Let's check in with Fortnite...

 Good lord, what is happening in there?

It does one credit to try and stay on top of the gigantic monolith of cross-brand marketing which is known as Fortnite, because to just ignore it is to live a life of lies. I mean, we joke all we want about the insanity of the metaverse and the stupid proposition that any one brand can hold the combined IPs and properties of everyone in a gloved gauntlet of oppression, but that doesn't quite feel so funny when we're talking about a project that pretty much has done that and is merely in the process of doing victory laps around the parking lot. Fortnite is the home of brands, plain and simple. if you are a brand, Fortnite will come sliding into you DMs at somepoint, luring you in with honeyed words and slight flirtations, before sneaking an arm around you shoulder at the feature, playing a little game with your collar bone to keep you distracted, and then dislocating it's jaw like a snake and latching it's jagged-edged teeth across your entire head, painfully and methodically swallowing you into itself. Less 'Lovecraftian' and more 'Cronenberg'.

Which is probably how we ended up with the current release of Fortnite, the premier of which not only revealed the next act in the Fortnite play, but also contained with it a reveal for the release of the next game from the Rocket League developers, Rocket Racer, existing entirely within Fortnite itself. It is insane to think that Fortnite's dream of becoming a platform is no longer limited just to how players and brands collide across it's many systems, but also now how other developers look up the software. I know that Fortnite has had comprehensive building tools for a while now, enough to potentially rival what Roblox has, but you never hear about a serious developer releasing their next title on Roblox. (It happens, but not from millionaire success-story developers.) Some sort of 'Advent Horizon' has certainly been crossed by the Fortnite folks and it positively runs my blood cold to think of. Imagine if Hollow Knight Silksong is taking so long because they're porting the whole thing into Fortnite! Gods I- I don't know what I'd do. Is man so malleable that his fragile flesh walls can contain the chaos of creating a new Fortnite account past age twenty-five? No- I cannot possibly even consider such a disgrace... can I?

But that is not the only act in Fortnite's current play. You probably don't need to hear this because of how everyone has seen the transition with their own eyes, but the current season of Fortnite has lightly shirked off the Battle Royale's skin altogether in order to become a... survival crafting game in the vein of Minecraft? (Actually, maybe a little closer to Valheim for the more diminutive scale of the crafting.) And it's all rendered in Lego. Because we needed to throw in another brand selling their soul for quick profits. (Whatever happened to the quality Lego videogame brand, man?) Of course, because of the nature of the endless dozens of Fortnite servers, one can probably still log in for a cheeky bit of Battle Royale in some errant server... I think... but the main game is not a cooperative survival title for the next few months. And that is... so bizarre I don't even know what to think to be honest. Is that a great evolution or an insane trick to an audience of the bewildered? 

Already players of Fortnite have flocked, nay sped, to demonstrate exactly why they shouldn't be granted any remote powers of creativity. If desperately attempting to cause a ruckus as the Xenomorph during the Black History Month event a while back wasn't enough, trying to utilise Catwoman's 'whip crack' emote for shock effect, then how about this- It took creator's less then a day to recreate the 9/11 attacks. And yes, I said creator's, because the population of Fortnite apparently operate on the same malnourished and overworked braincell which bounced the exact same idea across every creator's head over the course of less than one day. (That is one overachieving Neuron! Nina would be proud. Or horrified, probably more horrified.) Which is great. Not really sure what Fortnite's team can do to combat this one, can't just disable an Emote here. Guess they can just bury their heads in their desks and wait for people to get bored on this one.

On the much more legal end, Epic Games managed to win themselves a lawsuit that might just tip fortunes further in their favour. Much a shock to myself, who long believed this to be an utterly frivolous case that would lead nowhere- the monopoly ruling. Basically the Play Store (And the Apple store, although I don't see them on this ruling) forced an app that ran on their infrastructure to use their platform stores in order to sale microtransaction which, given that both types of phones are ruled by either of those stores, would constitute a monopoly. Epic created their own entire storefront to get away from Steam's store royalties, squaring up against the mobile platforms was only a matter of time. And, by the gods, it seems that they actually won!

