featured better schemes than others, and whatever you got lunked with typically was your lot because this was the time before options menus and picking your button layout too. In this age, tutorials still served a very real function for telling you how the basic controls of every game worked, because gamers couldn't yet develop intrinsic familiarity with that very basic control scheme which today is compatible with just about every game bar some odd regional differences. (Can never get behind Japanese games and the swapped 'confirmation' and 'cancel' buttons- it bums me out.)

I can't say when the exact moment was when all of gaming made the unified choice to stop playing silly buggers with what controls did what; but that was a huge step forward in general cohesion of game design. Controls were designed to be ergonomic and sensible, prioritising buttons that would have to be pressed often towards fingers that could comfortably do the pressing. The world started to heal, things made sense. Every now and then you get a wild-card developer who believed they were going to reinvent the wheel, but basic settings menus with button configurations thankfully saves us from those anarchistic elements trying so desperately to destroy our clean, functioning, unified control scheme governance. In many ways this was the most important innovation ever to grace game design for the wide reaching effect it's had on the consciousness of gamers and the permutation of game playing proficiency, but it's also the most boring to talk about so how about we get a bit classic and specific?

How about we talk about saving? We all do it all the time, unless we happen to have a free 40 hours to complete brand new games start to finish without taking a single break. And yeah sure, I have that free time but I'm a desiccated old man hooked up to an energy extracting bacta tank; most of the rest of the world isn't. The Legend of Zelda was perhaps the first game to implement the ability to save the state of the world so that you could come back to that comparatively large game and pick up where you left off, and since then it's become an industry standard feature that we don't even think about. As universal as breathing and sleeping, but in digital form. Such that games that muck around with saving become weird and novel for their defiance of a standard, such as rougelikes, or Neir Replicant, etc.

But not every innovation totally rewrites the industry standard, some just do something incredible which makes their game stand out from the crowd. The Nemesis System from Shadow of Mordor was once such innovation, wherein the raw gameplay was enriched with a dynamic system that would remember NPCs and build a history of interaction between the NPC and the player. Injuries would be remembered, victories would be rewarded, ranks of hierarchy would shift, the dynamic make-up of guard outposts would evolve. It was a system that made the world feel living and shifting and made the player feel as though they were at the head of conducting their very own story. The Nemesis system was a huge achievement of robust design and oodles of voice recordings and script writings to create a seemingly endless list of permutations.

And that system, at least somewhat, was innovated on again by Watch_Dogs Legion! Now I know I usually rag on Ubisoft, for very good reason, but Legion did manage to quite interestingly iterate on something that Warner Bros. games created. I mean, admittedly they did just kind of take that concept and expand it laterally, rather than add anything in the way of depth, but I'll take what I can get. In Legion, every single NPC can be recruited into the player's army through a dynamically generated quest system that grows stale very quick through a lack of variety. But the differences in what each potential recruit offers will incentivise you to seek them out and endure the side missions anyway. It still doesn't convince me to actually change to someone who's skills work best on a mission 80% of the time, but having the choice is decent enough.

Unfortunately, Legion only really works as an innovation to Shadow of Mordor. However by the time Ubisoft's version of the concept came out, Warner Bros. had already innovated upon themselves in Shadow of War; and in doing so put Legion largely to shame. War was what happens when the raw framework of how everything works is pretty much done from the beginning and the team can spend as much time as they can creating diverse and varied interactions. The Orc armies you build and fight interact with each other fantastically and impressively all throughout Shadow of War, to the point where you'll see betrayals, surprise revivals, random assassination attempts and ambushes all throughout your playtime. If Shadow of Mordor made you the conductor of the narrative, Shadow of War puts you at the mercy of an orchestra gone wild.

Innovation is the fuel of art, and the games industry is blessed to have been showered with more innovation than most art forms enjoy in their early decades. Stagnancy flitters here and there, but is quickly swallowed up by the every shifting wiles of trends and new genre tropes that can make a game from 10 years ago feel like another world away from the kinds of experiences we enjoy today. Heck, with enough innovation the world might one day make a 4X game that I don't absolutely suck at; but then again maybe that's asking for a miracle too far... All of what I've discussed today has been relevant only to software; but hardware for gaming is every bit as evolving and ever-improving, to a frankly daunting degree. Maybe that in itself is ripe enough for it's own innovation themed blog in the near future-

Redesigning Sonic

 Life is a stage loop

Sonic is the fastest mammal alive... excluding Barry Allen I guess... Barry's so fast he can literally go back in time and pass through solid objects by vibrating their particles! Barry's only weakness is... plot convenience. Literally. But whilst their universes remain mercifully separate, Sonic is the fastest thing alive and that singular fact has informed the majority gameplay decisions made around the designs of his games since 1991. With the obvious exceptions; 3D Blast, The Fighters, etc. As such it's quite impressive that in all that time, Sega and Sonic Team beneath them have never quite managed to crack that nut of 3D Sonic. Because when you break it down to the core essentials, conveying and gamifying the acquisition of speed is literally the only piece of connective tissue that needs to connect the 2D era of Sonic to the 3D era; all else is superfluous and/or ill advised. It seems that might be a lesson Sonic Team have learnt with their most recent outing, Frontiers; but then again: they did fill their open world with platforms and grind rails, so maybe not.

