Great Expectations

 Bad dog.

Positivity is one of the most powerful forces in the world, I am told. With the power of believing in yourself and sheer confidence someone can drag themselves through the worst of the worst and empower the passions and dedication of those around them, and I believe in that power. But it can be a fragile tower, building upon expectation and positive reinforcement, when it all crumbles into nothing; just as it can be a lighting rod of elation when the opposite happens. The same is true from the level of an individual as it is from the heights of a conglomerate video game development studio, and we can see perfect examples of both extreme outcomes within the space of just the last year thanks to attitudes towards two franchises that received reactions almost polar to their initial general thoughts. (I know they both surprised me.) So let us take a gander at this phenom together, shall we?

Saints Row. What can a man say about Saints Row that hasn't already been said to death? It was the discerning man's crime game, rife with intelligent introspection into the societal foils that engender criminal enterprises and the spiralling manner of modern living that points the unfortunate and uneven down to that way of life. Actually, Saints Row is nothing like that- the entire franchise is more just 'A bit of banter', at the end of the day. Early day Saints Row was considered a rather limp GTA clone, then a zany product of it's own, then a slightly overly zany friend still dancing at the party as everyone is winding down, and then an annoying drunk still stinking the place up and thrusting at everyone obnoxiously the morning after. The Saints Row Reboot was supposed to be a return to the heyday of the franchise... well, not it's origin, but more a sweet-spot just after the origin and just before the downwards trajectory. And I remember there being some actual excitement upon hearing this.

Those who knew Saints Row all had their ideas about when the franchise was at it's best, and all were being catered to throughout the marketing process with carefully, or perhaps not-so carefully, chosen platitudes. It wasn't until the first trailer that real dissent started to air. I didn't get the complaining at the time and found the only coherent complaints to be crass and/or contrived, but whether through random luck or subliminal sabotage: that shift in attitude would mark the trajectory of the reboot forever more. When it finally did launch, the most charitable thing anyone could say was that it would have been a perfectly standard open world title 10 years prior. Otherwise it was outdated, badly written, buggy, uninspired, oddly ashamed of itself and largely impact derived. Saints Row Reboot was quite frankly a critical dud. But what about commercially?

Well get this; reports have come out claiming that the Saints Reboot might have cost somewhere in the ballpark of 100 million to create; which is either evidence of simply incredible mismanagement or mask-off cartel money laundering, because that ambition does not translate to the final product. In fact, considering the recycled animations, the underpaid writing team, the 'meh' graphical improvements and the overall vast feeling of emptiness... I think that maybe people should be watching very closely what Volition put out next else we might be having a bit of a Borderlands 2/ Alien Colonial Marines situation on our hands. That would be the only way I can justify this sort of insane price tag. Oh, and would it surprise you to hear that the game fell short of expectations in it's sales? Somehow the publishers over at Supervillian-group-in-training Embracer were surprised they never made a profit; which makes me seriously reconsider my understanding of the universe because I though that was the most predictable outcome since the sun rising every morning. (Maybe if you lie to yourself that reception was 'mixed' long enough it starts to truly alter your perception of reality.)

And on the total other end of that spectrum comes a game that I had absolutely no faith in, and that a lot of people wrote off in it's early reveals, that came around to smash general expectations into nothing. Sonic Frontiers had all the makings of another 3d Sonic dud, especially given that it was coming right off the heels of the embarrassingly undercooked Sonic Forces and was trying something the franchise had never tried before, semi open-world! I thought the game was going to offer nothing but a substandard experience piece with low-effort exploratory open world mechanics and a largely forgettable overall package, and it seems that whilst I wasn't totally wrong I wasn't totally right either. The game is largely well received and managed to sell absolute gang busters from a Sonic fandom utterly shocked they've got a real functioning Sonic game to spend their money on.

In fact, I'm not the only one who lost their expectation bet when it came to Sonic Frontiers. Recently we've seen SEGA themselves, confident as they were during the marketing stage, come out to confess that the game overperformed what they were expecting, which means either they really didn't believe in their own developers or Sonic managed to truly break it's own glass ceiling in it's ascent back to some form of general relevancy. All of which is great news for the Sonic franchise, of course, which is scoring recognition points just about everywhere recently. Movies, TV shows, new comic franchise; Sonic is getting around. Maybe we can start to see an actual new take on the Sonic formula so that these games can get on the path to being something special again. (I've got the perfect pitch for a reimagined Sonic, just call me, SEGA!)

Expectation is quite the magical ingredient, is it not? Our means of preparing ourselves for the coming inevitable, either for the brace of disappointment or the elation of success. Whereas I'd imagine that Saints Row is currently in the process of burning their future plans given the thorough rejection of just about everything their latest game stood for at a fundamental level, I'd imagine the various Sonic creative teams must be running out of ideas to slap down and make more fans off of. A world of opportunity is opening up at one end of the industry just as a dozen doors are slamming shut over at the opposite end. Do you ever wonder, why to win somebody's got to lose? It's like the great universal balance requires a sacrifice before it'll award it's bounty elsewhere.

Hype is the double-edged sword, there's no doubt about that. But it's also just that tantalising fruit we can't manage to totally keep away from. Resign yourself to never get all goo-goo eyes over some upcoming new game or movie and suddenly you're the dull thud of the party. I expect something of a more critical eye when it comes to the recommendations and expectations within a coherent business analyses of their own potential success or failure, but I suppose maybe the world of speculation and prediction is so called for it's transitory nature, is it not? At the end of the day I can't help but wonder, why exactly qualifies these people to be speculator's when industry fans like us tend to have a better hit rate than them? Confidence, I guess.

Is it too late for Skull and Bones?

 Yes.

You are Yves Guillemot. I know- horror of horrors, but just play along with my little thought experiment for a bit, will ya? You have in your hand the key to unlimited riches, a franchise that people will pay through the nose for, and yet for some reason you can't help but dabble in ways to seize for more. How do you temper your worst impulses when they have become most all that you are? It's the curse of the rich, it's never enough. To be fair, that illness effects all of humanity from the most lavish to the poorest, not one person can ever be happy with their lot. It's the same reason why the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal used to task his people with walking onto the streets and telling the citizens wild tales about lions he had slayed with his bare hands. Actual fake news propaganda gibberish originating from a deeply insecure man to whom all his world was his oyster. There's no such thing as being content, and Yves Guillemot is slowly learning that when you surrender enough to those avaristic compulsions, the slap back can be dire.

Did his company need to accept a grant from the Singaporean government in order to create an online spin-off to the ship-sections of the popular Assassin's Creed game, Black Flag? Of course not. But they absolutely did. And ever since then that game has hung like a noose around the necks of Ubisoft, a daily reminder of the coming disaster that they cannot avoid and really don't need right now given the general state of disarray the company has been exhibiting of late. Of course let me be clear- the ship sections of Black Flag were hugely fun and people loved them to bits; but they also wore themselves off before the end of the game for how frequent they were. I know this because the Assassin's Creed games have tried to reinstate them as staples of the Assassin's Creed formula several times since, in Origins and Odyssey, and everytime it just seems to grate at the audience more and more. So turning that into a premise of an entire sperate spin-off game? Well, that's definitely more brave of a choice than I would ever make for the company.

I think for me the real issue with the idea of Skull and Bones is that it was invented at a time when there was a real gap in the market for a Pirate-themed game. Love for the 'golden age' of pirates roared back into the mind of the modern youth with the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies; everybody wanted a pirate game to capture the dream of becoming the audacious yet humbly quirky Captain Jack Sparrow and embarking on countless death defying adventures like he did. I'm pretty sure most every kid of that age played at least one of the largely mediocre movie tie in games and sighed with the thought "If only this wasn't utter trash." (To be fair, I actually liked the first Pirates game at the time because I really was that young once.) But that is not a void which has festered totally unanswered in the years since. Plenty of other developers tried their hand at living up to the fantasy and, much to the disappointment of the Ubisoft team I'd imagine, one already released.

Sea of Thieves is the pirate fantasy brought to life. It's done in a highly stylised fashion, perhaps, but with all the hallmarks that one would want. Fantastical adventurous creatures to battle with, co-operative framework to pilot ships together, vague party game mechanics for social players and a free-form approach to play that encourages the consumer to make their own fun within a robust and comprehensive sandbox. It's a very refined game that has been steadily supported by the developers and the community ever since release, and even though the game is perhaps no longer the belle of the ball, every Pirate fantasist out there has their copy of Sea of Thieves and therefore simply must compare it against any other sea-faring pirate experience due out. Just as how Wildermyth beat Ken Levine to the punch of a story-flexible narrative and now his upcoming game is inevitably going to be compared with Wildermyth on a narrative level, Skull and Bones is going to have to butt up against Sea of Thieves to prove it's worth in the games market. And I know who I'm not putting money behind regarding that dust up! 