It's not quite certain what will come of this as of yet, but if Fortnite is given the go ahead to run their own first party store, and then return to the mobiles, it would be a much welcome income injection to Epic who are currently flushing untold millions down the drain in an attempt to make the Epic Store front a legitimate competitor to Steam, which reports say is pretty slow going. Of course, I want Epic to succeed because the more competition there are in these fields the greater everyone else has to step up their game, but I have seen what Epic does when given a storefront to run, and I still don't think the PC Epic store is even nearly as good as it could be. (At the very least we need better sorting options for our libraries. Steam needs them too, but Epic's need is dire.) And then there are the potential floodgates of now every two-bit scam mobile game might be allowed to open up their own sketchy links to questionable funding platforms. There's a lot to iron out.

This all sends quite the message, doesn't it? When it comes to the supremacy of Fortnite there's not one powerful enough to stand in their way, not even the giant that is Alphabet itself. I never thought anyone could win a monopoly lawsuit against the world's most powerful monopoly- considering how they rule online traffic, I assumed that those who earned the ire of Google merely got vanished from the Earth. But then, Fortnite do control the brands, don't they? Can any one person truly say that they've 'made it' in life unless they have themselves as a skin in Fortnite? Of course not. In today's digital world that is the singular mark of overall worth that we all seek with clammy and desperate hunger! I'm sure in a year's time we'll get the 'Google' Skin pack and the 'Apple' skin pack as the former legal enemies of Tim Sweeny become absorbed into the all-consuming body of his ever-feeding marketing baby, amorphous and abstract as it has become.

So Fortnite is still on it's A-game, it would seem. They recently broke their concurrent player count once again- which is insane to think about given how many years it's been since that game was the peak of the culture, and they remain influential in a world that refuses to move on without them. Given how I've not played the game in years it makes me feel just that little bit out-of-touch to not be playing the thing, but then I remind myself that I am an adult and being in the Fortnite player pool would be weird. I wonder how Minecraft still stacks up to Fortnite in terms of culture saturation? Would it be greater, given Minecraft's obvious influence on Fortnite's design, or has Fortnite eclipsed it? Or is the metric of brand collaboration a smoke screen of significance given false power by the veneer of the 'celebrity' age? Questions for philosophers, no doubt- that shall be argued in the historical annals several generations from now. 

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Complete Journey Review

 Hasta la Vi-Star

The Ballard of the ninth generation of Pokémon will go down as one of the most interesting in the franchises history for it's many lows but commendable highs in Gamefreak's attempt to go beyond themselves and somewhat change the face of the franchise forever. It's been over a year since release now and we've finally received our last DLC. (See that Starfield? We should be wrapping up DLC after Year One- not just getting started!) What this means is that with the entire adventure of Pokemon Scarlet up to grabs, and the game feeling mostly complete as a consequence, I feel comfortable reviewing this game in it's entirety. Barring any sudden explosive developments, this is about as complete of an impression as I can feasibly get.

Firstly, it's worth noting that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet suffered from a legendarily painful launch that had the game riddled with the kind of glitches and bugs that are actually game breaking, not just the odd hiccup that sets 'gaming purist' forums off. What Gen 9 wanted to achieve was to hop off the momentum of Pokémon Archeus to present us the very first fully open-world Pokemon game uncoupled from the narrow design foibles that made the franchise feel so stale recently. Many blame the technological limitations of the Nintendo Switch, but given the release of 'Tears of the Kingdom' and the state that game managed to achieve- I think this is probably more of a comment on the team themselves. They did not have experience building and testing for a game of this size before, and they were stuck to the same extremely narrow window for development that the franchise has been on since the dawn of Pika-man. Early buyers ended up suffering the consequence of those factors in a truly shocking first few months of life.

Being lucky enough to pick up the game a bit after all that mess, I could focus a little bit more on the actual world of Scarlet and Violet and the team's dedication to their open world design; which was stronger than I honestly expected. Generation 8 brought us a giant open field of exploration, and the Isle of Amor expanded that out to an entire, tightly designed, training island to explore. Generation 9 brought the entire game world into the open world, free camera, realm and it slides in just about as well as everyone who has been begging for this believed it would. Rather than give us routes that slowly get tougher, the sectors of the game world are split into levelled regions that players are free to explore at their leisure, and the total elimination of grass encounters means that every single Pokémon is rendered in the game world- imparting a requirement on the design team to be mindful of habitats and thematic consistency, which the game tackles in an admirable attempt.