I've been pondering this for some time as I've tried to deduce how exactly one might go about redesigning Sonic for a newer audience. Oh, and I don't mean visually redesigning the little blue furball; I've already seen a couple terrible ideas for how that can be done. I'm talking gameplay, where the buck starts and stops, because that has been a constant sticking point for the evolution of Sonic over the years. How do you stay true to the franchise and evolve the brand? How do you make engaging and unique gameplay which takes advantage of the mascot's strengths? How do you convince Sonic Team to stop putting stupidly jarring platforming challenges in their 3D adventure games? They're never even hard challenge platforming either; just the bare minimum of the bare minimum. Is the solution at all formed in jumping challenges, or is Sonic barking up the wrong tree?

The way I look at it, one of the most enduring problems with Sonic has been the attitude towards approaching and designing it. Everytime you'll find developers unwilling to really challenge what it is that Sonic has become in order to redistribute him towards this future, and instead they're always wanted to strike this balance of what Sonic was and what a 3D version of that exact image would look like. But- that's not really sensible, now is it? The original Sonic games were 2D platformers balanced and designed to take advantage of the limited dimensions to offer platforming challenges, level gimmicks and vertical path diversity. 3D games can't really take advantage of platforming very well thanks to the depth perception problem which is difficult to solve from behind the subjects head, and the 3rd dimensions adds a horizontal plane of travel that should really be considered when level designing. (And isn't.)

Sonic Adventure is about the best one could hope for whilst trying to stick to the tenets of what made the original games work, and even then it had it's issues. Levels were linear by raw design and alternate paths seem like unintentional oversights rather than planned routes. The Platforming can be meddlesome and difficult to work, because 3D platforming is a headache, and nailing the sense of speed that Sonic in known for is difficult to do in run sections because you can't really just lock the player in a sprint without sacrificing that sense of control. (Wait until later Sonic games where they stopped caring about that risk altogether.) Later Sonic games should have taken this as evidence to move on from what Sonic was and design him for the future. But excluding 'Boom', which had it's own problems; Sonic Team seem to have been chasing this Adventure high ever since.

Firstly I think Sonic could benefit from a total shift in setting into a world comprised of the core tenants of world design; context, culture and consistency. Somehow we're supposed to consider every Sonic game currently out as all part of some unending canon despite the original games taking place in a seemingly endless scroll of biome diversity, the Adventure games taking place in and around human cities and Forces showing us an entire city populated solely by anthropomorphic animals. There's no unified design philosophy, no conceptual themes around the lore of this world and zero connective tissue unless you squint and try to see it. And if the world makes no sense, it can't be taken seriously and you'll have trouble creating a narrative in which the fate of that world has any consequence at all to a viewer. And I think a consequential world is the first major step of improvement this franchise could benefit from.

As for raw gameplay, my proposition is toward a vast shift in core gameplay tenets. Coming up with revised tenets is a big ask without fundamentals, however; so I'm currently still nailing down what a reimagined Sonic would fundamentally play like; which has me with an image like thus: an open plan game (not necessarily open world but at least open plan level design) wherein speed is the most important factor of gameplay. I see a new angle to combat wherein the way Sonic attacks is by gaining a certain speed, then entering into his ball state (locking his velocity) and barrelling into his target. The faster object wins the collision. Speed acquisition will be paramount in such a system, with momentum based mechanics and maybe boost tricks coming into play, enemies would have to be completely redesigned to all challenge on a speed level, and Sonic's running animations would have several stages to indicate which threshold of speed the player has reached so they judge how to barrel into their enemy.

For bosses I have a few ideas. The first is simply, an elevation upon the main game. Big speed demons every bit the match of Sonic and just as capable, requiring the player to make moves to break enemy momentum and open them up to attacks. Maybe breaking trees that fall down in their run route, forcing them to divert to a smaller momentum building runway; or breaking a dam that floods the stage with water which affects friction. It would be based around disarming the enemy creatively before attacking. The other, more spectacle driven approach, would be in giant mechanoids which the player has to break inside of and destroy from the inside. Dodge enemy attacks to build speed, then pierce within the metal body and break what you can before getting kicked out to repeat. Of course, by it's very nature Sonic has to have unique and different bosses for each encounter; but those are just a few ideas to demonstrate how this style of gameplay could effect this important sector of Sonic games.

Of course, my ideas are just one of many peoples; and as such little more than a trickle in an ocean. But I hope that from a raging ocean of ideas to choose from, Sonic Team would some day recognise the sheer breadth of choice in front of them and not just chase that Sonic Adventure high after all these years. That moment has passed them by and all the gimmicks in the world can't hide the fact that Sonic of today feels played out and dated. But there's something about the little blue guy, all sassy and indignant like he is, that keeps me wanting to route for him and not just write this off as another series gone down the gutter. I hope that Sonic Team can recognise the potential in their hands before that benefit of the doubt rubs off for me and the others of this strained franchise.