But Skull and Bones can't really shy away from the fight, else the Signapore government will ask for their Grant back and Yves has already spent that on hush money for all the harassed women he's helped cover up in- oh come on, that isn't slander! (Slander is spoken, in print it's libel.) People who have been waiting for Skull and Bones had their perception of what a good pirate game feels like dictated to them by the Sea of Thieves team over at Rare, which is a problem for Ubisoft when Skull and Bones doesn't, by the previews we've already seen, seem able to match-up to that vision. For one, Skull and Bones totally walked back on all of it's mythical elements in favour of a boring straight pirate game set somewhere in the Indian Ocean, similar to what Black Flag already delivered. For two, Skull and Bones features no substantive on-ground gameplay, which is arguably half the fun of being a pirate; and for three the initial MMO-style pitch seems to have been peeled back bit by bit with each re-reveal of the game to the point where this could be a peer-to-peer deathmatch game at this point and no one would know until launch.

However the team could hide behind the fact that this is just the general perception that people have when looking at Skull and Bones. Nobody really had any empirical evidence confirming that this game was a boring, uninspired waste-of-effort that is being dragged on the development team against the wills of everyone involved. Well, at least we couldn't say that until the playtest reactions for Skull and Bones started to get leaked out into the public. Getting such great responses as "There wasn't a single point in my hours of gameplay I felt any fun" is pretty much the worst feedback imaginable as a designer. If people can't even see a whisper of a good time in your idea, it might be time to go back to the drawing board. But if there's one thing Skull and Bones has pretty much expended itself on, it's spare time.

From what the testers appear to be saying, the Skull and Bones title lacks anything unique or interesting in it's premise that will help it last longer than half a year out in the wild. This is at a time where the games industry as a whole is genuinely starting to become sick of the endless live services out in the world and thus are abandoning them one by one. It was just recently revealed that Multiversus is suffering the effects of player fall-off after an entire season during which Marvin the Martian was the only new character brought to the game. As you can imagine, when Multiversus is feeling the brunt of a flagging market, soaring star that it once was, that can only mean grim tides for all the other pretenders. And Multiversus actually had a USP; Skull and Bones has nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

So it is too late for Skull and Bones at this point? Too late to work on the feedback, too late to identify a gap in the market and steer their ship towards it, too late to come out and be a success that the Ubisoft offices really need right now? Yes, absolutely, unquestionably, yes. It seems that years of middling titles and repetitive pitches and design philosophies has started to wane when inflicted upon industry typically defined by creativity, and Ubisoft's own bad decisions have backed them into a corner with a bad game, destined to dry up in no time flat, after a year of cancellations and dropped market value. (And Watch_Dogs Legion was a literal personal insult aimed at me. I will not let that game's mediocrity go as long as I live.) I genuinely never thought I'd be saying this about a company as seemingly unshakable as Ubisoft- but we may be looking at the beginning of the end. Or maybe the middle- Assassin's Creed Unity was the beginning. 

Checking the pulse of 2023 E-Sports

 Hit me with your best shot

E-Sports is quite the impressive conceptual when you break it down. Because within the grand scheme of the prospective of the game's industry to an outside audience, there would seem no better an oxymoron than Video games and sports. Of course we're talking stereotypes, but the kind which seem to have be shattered in the most flamboyant fashion. Not only has E-Sports flourished as an accepted concept in recent years, but we've seen actual stadiums of spectator's show up to watch somehow super star E-Sports teams duke it out in their chosen games. It's actually quite inspiring to see the heights to which a single aspect of the games industry can soar within the space of hardly any time whatsoever. Gaming truly is a rapidly blossoming flower.

And all this I of course say from the prospective of an outsider. My furthest interaction with the world of E-Sports comes once a year every game awards when I make a wild stab-in-the-dark as to who will win the various categories based on absolutely no personal research whatsoever. A tradition for which I score shockingly well, considering how scatter brain it is. I am, however, not a total ignoramus when it comes to the huge and community driven world of the E-Sporting. I would be remiss in my duties not to pay an odd thought to the world of the sporters every now and then, which is how I also hear about some of the misfortunes that run across this world. The Smash Bros. community controversy, the dwindling of certain territories, the shut-up of Echo VR and, worst of all, the induction of FaZE clan into the official Batman lore thanks to a crossover comic which is real and you can look up right now. (Spoilers: it's pretty terrible. The art is okay.)

As with any sub-division of the gaming conglomerate we call an industry, the world of E-Sports is forever shifting and changing what it needs to be in order to survive. I'm sure many still fondly remember the underground days where passionate individuals played tournament games in tiny backrooms that were recorded on hand cameras, and maybe some even further back remember the days of actual developer set-up competitions in local arcade spots. Surely it was a different world then compared to today with the slick-back and corporate organisation of trained E-Athletes who assemble entire teams of obsessives that train together every day of the month. Athletes who sometimes have to go even further than their outside counterparts by being somewhat entertaining personalities to, as a lot of them double up as streamers during their free time. And, of course, I bet the competitors of yesteryear would never foresee a world where E-Sports champions actually made money. 

You don't actually have to go back too far to find a time where E-Sports players competed simply for bragging rights of a theoretical crown. The Smash Bros competitive scene was pretty much built on that sort of self-driven passion and considering how they've struggled to get a decent prize pool going even to this day thanks to the machinations of Nintendo, it's likely that personal pride is going to continue to play a role in competitor's psyche for years to come. But around them you can find much larger professional circuits with seriously eye-bulging cash prizes. In 2021 the various Overwatch competitions combined added up to over $4 million dollars in their prize pool and for 2022 LoL World Championship alone apparently boasted a prize pool upwards of $2,000,000. With the higher potential reward of course comes an increase in the calibre of competitors which, somewhere along the line, means that running an E-Sports team is going to become an expensive endeavour in itself.

Unlike other forms of sports there really isn't a direct form of payment for an E-Sports team beyond winnings and merch sales; events are typically free to watch and there's no central league to handle the distribution of events, broadcasting rights and ticket sales. Just as with gaming itself the very economics of the E-Sports world are still in their infancy, unfortunately the actual realisation of this did not come easy to the many who flocked to the scene in the early days. Many who don't even follow the sport will know of the large and storied titans who rule the space, FaZe, 100 Theives, OpTIC, and naturally just assume them to be as stable and secure as the pillars of industry around them- but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact many of these stables are starting to drop in market value recently as the bubble of confidence around E-Sports teams is starting to wobble and burst.

You see, as what seems to be the culture around tech startups, venture capitalists and self-proclaimed 'innovator's clamoured to fund up these budding teams in their early stages, fuelled on by the mantra of Silicon Valley: Infinite growth, revenue someday. It's very much an 'all or nothing' strategy best defined by a manner of quantity over dull quality; be the key investor behind enough startups and one of them is going to come through and make you a Billionaire. What I'm trying to say is that recent years have made it clear that very few purse-string holders for these Teams had clear laid out business plans heading towards profitability, and that might be how we've reached the status quo right now where most teams expend more on sustaining their talent than they make in all their elsewise endeavours.

For some the cost itself is negligible for the love of the sport, and there's a real beauty to that kind of sacrificial love. (I'm sure M.Night.Shamalyan would tear up just hearing about it.) I specifically know that Moist E-Sports, founded by streamer Charles White, has never seen profitability and that Charlie pays for the entire team out of his pocket simply because he enjoys having some sort of tactile contribution to the competitive scenes he loves to consume from. But that really is the outlier in this sort of industry. E-Sports as a whole is worth actual billions, and the sort of heads those numbers are going to turn won't all be games or even sports lovers. That potential attracts those that seek profits, and given that the entire E-Sports industry seems stubbornly affixed to not generating sustainable profits for it's talents- there is perhaps a mass crash in the market that is only just starting to bubble up.

Of course the natural response would be to say "I see the problem, what do we start doing for solutions?" But to be honest I don't think anyone really has such a blueprint yet, even conceptually. The culture around E-Sports is so intrinsically tied to freely viewable online events, it's hard to turn that around and expect not to damage the still-growing viewer base. Merch sales are a big winner, Prize funds can be great short-term boosts, some games put in revenue share measures in the form of 'support skins' or even recently one game sold off a 'seasonal split' to Moist's E-Sports team. But all around these are just errant planks of rotted plyboard patching up a cannonball size hole that's slowly starting to sink the whole galley of this industry. All we can say for certain is that something has got to give, but whether it's going to happen in the Nth hour, or years from now in the phoenix-style ash-renewal of the crashed industry- well, that's what we're going to have to see.

What do you do when you're too far gone.

 When you get neither what you want or what you need?