However, there are draw backs. Whilst I still don't think the Switch is the ideal whipping boy for all of it's problems, it's hardware limitations are no doubt the reason why the game has an abominable draw distance for entities; you'll see Pokémon pop into existence less than a yard from you, and literally feet in front of the player when mounted on the mascot legendary. Pokémon still lack that level of coherent intergration into everyday life that we see demonstrated beautifully in Detective Pikachu, and somehow even with these new deign philosophies all the world's Pokémon still feel like little more than pets. In fact, all the towns feel woefully poorly designed, with wide open nothing spaces one would anticipate from a high-traffic MMO hub-town and not a breathing and living space in a mostly single player game that you are expected to frequent. And don't even get me started on the loading screens! The academy was a nightmare to travel to for all the poxy loading screens!

Curiously, there aren't loading screens into battles anymore. (Which blew me away to realise was still standard until literally this entry.) And the ability to sneak up on Pokemon actually enables a 'stealth Pokeball' move which initiates combat with an initial catch-rate bonus, actually promoting clever use of shrubs and approach angles for those most infuriating-to-catch mons. There is genuine thought that went into evolving the Pokemon playstyle, and if the team were given more than the bare minimum amount of time to get it done, I suspect the released product would have felt a lot more fully formed. As it happens we've had to wait for all the DLC to launch to finally get features that feel like they should have been present off rip- such as the ability to fly on the back of our mount Pokemon, not just glide. But I'm getting into specifics a little early.

The narrative of Scarlet and Violet has the player step into the uniform of a newly inducted student to Paldea's most prestigious, and only, Pokémon school- a giant tower sticking out of the middle of the capital city. As you'd expect from the curriculum of a school set within the Pokémon world, all the school consists of are exceptionally drab (and mercifully optional) school lessons with a memory test at the end of each of them. Thankfully, lessons themselves are not the meat of the game. As soon as you arrive the game gives you a quick introduction, introduces to your rival and best friend- this time wrapped up into the same character: the battle-crazy rich girl Tomboy Nemona- and sets you loose on a free form narrative in the vein of Breath of the Wild or Far Cry 5. Now I'm not typically the biggest fan for this style of narrative because it always seems to sacrifice any situational momentum and all opportunity for agency building in favour of 'choose as you go' objectives who's only benefit is the ability to drop them on a whim like an ADHD struck child. But in the case of a Pokémon game, there isn't much story to jeprodise in the first place- so it actually works to the game's advantage.

The progression of the narrative is split into three paths that are equitably spread across the game's giant world to ensure you visit everywhere on your journey to championhood, with the level of the local Pokémon in each region presenting the only actual roadblock to progression. You have the challenge battles against the mysterious Team Star, former problem students that are shirking lessons for a secret reason that becomes blindingly obvious upon your first investigation because this game was written for children. The typical 'road to championship' which pits you against the world's gym bosses in order to qualify for a shot at the top position, which feels impressively not-important this go around of the game. And finally the investigation into the mysterious giant boss Pokemon from a different time period that are scattered across the plains, which are tied to the game's unique gimmick: Terrestrialization.

One of the more gimmicky, but still fun, aspects of Gen 8 was the Dynamax and Gigantamax forms of Pokémon that ballooned Pokémon up to giant proportions and powered up all moves to type-specific superforms. They were typically only useful for dens, as the animation to summon them took so long, but the desire to hunt all the special 'Gigatamax marked' variants with their special form-altering giant mode was enough to keep me interested. Terrestialization offers precious little in the way of collectible potential, but is admittedly a lot more sensibly balanced. It's a power up to a single pre-picked element type which makes STAB attacks more powerful and weaknesses just as buffed. There are no special forms outside of those adopted by the cover-exclusive Pokémon in the DLC, and the animations to summon them are still painfully long. At least the dens are better this time around.

Dynamax dens were a bit of a joke in Gen 8. Terra Dens are a lot more serious in Gen 9. Terra Dens are four person raids against powerful raid Pokemon powered up by Terra effects and pumped up with periodic stage effects it can whip out for free at certain timer and health parameters. It also employs a painfully strong damage shield halfway through the fight which is a pain to whittle down without taking advantage of type advantages, your own terra-charge and, to be honest, as much STAB as possible. At the top most end of them, the limited time 7 star dens, these guys are pretty much unbeatable without a team of properly built Pokemon, creating genuine end-game challenge which I hope sticks around in future Pokemon titles. I like the idea of having high-level endgame content that isn't just player Tournaments- it stimulates the adventure.

This adventure counts itself as rather unique to the Pokemon games that came before it, in that the front cover Pokemon is not the end game boss. Actually, the front cover Pokemon is your partner throughout the entire adventure. (albeit only for mounting purposes. You have to unlock their fighter form.) They are basically bikes for the player to ride atop of, capable of swimming, climbing walls, gilding and, at the end of the very last DLC, flying. And good lord is this the optimal way to get around in Pokemon from this point forward. Even the instant fast travel of Sword and Shield started to grate after a while, gliding across valleys and sprinting down canyons is just a much more engaging way to travel, even when there isn't a great lot to be looking at along the way. The fast mode of transport makes the largely plain features of the Paladian landscape actually somewhat forgiveable.

Of course, with all this travelling you'll be doing there would need to be a moment of rest, which is where camping returns with a suitably Spanish-coded variant of the cooking activity- Sandwich making? (Is- is that particularly Spanish?) Once again, we've had significant improvements in this mechanic. Sandwiches are built according to a recipe piece by piece and the player is required to balance all the ingredients on the base loaf and stick the top on without anything falling off- which of course become more difficult for higher level sandwiches. But the rewards are impressively worth the hassle of ingredient sourcing! You get timed boosts for certain damage types, increases to Egg production rates, (Breeding is now done entirely in camp. The convenience is nice but it takes so long that Shiny egg hunting is pretty much dead.) buffs to capture rates which are invaluable for some of the painful Legendary capture rates added in the Indigo Disk and, only available via special ingredients so rare I've literally never found a single one of them in my entire playtime, increased shiny spawn rates! These are all really great buffs!

'Convenience' really does seem to be the 'modus operendi' of the system design for this game, and whereas for most average gamers this improvements seem rather obvious and trite, to us long-suffering Pokemon fans these are tinctures of the god's own juices! You can have a Pokemon remember a move from your menu, without hunting down a hospital! You can change Pokemon names from the menu! Teleport from the map, save anywhere, camp anywhere, throw out your Pokemon independently so it can do auto-battles for you to gather Pokemon resources- the new currency for TM cloning which makes casual battling worth while. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet feel like Gamefreak speeding towards reaching modern game design values so fast that they tripped over and hurt themselves along the way. And though the scraped knees are a little ugly to look at, and they're hobbling about with a limp now- it's so good to see them in such form! Pokemon feels modern- mostly. And I'm here for it!

And yet, Gamefreak always do manage to veer in some directions that irk me. For one, they are pushing really hard in the 'play with friends' angle in a franchise that is traditionally rather solitary. (If I had friends, I wouldn't be pretending to have them in Pokémon- now would I?) The aforementioned 7 star dens can be almost impossible if everyone doesn't know what they're doing, the Orge Ousting minigame for The Teal Mask is genuinely unbeatable without 4 players, the annoying BBQ grinding minigame for The Indigo Disk receives insane multipliers for group play (which is actually non-sensical. They already get more BP because all group side quest rewards are unified, shouldn't the solo players get the extra profitable bonus missions for balance purposes?) and there is one evolution that simply won't occur unless triggered in another player's world. This would all be fine if Pokemon Scarlet and Violent had any modern matchmaking standards but... that's where the team ran up dry. Outside of Raid Dens it's all 'Link Code' matchmaking. No joining randos. A real kick to the nads for players like me. Makes us feel unwelcome.

In it's basic narrative wraps the story of Scarlet and Violet around the mystery of 'Area Zero' and the 'time paradox' Pokemon who all appear to be variants from across history brought into the modern age. (The future or the past depending on your version.) It's a pretty loosely tugged on narrative thread, even more so now that Pokemon splits it's narrative efforts down three paths, and events only really pick up in the final act where the professor of your game finally drags you down into a thematically really exciting looking finale, with no weight behind any of it because you know next to nothing about the area, the mystery of the terra Pokemon, or even why your Legendary Pokemon has a special place in the story. It's not even unique, this is the first Pokemon game to present two capturable versions of the franchise Legendary. (It allows you to capture one and trade to complete your Pokedex, but narratively- it slightly knocks you down.) The actual meat of the story was left, presumably, for the DLC to pick up on.

The Teal Mask was the first DLC released in the early months of this year and it introduced the player to a field trip that took them to the land of Kitakami, one of Gamefreak's weaker locations in visual design. It's kind of just a small Japanese town with a mountain range, there's no real individuality beyond those basic geographical elements. Rather than touch on the narrative of the main game at all, this DLC focuses around the legend of the mountain Ogre and builds up the Legendary's... well... Legend to a degree that the main game lacked. It also introduces us to two new best friend characters in Kieran and Carmine, which seems bizarre given that the main game already had a cast who don't show up in either DLC. What, is Nemona busy having dreams about when she next gets to ambush me for a Pokemon battle? Is Penny hiding for fear of another tongue-assault from Koraidon? Thiers is a pretty bizarre omission. At least the Ogre ousting minigame is fun, if solo player exclusionary.