Where do you go after that moment when you've reached the end of your rope, look around and realise that you're alone? That there's no one beside you and nothing ahead of you; and no one to hear when you scream against the placid walls of your own maddening isolation and despair? How do you go on when everything you've worked towards for so long, and dedicated so much towards, ends up leading you nowhere but to the tattered barriers of the 'dead-end road'? What do you do when you're truly broken, utterly and completely, and are resigned to little else but headless flittering and idiotic gawping desperate for some sort of release from the bars of your own shuttered mind; whether that be from the indescribable and invisible myth called 'Salvation' or the comforting embrace of endless and final annihilation? What do you- wait, I think I was supposed to be talking about Facebook but ended up doing a stream of conscious instead. Yeah, forget all that and apply it to the Facebook/Meta situation instead; it's actually quite analogous! 

Meta is not a company I expected to become a regular on this blog, indeed I thought the world of social media would be like oil to my water... totally insoluble. But here I am, somehow talking about the machinations of a 'Social media conglomerate mega corporation' who once made the shockingly bizarre move to die at the feet of the games industry, whilst thrashing and chucking several billions worth down the drain in an insane death dance of mortifying connotations. I think it's fair to say that no single company has thrown itself so neatly out of it's comfortzone and into the fire, and if the world of tech entrepreneurs was ever at risk of becoming too risqué, Mark Zukcerberg has effectively slapped that industry back in line with his glorious and fascinating self immolation act.

And like a flame-struck moth dancing to the rhythm of it's fiery master, I surrender myself to the carnage everytime I see it. How can I not? Meta's downfall is totally fascinating, both in the way it seems both so predictable and oddly earnest on the behalf of people who aren't all Mark! Yes, there are living blood people inside of Meta who somehow believe that the Metaverse future hill which Mark is dying on has genuine potential if only their robotic ruler will reveal it's granduer to the world. Even the lead in charge of those metaverse ambitions, who recently quit, did so for the mismanagement of the project which led to billions in wasted production funds, rather than for the sheer insanity of the idea. Which to me only means one thing: Mark has a true vision for his proposed platform that he is stubbornly hiding from the world. Either that or he's created a mind-washing cult of personality around himself to beguile and befuddle his employees.

I simply need explained to me what on earth is so very interesting about the idea of an interconnected marketplace where brands struggle over each other for virtual space that they can trap people around. Isn't that just a VR version of the Internet that we already have? Why add extra steps? In this world that trends ever closer to easier methods of interaction, Mark is the only tech industry leader trying to make everyone's lives markedly harder. It's like this man heard the 'Arsenal Gear' speech at the of Metal Gear Solid 2 and suddenly decided to make his entire life trajectory based off of the video game chat wherein the AI man predicted fake news through the democratization of knowledge. I love a good Kojima plotline as much as the next guy, but there are limits one needs to stop at when it comes to assimilating products into their own daily life and identity.

What repeatedly astounds me about Meta's trajectory is the unending consistency with which the company always does the wrong thing to be either profitable or popular in an industry that lives and dies with the popularity contest of it's users. Meta should know that a social platform needs to make it's users feel at home, else they'll jump ship to the next big thing as what literally happened with Facebook. And yet you've got the brand new CTO doing the unspeakable and actually burning one of the few communities that Meta actually did manage to build under some hypothetical pursuit of a greater reward down the line. I mean at this point you have to ask whether or not these people are operating under the gaze of some sort of backwards doomsday clock which is going to give them a reverse Uno card if they just do one more blatantly stupid move.

I am, of course talking, about Andy Bosworth and his absolute dead-set march towards the position of being 'unequivocal villain.' If you saw Puss In Boots, consider Andy the real-life equivalent of Jack Horner: an irredeemable monster and proud of it. Echo VR is perhaps the only 'game' under the META umbrella of products that has seen any sort of traction. People seemed to think it fun enough not only to form a community around, but to even create E-Sports events venerating and celebrating the game. The Dev team behind it were pretty much only keeping the game running at this point, all of the hype behind what they originally created found fuel in the love of the community, and what a community it was! Tens of thousands of players treating a VR game like an actually serious gaming endeavour- that could be the start of an actual movement over at the META offices!

And it's gone. Yes, Andy swooped in and slapped the 'cancel' hammer on Echo VR for the most 'I don't get the position I've been given' reason of all time. In a self-recorded video he willingly posted on the Internet, so that all the world can see his gormless face in the flesh, Bosworth announced that the game "Dwindled." But he didn't stop there. "It's user base is loyal as all get-out, but it's small. Measured in, you know, the low ten thousands" He'd rather direct those resources to the "Tens of millions of people that are now in VR." Now sure, if you share the same level level of mental acuity as a particularly ripe walnut than perhaps this logic makes sense to you. If not, well then, you might strike your own head in sheer exasperation and ask why in the right mind a struggling VR platform would bereave tens of thousands of loyal players on a low-maintenance game for the sake of assimilating an entire world of potential consumers within a single mega-project. I don't even think this is terminal 'marketing brain' fogging the man's brain, because even marketers understand the value of a varied offering of experience where possible- I genuinely this Andy is just clueless.

Of course, I haven't just given Andy the title of 'self-destructive troll' for just one of his bad calls. Despite having a history of working with Facebook, Bosworth went so far as to lambast the 'philanthropic' nature of META as a distraction to it's plans. Yes, Facebook/META which is famously complicit in some of the most horrible crimes known to man, (and that is no exaggeration: Look up Facebook and Myanmar) apparently shouldn't perform the bare basic minimum to keep their own staff able to sleep at night. No, Andy is terrified of Zuckerberg losing his edge and going off to start his own 'Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation' or whatever bogeyman these corporate ghouls suffer sleep-paralysis threating over. It almost feels like Bosworth is a literal scrooge set-up to absorb all the disparagement that should be heading META's way.

META is sliding down a fiery pit to hell in the manner that I think all the world is happy to celebrate, but watching the billions of revenue crackle and fizzle into charred nothing in the ashy decent genuinely hurts my soul to watch. In some ways, it's like watching a great greek titan, who's back seemingly held up all the world, torn away from his task only to realise the new age has totally circumvented his one role in life and thus he has been left bereft and without purpose. The social media space has forsaken them, the Metaverse concept has been co-opted by every other WEB3 grifter across the Internet and the Facebook users of today can't even spread a good conspiracy to save their life. They're a washed up, worn-out, geriatric, slum house rehab clinic frequented only the passing brand accounts and soul-rotted octogenarians who only stick around to have a safe echo-chamber they can call their own. Maybe that level of obstinate despondency is simply the vibe that Andy B is trying to cultivate- play to your audience, why don't ya?

The Mirror Lies-

The whole world's wrong but you!

I've spoken about it before at length but I have to come out and just admit to myself and the world that I am justly fascinated by The Day Before. Or more appropriately, by the absolutely weave of bizarrity which is the marketing cycle of 'The Day Before'. Firstly I should stop by and say that whilst I know everyone has their opinion on this game, and I certainly have my own, I'm not going to sit here and try to convince you that the game is or isn't real. I'm pretty much sold on the fact that it isn't real, and even though the recent gameplay footage we saw appears close to an actual viable product, upon further reflection and really analysing the way that The Day Before has been shown off before and talked about after the 'gameplay reveal'; I've reverted my opinion. I no longer even believe that this game is a shambled together asset flip tossed together at the last moment; this just isn't a real product.

No, the question I want to ask today is actually a pretty important one given that it's one of the key pillars of any investigation and one of the most important members of the '5 W's gang. "Why?" But seriously, establishing motive is such an important part to making any sort of accusation that it really should be the very first step whenever any such allegation of falsity arises. If you can't make a valid assumption as to why a person would be tempted to fake something, then it hardly follows that they would. A high class speedrunner who fakes a run in order to sink that all-important World Record spot is spurred on by the prestige of their reputation and the heavy pressure not to underperform to their own established standards. At such a high level, cheating can be justified as merely ensuring you perform to the standard you feel like you could achieve on perfect conditions. Start with the why and everything else should fall into place.

When you ask the question why someone would be encouraged to fake a video game's existence, then the answer should be obvious. Just ask the founders of 'Chronicles of Elyria', 'Dreamworld' or 'Earth2'. Cut through their weak pitches and observe the person beneath, and you'll find a person groping about for crowdfunded capital in order to either run away with, fund themselves to do nothing for a year or two or fuel an absolute pipedream that has no hope of ever coming into fruition. At the end of the day the goal is always the acquisition of money from those who don't know better through the platform of crowdfunding sites. But... The Day Before was never kickstarted. It never asked for funds from the public, it hasn't offered any sort of pre-order offer. It's as though the developers have absolutely nothing to gain from lying about a game which they can't prove exists? Unless...