And finally, the second half of the DLC slate: The Indigo Disk. An excursion to the Blueberry Academy off the coast of Unova where you, an exchange student, embark on a mission to battle some sense into the emotionally broken young brother of your Nemona-replacement, I mean 'Carmine', following the events of the Teal Mask. I'm quite impressed with how the DLC's were able to maintain a consistent narrative and the characterisation of Kieran's descent into obsessive perfectionism was rather well done, if hugely derivative in the anime space of storytelling. (It might have been more impressive if they didn't get it right with all the reference material to 'borrow' from.) The tighter focus on this one plot point does wonders with enforcing what actually matters to the story- which is why it is so galling then that the ending chapter is so bad. Having you finally address 'The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero', which was the naming convention of the pack we bought to access this content, the game proceeds to unveil nothing.

I wish I was kidding, but this game's final chapter must have been written by the same screenwriter who penned 'The Secrets of Dumbledore' because there is no narrative substance to this 'hidden treasure' whatsoever. The Legendary, Terapagos, is given absolutely no build up. No backstory. No explanation as to it's connection to the Terrestialization phenom that is said to be the entire purpose of the study into Area Zero. Nothing is resolved by your capturing of Terapagos aside from the 'goodening' of Kieran and it leaves the story of the entire game in a kind of weird limbo state of non resolution- closing out nothing of significance to the world. And speaking of non-satisfying conclusions- I'm sorry to say that despite the recent eye-brow raising trend of requests from fans, (fans who I assume are hopped up on Baldur's Gate 3) Gamefreak have not introduced the ability to rizz up characters from the game. Sorry, Rika fans. Nemona stands. Penny lovers. Dendra simps. Carmine Carers. Pokemon just ain't that sort of game.

At the very least we have a secret hidden epilogue scene where you are caught in an inexplicable time paradox with the real version of your version's professor whereupon you initiate a paradoxical time loop by instilling in them a curiosity to begin the studies that you will later become involved in to learn about Area Zero to being with. A cool idea if it wasn't so slapdash and poorly explained. (Clever concepts don't quite work unless their presented... you know- in a clever way!) We do know there's an 'as of yet' unannounced secret hour of content with a brand new Mythical Pokemon at the end of it waiting to be unlocked, presumably with the next few months, but I doubt they're going to get around to patching the flapping maw of void that is this game's finished story. Such a shame that Gamefreak failed to stick the landing even in a story as basic and straightforward as this one.

Scarlet and Violet is easily Gamefreak's most ambitious game to date, and it's in the spirit of that ambition that I feel softer on some of it's rougher elements. The rendering failures, the arguably empty feeling world- the nowhere narrative is less forgivable, but they had a lot on their plate- maybe they forgot to actually sit down and do the writing until the last week or something. Still I was actually surprised about how much Gamefreak had to pull out of their sleeve in order to make the free world plains of their first totally open game not a boring waste like a Ubisoft Far Cry game. Paldea has personality and charm, and I genuinely enjoy travelling around it on the back of my winged Pokemon. (I have Scarlet.) Barring the excessively rough launch, I would have to call Scarlet leaps and bounds in the right direction. But there's still a prevailing sense of the developers not being quite there yet. Pokemon is still a few generations off from it's 'masterpiece' game that nails an identity for this franchise down- but if every generation evolves leaps and bounds like this one does- I'm certain that game will come out someday. In that spirit I'm willing to grade the full version of Scarlet and Violet, DLC included, a solid B- Grade, which is much improved from the C- I was looking at for the base game before the more focused DLC snippets brought everything into cohesion. I think we're 80% of the way there to a revolution for this franchise, I can feel it buzzing on the air... maybe next game?

Character creation is good, actually.