Unless it's simply clout that they gain! Remember, FNTASTIC pretty much exploded onto the scene with the announcement of The Day Before, but that was by no means the only game that they worked on. They brought out Propnight, a play on the popular Prophunt concept from Garry's Mod, and The Wild Eight: a game who's premise utterly evades me every day. They also made a game called 'Radiant One' but no one can tell what that actually is. Basically, their catalogue has a few smaller indie hits that could have theoretically benefitted from the studio becoming a runaway hot ticket item due to the surprising ambition of their newest zombie survival MMO with a PVP focus. But I'll be honest, I don't like that explanation. What exactly is the point of aiming a few new eyes to your other projects when it also incurs the wrath of suspicion that puts any future projects in jeopardy? It just isn't worth it, even to a warped and scam-attuned mind. It has to be something more banal than that.

In fact... it has to come back to money. There simply is no other explanation. Whether that's money to try and funnel into the studio under the guise of it making the new game, or money to embezzle out of the company entirely for personal gain: the root of all evil is the root of this game somehow. But it's strange, because the only people actually paying FNTASTIC is their publisher MYTONA, and that company is said to be keeping a close eye on The Day Before by seeing it's progress at every milestone- oh wait... when they say 'seeing it's progress', do they mean with hands on demonstrations, or with glitzy showcase gameplay videos? The same videos the public has been seeing, rife with pilfered store assets and not-fit-for-purpose features and world geometry? I think I figured out who's the one getting stiffed in this whole affair.

MYTONA is a publisher that has themselves a history in developing games from their New Zealand headquarters and publishing some of FNTASTIC's side games around their big 'break out' game. As far as I can tell they aren't themselves a huge publisher, and probably wouldn't find themselves involved with a potential scam unless they weren't privy to it. Besides, FNTASTIC have used their partnership with MYTONA as an alibi before, claiming that the publisher checks in on them at every major development milestone so if anyone was going to call them out, the Kiwi's would be the first. But if we're to take certain the many accusations of falsified gameplay presentations in the past then there's nothing to stop us further assuming that FNTASTIC pulls that same wool over their publisher's eyes whenever possible. Because if there's one thing these people can do it's throw together widely ambitious, and yet still realistically boring, gameplay trailers. Could the victim in all of this be MYTONA's investment dollars slowly being eaten up by a studio treading the waters?

At this stage the balance really is whether or not this team is lying to their publisher or lying to their fans, and which eventuality would be the worst. Well, I guess in 'repercussions' the act of lying to a publisher would open you up to legal proceedings against a plaintiff who presumably has the means to hunt you down. But on the plus side they can pretty much indefinitely claim to be the bleeding heart heroes to their fans, not taking a cent away from them, and hide behind that perception. On the otherhand, lying to the fans would literally be putting your own consumer base at risk if the truth ever comes out. And if they're doing both, like it seems they might, then this is one precarious little house of stumbling cards that the team has built up for itself, now isn't it? But in an age where admitting to fault is the same as accepting death, we'll probably never get a confessional on the matter- not as long as we live.

What I'm curious about is the plan from here, whether or not the team can actually make the game they set out to. Or rather, whether they can slap together a minimum viable product in a truncated development window and claim that this was the game all along which just needed to be scaled back from the original vision thanks to industry standard conceptual pair-backs. Zombie survival games aren't exactly a wizard's feat, they've been done before and to largely abysmal results- The Day Before seems to have taken that formula one step further to bring us the first zombie game with hardly any walking dead in it at all, so there's that USP to get all excited for at least! I honestly think they could pull it off. Throw together a year's worth of work and argue until they're blue in the face about how hard they've worked to even get that together. It won't be fun. It's user base will die off before the end of the year and the game will cease post-launch development before 12 months of being out in the public. That way the developer can save same small face and claim they actually delivered, even when the world knows to be suspicious. Come back here and give me my 'Nostradamus' label at the appropriate time. 

Does it matter if FNTASTIC do deliver in the end? Even if it is the disappointment we know it'll be? Well for the team it absolutely does, because the creation of an abject disappointment is far more understandable than a false product which never materialises. If the team want to have any sort of future developing games with the backing and support of anyone, they need The Day Before not to fizzle up so they can change that narrative. To those actually paying attention, there really is nothing within FNTASTIC's power that will change their mind. Anything short of delivering the exact quality of experience that the team promised in their reveal will rub that crowd raw, and considering that promise wasn't even feasible back then yet alone in the handful of months they have left- well, let's just say that FNTASTIC are going to have their work cut out for them getting their own Comic Con booth.

The stunted development of Virtual Reality

 Arrested 

There was a time when virtual reality was set to take hold as the bold new face of home entertainment. An experience that would defy the fidelity of all other forms of entertainment, and even that of life itself, as you forsook your human chains and set off into the sunset to soar as a virtual deity of your own despotic reality. A time when the only gleam of land on the horizon of entertainment technology was formed of 3 dimensional objects so full that you could almost feel them drift against the tips of your fingers. That time was in the 1990's. And the result was one of the biggest video game platform flops by a proven gaming titan of all time, because I'm not about to drag up the Ouya sales figures for comparison. The Virtual Boy: a console so utterly bad that it ended up pushing back Virtual Reality several decades. Man... they just don't make 'em like that anymore, now do they?

Since then the Virtual Reality scene has a enjoyed a few minor glow-ups. From the proper full head immersion experiences of the arcade booths to the high quality, and high price, home copies to the VR headset of today which is now the last resort of 'Meta'; a prohibitively overpriced and overspec headset designed and marketed purely for corporations to keep in touch with their employees. Hey, at least the VR market is getting absurd amounts of money sunk into it's ongoing development. But with the rapidity of how the gaming market has grown around VR, to the point where we may actually be within touching distance of the pinnacle of visual fidelity for this age- why does it feel like VR has sort of plateaued early and bowed out of the race?

At the beginning the only real gripe holding back the proliferation and domination of Virtual Reality was a small problem called "Nothing to play". Practically everything the various VR headsets ran were simply just 'experience pieces' that pretty rounded up to glorified tech demos without the added push to become a fully fledged product beside that short coming that the original Mirror's Edge had. As of today that is no longer the case. Entire gaming development companies exist exclusively to develop unique content that is built to work with, and some of the titans of the industry have produced actual gold for some of these headsets that should be absolute system sellers. Why 'Half Life Alyx' wasn't just called 'Half Life 3' is utterly beyond me, because it nails the concept of 'transformative gameplay systems' which is fundamental to the brand of Half Life. The Boneworks games are delightfully thoughtful and fun jaunts through creative murder halls and there's a Skyrim VR mode which has a mod that allows you to drag NPC's alongside you by the head. Which is simply... I mean that's a system selling feature right there!

But with all those roads forward taken to the growth of the VR market, to this day the actual percentage of players on Steam alone that actually owns a VR headset is something close to 2%. (Or at least that was the average figure as of cira 2021- but considering there's been no significant inroads to the tech made in the past two years, I'm willing to bet that estimate hasn't gone up since.) Now to be fair, 2% of Steam's audience is actually massive in real figures; but it's not the new in thing despite all of these great moves that should eek out the situation that way. It's not like Google Stadia which was made up of overpriced ports- most great VR titles are exclusive to the headset owning market, which means there's some genuinely incredible games out there which most gamers simply haven't played in any form. It's gotten to the point where some VR games are porting themselves backwards into being 'flatscreen' compatible! (Like 'Five Nights at Freddies: Help Wanted') So what is the missing ingredient?

Insanely, given how this was always the problem and really should have been worked on by now, the issue is still accessibility- even after all of these years! Some of these are the sorts of problems that can feasibly be worked on, others not quite. For one, those headsets are expensive and far outside the range of the typical gamer. Specialists are the only one's with the money to put down for that sort of specialised hardware. Then you have the spacing issues that come with VR headsets; not everyone has large and uncluttered rooms to flail around in to wild abandon. And then lastly, most frustratingly, you have the biological roadblock- motion sickness. Some people just can't handle the total immersion of the VR landscape; and what do you do then? What indeed?

The problem with accessible pricing seems to have hit something of a wall within our classical understanding of depreciation. There was a time when the top-of-the-line was merely a statement of time, and given a few years the average man could feasibly afford hardware that was once space age, as is the progress of improvement in tech. Tech itself, however, appears to be trying to clamp down on that cycle by ensuring the powerful stays expensive and the new just becomes more expensive, establishing a firmly inelastic backbone to the higher echelons of entertainment hardware. Right now the most affordable possible piece of VR hardware is the PSVR, and even that costs about as much as the console right now; which is required in order to run it. We need a distinct effort to re-establish depreciating pricing for the good of tech itself.

As for the biological issues, there have actually been supposed head-way made on that front. I've heard anecdotal recounts of people who find certain games less headache inducing than some others, which they chalk down to the way those outliers handle movement. From teleportation to simulated walking and the abundance of headbob, the secret to unlocking the barriers around accessibility might be as simple as providing the right customisation options to the right users. Just as colourblind options are such a staple of modern gaming that they're literally the first thing Hogwarts Legacy throws into your face, VR accessibility could fill that gap preventing wide spread adoption with a little bit of thoughtful engineering. Such methods are, unfortunately, still hypothetical for now.

The VR space is not as much of a dud as it was in it's initial spur, but by the same merit it lacks the panache and prestige that many seem to believe it's worth. Keeping the trajectory it has, there's no doubt that VR is never going to get anywhere significant within the gaming medium, which will make it less appealing for creatives and new creators to jump abroad the development train. I think this starts in the business room, maybe better cost-cutting parts deals, loss leading affordable devices, anything to help establish those environment-surrounding goggles as that immutable living room standard this industry needs it to be. Then, we'll truly start to see what the world of total immersion VR is fully capable of.

Artistic Intent versus Mechanical Cohesion

Thrills of Frills?

The game, the game; the beautiful game! Often has it been said that at the end of the day, when the chips have landed and the goose is cooked, within the world of games there is no more senior a position than gameplay. The divine right of developers to directors to publishers to shareholders all rely on the power of strong core gameplay to trickle down it's bounteous rewards, pretty much in that order of beneficiary. But what of the all important king of creativity across the entertainment medium? Artistic Intent? Why, the artistry of creation is the lifeblood behind it, and failing to really hone in on that beating heart of intent can spell the difference between Apple TV's 'Luck' film and Dreamwork's 'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.' One treads the well-worn steps of successful previous properties, the other dances with it's heart in it's hand throwing a twirling fiesta in the name of love, life and spectacular animation. I don't... you don't need me to say which is which- right?

When it comes to the world of game design, the question of where artistic intention ends and mechanical cohesion begins is not an easy one to answer. I know because I literally spent last week trying to get an answer out of actual game designers from more personal studios to conglomerates like Sony, and the resounding response was a middling "it's a balancing act". Because at the end of the day, sure, if you can make a game that is true to it's artistic principals and the intent of the narrative themes alongside being robust, intuitive and fun; then well done, you've reached peak perfection as a video game designer. But... well... that's not going to be where the majority of people land, now is it? Perfection is a slithering writhing snake weaved of the finest sand, that squeezes through the cracks in your fingers the tighter you grasp. So you end up doing the best that you can. Compromise. Balance.

But I don't like that answer. It seems... incomplete to me. Of course, there's no way to write a perfect consensus that will cover every scenario dictating times when the art needs to peel away for the good of the mechanics- but there's got to be a better consensus then 'I'll go with my gut'. I always hated the games that attempted to try and rationalise the concept of respawning by somehow working that into the narrative. Bioshock's resurrection chambers make any character's death patently meaningless thus undermining the sanctity of death as a narrative device, and Borderlands' New-U-Station attempts to be both an in-game joke and apparently non-canonical mechanics system. The latter of which literally clashes between the teams who make the games where no one can seem to decided whether or not they need to bend over backwards to explain why Handsome Jack deregistered himself the network (because there was an off-hand joke in the first game about it causing irreversible infertility and Jack wanted a daughter) or just ignore the fact that Scooter definitely would have been linked up to one. (You know, considering his entire 'Catch-a-ride' enterprise functioned out of various New-U-Stations!)

Is the solution just to ignore the collision? I've always looked at that to be a sacrifice in immersion. Sure, maybe if you have a protagonist who doesn't speak that can allow the player's voice to inhabit the hero's head, but when your player stands silently in the middle of 4 way conversations that omission can start to grate at the senses. Or even a little thing like how in Hogwarts Legacy, being a game set in school, people are constantly introducing themselves to you and simply don't expect the same in return. You have no pithy short-hand catchphrase they can call you, you're not the 'Boy who lived' or 'The Dragonborn' or 'Courier Six'; your just a student with a name that the player wrote out, thus the game can't feasibly repeat it. Perhaps these are the lesser examples of art clashing with mechanics, but the dissonance rumbles nonetheless.

As always whenever we get into diatribes about topics like this, I find myself coming back to the eclectic work of Miyazaki and his now legendary Souls series, which championed artistic intent in marriage with robust mechanics throughout most of his catalogue. There was, however, one famous instance of a clash that I can recount. The final confrontation of the final Souls game was famously changed from the difficult 'Pontiff Sulyvahn', sometimes still called the hardest boss in all of Dark Souls III, to the relatively simpler but thematically resplendent 'Soul of Cinder'. Whilst mechanically and balancing-wise there really is little doubt that Sulvahn provides the more dynamic challenge, designed specifically to ingrain a playstyle in the player that he then immediately undermines with his next phase, the narrative impact of what the Soul of Cinder would come to represent, the conjoined efforts of every souls player who ever played the games, and then of the returned Lord of Cinder himself in that iconic second phase, is irreplaceable. Artistry, in this instance, trumped mechanical soundness. 

And to take matter back to one of my own favourite games of all time, who remembers the iconic ladder scene within Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater? Itself existing within a transitional cell that moves the player from a jungle environment to the desert-like mountain tops, and as such could easily have been covered by a single cutscene- as is utilised later when Snake climbs from the underground tunnels up onto the tarmac of Groznyj Grad. Instead Hideo Kojima decided to give players a conceptually dull task of climbing the ladder in real time, with a fixed camera angle, from the bottom to the top. A task enriched only by a ghostly, acapella rendition of the title song, Snake Eater to fill the monotony. A scene that exists to offer no gameplay benefit to the player whatsoever, but simply to reinforce the artistic intent of creating a game narrative indistinguishable to the film making techniques of a James Bond movie, which would typically invoke musical overtures during transitory sequences. 

Of course, the examples I just pulled up were from auteurs for their craft, and just as leaning into your intent can be transformative to the overall experience, it can sometimes be a detriment as well. Forspoken is a game built to incur the same sort of emotions and responses as Joss Whedon written dramas. Imagine Buffy or the Avengers; that's the kind of audience the game was hoping to secure. And yet, giving up the agency and immersion in the game world to constantly have a witty and stake undermining back and forths between Frey and her talking magical Cuff drove a wedge between players and how they wanted to experience the world, making it difficult to take anything seriously in all but the most dire moments. In this way the artistic intent ended up harming the overall presentation, and such is just the most modern example from a slew of examples likewise.

When it comes to nailing that idea of balance, I think that as simple and lame as it sounds the missing ingredient is understanding. Understanding of the exact effect the decisions and changes made will have on an audience. And perhaps that understanding can come from a sudden or supreme insight of consequence, or deferred from the repeated opinions of others; but until you've reached that point of knowing what liberties can and cannot be taking without diluting the whole product, you are pretty much developing in a total vacuum with a blindfold on. I am a firm believer in the sanctity of artistic intent, but I recognise how the fanciful whims of the artists can trail off into inanity, and the other extreme can languish in a mire of obsequiousness. Balance, as ever, is a process of iteration.

The Hogwarts conundrum

 Whatever do we do about a situation called Rowling?

I have to hand it to Hogwarts Legacy, not only has it proven to be a much more enjoyable game than my nagging doubts tried to tell me over the past year, it has skyrocketed to the top of a moral balancing act that I never once foresaw it having a take in. The conundrum of whether or not the game deserves to be in the targets of everyone and their mother is now moot, because the die has been cast and the hunting rifles drawn- now those who play need to keep up their guard lest they become clay pigeons. And that is no idle comparison, as am I soon to divulge in this here dip into the world of 'moral accountability', as I believe the appropriate term to be. And of course, I care little for either extreme of this diatribe- consider this a space for safe and judgement-free observation of both sides gathered for bloody and brutal war over their keyboards.

Now I won't go over the specifics, we've done that enough. So to generalise and expediate: J.K. Rowling is considered problematic and thus so is this game that is based on the property that made her the richest author in the living world. (I cannot speak to the resplendent riches of the literarily denizens of the golden fields of the Duat or murky pools of Hades.) As such many people are making a very staunch stand not to support the proliferation of this game, nor those who choose to play it, from loud individuals on Twitter to actual established review sites. Now in the lead-up to the game coming out there was much discourse about the extent of these 'boycotts', some seemed to think their side the authority on the matter and those of the other persuasion to not only be fundamentally misaligned but also small and forgetful in scale. Both were wrong.

Hogwarts Legacy pre-ordered and sold absolute gangbusters as far as initial and preliminary results are telling us, as the call for Boycotts and blacklists just seemed to melt into the excitement over a title that so many Pot-head millennials had for a not-mediocre Harry Potter style game. (Sorry 'Order of the Phoenix' on Wii, but facts are facts.) And yet the opposed did not let their choice not to purchase the game bounce harmlessly off the, from their perspective, insultingly healthy sales figures. Instead their number has... somewhat dropped the moral high ground in favour of... actually threatening people? Okay, of course the crazy actions of a few shall not and should not paint the opinions of all, or in this case even the many, but neither does that mean we shouldn't arch a brow and ask where these sorts of wild offshoots might have spawned from in a movement that originally just wanted to limit the amount of money that J.K got her hands on.

I'm speaking of course about the website which was created, though it is currently shut down, where people tracked down streamers and influential figures that have played Hogwarts Legacy and collected them in a list in order to harass these individuals. Now in their warped and twisted little logic trains I can sort of follow what's going on here; they see the proliferation of Hogwarts Legacy gameplay as a direct attack against the Trans community, and maybe even solely as an attack, rather than a celebration of a franchise they love. I also imagine there's that layer of dehumanisation between the public and content creators taking an effect here, where people fail to really empathise what it would be like to be on the receiving end of a harassment hitlist. All and all, I wouldn't call this the proudest moment of the anti-Hogwarts Legacy crowd.

Apart from that the discourse has been largely what you expect, verbal discharge all over social media with the vitriol and disgust regularly shared against an audience that seems either oblivious or discordant with their prescribed titles. Because here's the thing: for the most part players are seen as unrepentant transphobes who rally their hatred against the community in the act of downloading 'the wizard game' as they call it. Whereas for the most part people seem utterly uncommitted to the discourse and just like the game. Either that or they're intentionally goading on the masses in order to take advantage of the flurry of attention and clout. Because there is no resource quite as valuable in the modern age as liquid clout, now is there?

What I have had course to review as a result of this situation is my own lines in the sand when it comes to gamers engaging with products that I deem to be harmful to the larger ecosystem. Though I'd never go to the extremes that some of these individuals have, I do cast a judging eye on the millions who keep the Fifa games in furs and cotton year after year, all the while being served a topic emblematic of laconic and lazy 'bare minimum' iteration. What makes my prejudice any more earned and worthy than that of the Hogwarts Legacy Witch hunters? Afterall, in both cases we're just talking about people who want to enjoy games and care nothing about the vitriol around it. Well in my personal example the answer is actually frightfully simple. I'm selfish.

I could care less what sort of low effort garbage the masses rush to, they can play whatever they wish, but the second their purchasing decisions starts to effect me; then I have a problem. We all saw the way that the runaway success of football games, lionized by an uncaring audience who haply consumed their 'gruel' called 'content'; bled it's practises all over the rest of the industry. Season passes, random loot crates, franchise-mania. A lot of the most insidious and pernicious snapping tendencies of the gaming corporate titans got their beta test on the football turf. When I say that people who support Fifa are spitting at the general art of games whether they mean to or not, I have empirical as well as circumstantial evidence to back up my claims. That's as far as my personal vendetta goes.

The Hogwarts situation has been much louder than anyone could have rightly predicted, and I think that might be because of how ubiquitous the game appears to be becoming. Everyone is playing it and everyone seems to be having a fun time, which is further enraging those who believe they have a moral commitment to trash on the game because they believe that they are losing. So what do you do when your side is losing? You get more viscous, you drop those constraints of polite posturing that were holding you back, and you become something less. Something feral. That is what I believe is happening within the world of Hogwarts discourse. All we can hope is that the depths have already been reached, because otherwise we know how low the Internet can sink when they're driven on by that unshakable force called 'moral virtue'.

Exekiller is back!

 I walked through the desert on a horse with no name.

Is seems like so far past in a distant life with a long forgotten progenitor of the current 'me'; but I did once ago talk about my excitement for a, then recently revealed, game known as Exekiller. It was very much one of those indie projects that rode in on the wave of disappointment following the release of Cyberpunk 2077's base product. That CDPR origin title was a game that shot like electricity through the community imparting an excitement for the cyberpunk sub genre of entertainment only to leave that same community wanting after a game that wasn't what a lot of us were expecting. In such a void between expectation and reality, there lay a great opportunity for other smaller teams to lay down their own projects and ideas to fill that gaping maw in our hearts. Exekiller was one of the more impressive projects that we saw teased in that space, a single player bounty-hunter-style first person title with heavy Wild West influences and a visual palette very reminiscent of the ominous abandoned zone in Blade Runner 2049.

Of course as with any game that slaps down it's promise of what it wants to be before anything else, there's a healthy degree of scepticism that one would be prudent to maintain. Many of these concept-style trailers are as much about gauging public interest as heralding a real in-development project, and one can hardly observe the world of start-up indie games without acknowledging the endless stream of over ambitious and under-provided ideas that get announced every other week with no possible chance at someday releasing. (Just take a look at The Day Before's video.) But something about Exekiller cut through my hesitations, maybe the very deliberate and explicit visual intent, maybe the concept which shared similarities to the long-cancelled Prey 2 I used to fantasize about, somehow, someway, I believed we'd see this game again.

And here we are, a few years older and wiser, seeing this game progress to the point of an actual trailer and a real Steam page where you can wishlist the thing. Of course, pretty much any game can get itself a steam page if they kick back enough to papa Valve; but acquiring that page is at least an important step to existing. (And if they're smart enough perhaps the team went the actual distance to get their name trademarked in their home territory, because god knows we don't need that omission becoming a trend of development.) I have found myself, in idle drifts of laconic daydreaming, thinking back on whatever happened to this game, and it's so very gratifying to know all that spent thought-energy was not disappearing into the void. Rather now I have genuine gameplay trailer to hyper analyse and critique to an obsessive degree as the game hones in on what it actually intends to be. And what it intends to be really sounds right up my alley if their Steam page can be trusted.

A semi-open world  environment with hub spaces and a gradually uncovered map brings to mind thoughts of Immersive Sims like Deus Ex or Dishonoured, both of which make excellent blueprints for a narrative built around bounty hunting and adventurous sci-fi cowboy contract work. The self-appointed title of a 'linear narrative with non-linear choices' might sound a little paradoxical, but I see that as a way of conveying little choices that build up in a manner that might effect the ending more than the course of the game; which is a decent way of depicting consequence without bloating a project to the scale of overambition. And I quite like the distinctive approaching to 'player progression' that isn't so much tied to EXP and Levelling as much as to mods and augmentations. A fine way to propel the value of equipping iterative and more powerful variations of technology in a manner which I imagine will be synchronous to the world narrative. 

As opposed to some other recent gameplay footage that might have been doing the rounds recently, Exekiller decided to present itself with a tight little sequence which displayed the desolation of the Western Style world in a small but stark location. All we see it what amounts to an abandoned road-side pit stop, but from that one location alone we get a pretty good idea of the elements which make up the Exekiller world. For one, we get to see the holographic dashboard slathered in 80's style sci-fi type font, deftly informing the retro futuristic approach to the visual style. Additionally, if this footage is anything to go off from, the game seems eager to blend together post apocalyptic devastation with the classic iconography of the desert west; bleached skeleton bones and cacti dot the sands, it's all very 'new age Fallout New Vegas'. I love it.

One of the well-drunk design wells of modern exploration games is a basic handle of environmental storytelling, and just our small glimpse of a player picking through the turned over remains of what looks like a roadside diner certainly spells the framework for some great ground made over in that department. From this location in particular I quite liked the flickering and sparking electronic display boards creating some flicker of life to contrast with the otherwise dead and buried feel of the washed out place. It's all very expertly dressed from a design standpoint. All the player tools and equipment fly under the retro-ism design style, from the motion detector to the carried revolver, coming together to create an identity that taps the same sort of visual motif that CDPR played with in Cyberpunk- only for a different decade of design, of course.

As this is an alpha snippet of gameplay, all positives and negatives are subject to the changing whims of the design process; but if I'm pressed to find negatives I would have to start with the main character's voice. It's quite clear that the VA chosen lacks the vocal range for the part he's playing, and next to the surprising quality of everything else in the trailer his lines stick out like an oddly cast thumb. There's also a moment when actual robotic enemies appear and there's a distinct lack of impact in how the guns shoot. I'm not bemoaning the lack of iron sights, I actually like the stylistic choice, there's just a missing punch to the audio and visual stimuli that discredits the revolver. But even than, just the slight tease of the player kicking over an object and then shooting it for an explosive effect erases a lot of my worry about how this game's combat might feel. Play on systems like that some more and there's no limit to the amount of dynamic combat encounters the team could design. Like a more action combat version of 'Divinity: Original Sin's elemental combination system! (Maybe I'm overhyping myself again, it was just one explosive in the trailer.)

It really isn't fair for a game like Exekiller to look the way it does, playing to my heartstrings in all of it's weak spots. You're just going to bring out a game in the same genre as Cyberpunk, with a premise borrowed from the cancelled Prey 2 and a general visual look of a more modernised Fallout New Vegas? That ain't a tiny bit fair at all, it's like this game was designed specifically to attract me most of all. And of course, like a rabbit led on by a carrot on a string, I'm hopping along totally cognisant of the possibilities but blindly loyal nonetheless. Paradark, as I believe the studio is known, have had the benefit of an interested community since their reveal; but I wonder if they know quite how ravenously some of us have wanted a game that looks just like this. I don't mean to apply undue pressure on a difficult process, but darn if Exekiller isn't looking more and more like my personal indie sweetheart game every moment. Count on me keeping my eye out for more details!

E3 2033 is looking lonely...

 Looking like a short show this year...

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, I think, was a staple of the gaming world not all that long ago, even if it does feel like decades past to consider out loud. E3 was the one time in the year that every gamer rushed home early, busy-tailed and wide-eyed, eager to gaze in amazement at the latest spring-up-wonder cooked up in that ol' dream factory from LA! Wha- Hollywood? No, no- I'm talking the LA convention centre; where studios of all sizes battled each other with overly expensive bids to try and win a tiny booth in a packed warehouse which was always inevitably dominated by the prevailing three: Nintendo, Microsoft and PlayStation. The holy trinity of gaming. Other faces would come and go, rise and fall, but the three titan pillars of our industry proved to all staunch foundations upon which this industry event stood. As such, you can probably imagine how the ground must have fallen out from under the new E3 organisers for 2023 when all those three big boys refused to provide a presence for the upcoming year's showcase. (Ouch, rejection is never easy...)

For this year the unlucky runners of the E3 showcase are going to be veteran convention organisers 'ReedPop', known for their work in pulling off Star Wars Celebrations, PAX and New York Comic Con. All of that experience tells me that they're not going to exactly have their spirit broken simply because the big boys don't want to show up to their show, but I do wonder if ReedPop have weighed up exactly the size of the shoes they're stepping into. The ESA have been the whipping boys of online discourse surrounding industry marketing disaster events for the past few years for the way that they've handled trying to pull off E3. Every idea that the ESA tossed around just stunk of 'we don't know how to appeal to gamers' in their attempt to appeal to a more 'generalised demographic'. Although I will give the old E3 kudos for tricking Disney XD into airing E3 without realising that the event would be full of 15+ rated games that parents do not want their children to be watching on the big TV at home.

With ReedPop there's a hope that given their experienced familiarity with nerd culture and even with the various worlds of gaming specifically, we won't be seeing a bevy of out-of-touch organisers turning to desperate means in order to get attention. Such as seeking out celebrities to be hosts because of the Keanu Reeves moment during Cyberpunk's conference, which in turn totally misses the point of why that moment worked and how soundly that special moment would have been ruined with a resulting influx of unnecessary cameos. Although that may be something of a vain hope after all those bubbling rumours that some facet of ReedPop's management has caused an upset among potential attendees. Although there's no evidence to back it up so far, there's a possibility that Nintendo walked away because of ReedPops wanting conduct. Or maybe they just heard that Microsoft wasn't coming and didn't want to be alone. That's a very real possibility too.

Whatsmore, I can't help but wonder if the cultural need for E3 hasn't passed all of us by given the rise of Geoff Keighley's Game Awards which seems deadest on fulfilling the gap left by E3 within our culture. Long ago the community once came to E3 looking for the low down on their exciting upcoming games of the year, only to become increasingly frustrated as more and more companies started coming to E3 with nothing but CG trailers that could have just as easily made it onto their Youtube page without all the expensive and wasteful fanfare. Yes, E3 is a massive marketing machine, but it's a marketing event that should provide enough stage time to really give time to dive into the specifics of gameplay with back-up footage. Failing that, E3 is just a barrage of trailers totally undeserving of hosts or a physical stage at all. The Game Awards pulled that off better last year than E3 managed in it's past three events. The balance of power has shifted.

Now to be fair, this mass withdrawal of all the big studios out of the E3 lineup dpes not, as it might seem, come totally out of nowhere. PlayStation actually pulled out all the way back in 2019 in order to save all of their reveals and gameplay previews for their dedicated 'State of Play' showcase event which they've thrived using exclusively throughout their recent years. Nintendo has their special 'Direct' conference which always could have replaced their E3 slot, but until this year never actually had to. And with the recent Microsoft-Bethesda conference which recently managed to shadow drop a half priced game that has performed well enough to out-earn Forspoken in their shared release week, the big M have proven theirs is a formula worth sticking to as well. E3 is a time investment and a secondary deadline that has sat on the back of development studios for decades, being set free of that schedule is a godsend for many.

In their absence, the other studios who show up are going to have their chance to really step up and try to fill the perilous void. But given that each of those three big studios usually had entire days dedicated just to them and the games under their purview- the whole E3 event is inevitably going to feel smaller this time around no matter what happens. Square Enix have a lot going on, but they rarely know how to properly show it off. (Kingdom Hearts 4 footage would be appreciated, thanks bunches.) Embracer Group could really do with setting up some sort of presence given their unholy number of studios they've collected like some sort of 'Avengers' of developers; but they prefer to remain on the outskirts like anime supervillains. And I'd love for Gearbox to make a longer showcase so we can see Randy Pitchford steal even more time away from his own studio to show us his home videos of him visiting movie sets and whatever else catches his fancy. (Maybe he can have horse riding lessons and show us a montage of his progress- the possibilities are endless!)

The dominance of the AAA landscape of gaming lasted for so very long through the same means that Hollywood propagates it's most expensive projects. Marketing excess. But not only has the tight weave of marketing unravelled in recent years with the sleeper hits of Vampire Survivors and Valhiem domineering recent charts, the aforementioned Hi-Fi Rush beating out Forspoken is a perfect example that traditional marketing is no longer the sure route to riches it once was. Luck is a major factor, trust is just as strong but word of mouth is king. And word of mouth sounds so much better coming from the vocal cords of a human being rather than the bowels of a marketing machine. E3 might not be the catapult to success anymore, or at the very least it's not the only catapult; even if it might still be the most expensive.

When the ESA retired E3 it was amidst a whirlwind of bad vibes and sparked controversy, a storm that might have been weathered if they communicated themselves a bit clearer, but here we are. I think a lot of the really in-tune members of the gaming community were happy to let E3 sunset off and never bother a one of us again, such that most of us find this return a bit too little too late. Maybe if they got the big boys to come down and deliver a knock out E3 the community would reconsider, but with the line-up we're looking at I wouldn't be surprised if this year's E3 is a quickly forgotten footnote with little to show for itself. Maybe what the ESA are shooting for is that one last inglorious disappointment to let everyone know once and for all that what they have truly is irrelevant, and that the age of conventions is finally long past. 

Elder Scrolls online and character migration

 'The players are never right', apparently...

The Elder Scrolls Online made it's latest proclamation during the Bethesda/Microsoft hybrid conference amalgamation, and I would be lying if I didn't say it was probably one of the least interesting sections of that presentations next to Forza, depending on what you like out of your game genres. The Elder Scrolls online is so much of a known quantity these days that it's hard to really get excited as an outsider for it's new year-long expedition into one of the various remaining nooks and crannies' still left over on the Tamriel map. That being said, the Zenimax team did reveal a new class coming to the roster, which is something that ESO doesn't do very often, so that alone is going to draw some curious eyes. But as for my eyes, even if I wanted to look back at the game I left behind, the end result would be me just shrugging my shoulders in frustration because increadibly, in the year of our lord 2023, Bethesda as a company have stubbornly refused to adopt any form of save migration.

Gaming is a rapidly evolving medium these days that regularly jumps from newer hardware to new platforms with the regularity of the tides rising, nothing is capable of staying static in the world of evolving technology. But our save data for all of these online games, where info is kept server-side, can often get themselves tied to the consoles we leave behind, preventing a problem with preservation and longevity; both key pillars of MMOs. Maybe a console gamer is now a PC gamer and the reverse. How do you bridge that gap without losing players due to the slow march of time and personal circumstantial evolution? Well, the greatest minds of our age already pow-wowed to fix this. The solution is save migration, a system which has lingered in the public consciousness since the time of Mass Effect. It isn't automatic, and hardly flawless, but for online games that encourage you to 'main' a small group of characters for years on end, you'd have thought that basic save migration features would be a necessity, wouldn't you?

But you'd be wrong, wouldn't you! Because Bethesda seem utterly allergic to the very idea of porting progress from one platform to another, in a manner that I can't help but find utterly archaic in our modern age of interconnectivity. Now days we are constantly bedecked in smart functionality devices from phones to watches to fridges and light sockets, all of which talk to each with a complex web of networks and systems designed to work as intuitively and 'invisibly' as possible. Why is it that the modern world is so keen on bringing the typically mundane and static together, whilst the games industry with it's heart forged in the fires of this technically progressive world, seems so bitterly adverse? At first I bought the excuse, that Sony's unwillingness to open up it's ecosystem spelled stunted evolution for us all; but as Sony has slowly begun to reverse it's enclosed ecosystem and yet the boundaries remained, sights have to be retrained at the individual companies themselves.

Bethesda, though typically a single player company, have themselves a couple of ongoing multiplayer titles based on their properties and neither of them are open to cross platform play or migration. Fallout 76 in particular shut down any momentum towards players having the ability to migrate platforms, even as the older generation of the game struggles to provide a decent play experience that the new gen of consoles can offer. Oh sure, you can jump from Xbox One to Series X just fine, because Bethesda have to do next to nothing to facilitate that, but Xbox to Steam? No way, buddy; that's alien tech! What astounds me so much about this is, just like with Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76 is a universally updated game! Each version of the game maintains itself to the same update standard more or less, so it's pretty much the same game regardless of platform. Why is migration still such a taboo, then? 

For the Elder Scrolls Online this problems seem close to an actual sin of design. The game is supposed to be MMO, the very concept of migration should be in it's very blood! I know that part of the charm of The Elder Scrolls Online is the subtle removal of visible servers which allows anyone to play with anyone else, thus removing the concept of server hopping as it exists in more traditional MMOs, but honestly that kind of reinforces my point in a different way. Can they really market the global connectivity of the game, allowing people across the world to connect with one another to some limited degree and allow enemy factions to fight alongside one another; when they don't provide even the most basic account migration option from console to PC? I understand vice versa, but not even a one way conversion? That smells like hypocrisy to me!

Each time the patterns plays out in the exact same way. These studios remain utterly staunch in their stance against external player QOL procedures until such a situation where it becomes a necessity to their bottom line. If there was a new Xbox releasing with a distinctly incompatible server makeup to the Xbox of today, you can bet that Zenimax and Bethesda would scramble over on another to build some sort of bridging technology to ensure the generational jump would occur as seamlessly as possible. But today, in peace times, Bethesda are happy to laze about and grow fat laughing about the struggle thier fans have to go through if they want to migrate their progress and characters from one platform to another. Inexplicably giddy at how their years-long games need to be completely restarted if someone simply grabs themselves a change of hardware and doesn't want to fish out the Xbox just to play their favourite time waster game. It's maddening!

Bethesda are by no means alone in their rank laziness, a lot of prominent developers won't bother lift their hand unless it's already in the fire. But after seeing how easy it was for all those companies that found out Stadia was shutting down, during which they got together and built framework for a lot of save porting tech over the space of a couple of months, it becomes a really hard pill to swallow when contemporary studios declare it's too much work to figure out a clean save migration system to be used at players' leisure, not under the duress of an entire crumbling ecosystem. So instead of lauding the new Elder Scrolls update and brushing past the shortcomings, I'm dedicating this blog to my grumbling about inequities and unnecessary systemic omissions that bug me. Thank you so much, Bethesda, for not wanting my money bad enough to convince me not to buy your game on a new platform. I guess that is, unintentionally, somewhat conscientious of you.

Do you trust Microsoft and it's four flop mutli-failure studio?

 How far does the 'benefit of the doubt' stretch?

I actually lack the years of hard won love that a lot of the gaming world has for Bungie's stint on Halo. I may have played all of the games, but years after their first run when Bungie were already long on my 'do not forgive' list for their conduct when marketing Destiny content. (Twice.) Thus I can honestly say that it was purely on the merit of the sheer quality of the products themselves that I came to find 343 as questionable custodians of the legendary shooter franchise. It's not that I don't think they care, I just don't think they've ever had the right team to pull off a successor to Halo like they've been shooting for all this time. To many it seems like the decision makers behind the franchise don't even understand what it was that made Halo special in the first place, and offer ideas entirely contrary to what the audience vie for. And it is a heartbreaking game of tug and war that fans and developer seem destined to be stuck between for the rest of their collective lives.

Not that it is a simple thing to pick up where Bungie left off for their legendary franchise which was once so massive that it frontlined Xbox sales and branding; but one would think that at some point, with about 10 years on the job, the people at 343 would stumble upon something of a winning formula accidentally at the very least! But alas, you end up getting Halo 4, which had some great individual mission ideas that were ruined by the genuinely badly physically and visually designed new faction, Halo 5 which is said to have a legendarily bad storyline, Master Chief Collection which launched in the sorriest state possible and now 'Halo: Infinite'; so named because it was meant to herald the next 10 years of Halo, only to end up losing so much momentum, goodwill and potential that the team have reportedly quietly scrapped all of it's dreamt-of additions in favour of a brand new Halo game built in an entirely different engine.

Now because I absolute despise the several years of gaslighting that we were subjected to by Bungie after the Destiny 'Ten Year plan' debacle, let me be absolutely clear: Halo Infinite was called the start of the next ten years of Halo. The way it was built, with a focus on open world play that shunned constrained linear experiences, was in order to facilitate the next steps of the Master Chief story as integrated chunks of the single player narrative; maybe even expansions on top of that base product. Just as the Master Chief collection is a platform that collects the first 10 years of the Halo journey, Infinite was supposed to fill that gap for a new ten, and any shift on that model marks a distinct change in circumstance whether the team and Microsoft are willing to admit that or not. And a shift in circumstance that no internal party is willing to share or talk about does not typically engender happy and fruitful behind-the-scenes discussions.

This is worth bringing up because along with these unconfirmed reports of a new Halo game in the works, 343 just faced a cataclysmic rock of layoffs that took out much of the development force behind Infinite and even some of the executives. Although the real important people just moved from one position to another and people are want to do in high-importance positions. All of Microsoft was hit with these layoffs, of course, but the way that some reporters were discussing 343's casualties made it almost sound like the big M had a vendetta against 343 specifically as an underperforming studio tucked under their corporate wing. Thus it rings slightly odd when Microsoft spokespeople come out to then confirm that not only is Halo alive and healthy, but that it is going to continue on under the purview of 343 entirely unabated by the massacre which just occurred at that studio. It stinks of something rotten and aquatic. Perhaps the fishy remains of a deep untruth.

Some have already taken it upon themselves to read between the lines and question how healthy a franchise actually is if it's caretaker needs to publicly declare how not dead it is. I know there's an art of feeling the public pulse and responding to a feeling before it turns into an unfounded 'fact'; but even having to make that sort of fundamental assurance belies the state of a franchise that absolutely does not speak for itself. And does the current outward facing look of the Halo franchise seem healthy? Well it depends. On one hand Infinite's Forge mode is said to be the best the franchise has ever enjoyed and that has alone boosted the game's player count and the franchise just crossed over to television with it's own TV show last year. On the otherhand the actual singleplayer content of Infinite is said to be dead in the water and the Halo show was largely panned by critical fans and pundits. But none of that implies Halo is dead per se.

But what it does say to me at least is that Halo is missing the oomph that it once had. Which is kind of a basic statement when you think about it. Of course Halo doesn't have the brand appeal of the olden days, one merely needs to look at Xbox's modern, largely Master Chief free, branding to see that. But does that mean Halo is doomed to slowly become more and more irrelevant as 343 is slowly stripped of more personnel and resources for each failure they make? Because I can tell you one thing for free- they're not going to get better at making Halo with less people to actually sit down and make the game, now are they? If you ask me, and no one did; what Halo needs is fresh blood. And I'm not talking about new faces joining 343, I'm talking about new directions for the franchise.

Remember Halo Wars? The lauded RTS game which moved Halo away from Master Chief in order to expand upon the wider war with great gameplay and fresh characters and at least one race-bending cast member? Why doesn't Halo do more of that? Blow out the universe of Halo so it moves past the green giant and explores totally distinct genres to get ahold of more people, similar to what the 'Vampire: The Masquerade' franchise is currently doing with it's shotgun approach to games. Why can't there be a survival horror Halo game about being alone in a world besieged by Flood? Or a character driven narrative adventure following a single isolated contingent of the Sangheili rebels in the wake of Halo 2, trying to come to terms with being cut off from the Covenant that they were raised under and eventually coming around to siding with their former sworn enemies at the UNSC?

Halo as it stands is riding on the top of a small bump of a hill heading towards a dire plunge into unknown territory and it's not hard for the casual fan to imagine things will only become worse from here. Say what they will, 343 did not appear to be up to the task of keeping Halo relevant back before they lost 95 jobs, I can't see that changing anymore now. If Microsoft really do care about this franchise like they keep insisting that they do, then it's time for them to really dedicate some effort into proving that assertion. All of these new studios now under Microsoft's purview and not one of them could make a single small companion title to the Halo franchise as a small experimental project at the least? I call bull on that and I call bull on Microsoft sitting atop the burning rubble of an entire department of 343, sipping a brew made from the ground-down bones of all those they sacked and assuring just themselves that "This is fine."