 That's my hill

One of the lovely aspects of the game industry is that everyone has an opinion on literally everything, and they speak with an air of absolute authority whenever they do. Let it never be forgotten the absolute numbskull who insisted, in the wake of the GTA VI leaks, that visual assets are the first things completed in game development. Truly astounding. Of course, Twitter creeps are always full of nonsense, it's how their bodies function, but you get that 'authoritative drivel' pouring out of the lips of actual card-carrying games journalists too. I should know, I read half of them. And to be fair the industry is not always writhe with interesting goings-onsand explosive releases wrapped in historic pump and dump schemes from mysterious studios who may or may not be called 'Fntastic'. Sometimes you need to fill up page space so you can afford to eat. Then the editorials come out and they reign hellfire.

An editorial I recently read shall go unnamed, because it honestly doesn't deserve the view, but it rubbed me so very wrong with it's message that I simply had to say something. The topic, character creation. The Target, CRPGs. The title? Something along the lines of 'Modern RPGs are doing character creation wrong', with the subheading providing the thesis which the entire length of the article pains to try and justify 'Character creation should not be a test you can fail'. So you can see where this is going, right? It's another plea made in the guise of 'inclusivity', which is always a good thing- right? Heck, I think the more people that get the ability to play games, the better. And I've said it before but it's the accessibility of Baldur's Gate 3 which made it a shoe in for game of the year more than anything else. As long as you were willing to engage with Baldur's Gate on even the base-most level- you would be welcomed into the fold with open arms. But here's the kicker- that can't be every game.

Regardless what some antisemitic, homophobic, loud mouthed fake TV calibrator might have to whine about the topic, not every game is made for everyone. It's kind of one of those base most lessons that everyone is forced to learn as a child- you can't please everyone. There's logic there and it rings doubly true when we're talking about entertainment. Different strokes and all that? It's a religion in the world of design and marketing, hence the existence of demographics and genre lovers. I remember recently hearing some grumblings from Final Fantasy developers about the designation of 'JPRG', as opposed to just RPG- as though they saw some sort of racial prejudice behind the label. It's not that deep. JRPGs are just built in a fundamentally different way to Western RPGs and attract wildly different core audiences. I'm a chameleon, I love both. But ask your average Bioware fan what they thought of Final Fantasy X and they'll probably collapse on the floor and cry crystal tears of solid boredom. Different strokes, different folks.

Now the 'problem' in question was actually directed at Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader, with Baldur's Gate tacked on as another use case, so you can see why I'm taking this so damned personal. (I love both these games passionately.) Their thesis is this; these games both present extensive character creation tasks you have to navigate through in order to build characters including deciding their stats, class, ancestry and vocation- these provide significant chances for players to screw up and in doing so make a character who has no chance of standing up to the events to come. Essentially this creates a trap that requires extensive knowledge of the systems you'll be interacting with beforehand, which hardly seems fair to a fresh audience member trying to pick up the game- "be more accessible- character creation should be about being goofy and naming your character something really stupid and silly because I'm a games journalist and apparently we all do this and then share it in op eds in lieu of a personality." (Seriously, does anyone really smile when they hear some journalist recount the adventures of their 'wittily' named character who is just an appendage? It's just a bit sad they still find that funny, honestly.)

Firstly I think I should really impress that there's a certain amount of heavy lifting the statement is doing that is not reflective of the experience of either of these games. Namely, he's ignoring the fact that both Baldur's Gate 3 and Rouge Trader actually default optimal choices for every parameter in the character creation process and tweaking is only really for specialist players who know what they're doing. If you don't: no worries the game will give you a solid character just by clicking through. What the article is more about, is actually a common problem I've heard a lot about for new adopters of Baldur's Gate 3, or simply anyone wondering into a genre they aren't familiar with. They are unwilling to actually engage with the product, whether out of reticence or lack of investment, and see that as a failing of the game. The contributor under the spotlight, he just didn't want to read. He waxed lyrical about the many 'complicated' calculations the game throws his way in tooltips- (apparently single attribute multiplication was considered 'advanced calculus' in his school's curriculum.) and just generally outed himself as someone who doesn't want to read. In a CRPG. Which is kind of a problem.

You see, CRPGs are themselves attempts at recreating text-intensive tabletop RPGs onto a video game format; keeping that creative aura of imagination through description over visual representation in most cases. Baldur's Gate 3 was a vast exception to this rule, given their budget to depict literally everything. (Aside from the darker manifestations of the Dark Urge's memory. But that was probably for the best considering all the shrinking violets out there.) Rouge Trader is rife with evocative paragraphs painting inexplicable and emotional portraits, covering the perils of breaking through the warp, being dogged by the corrupting influence of heresy and seeing the world awash in warring pirouettes of colourful splotches. That's because it expects the audience to have the time and patience to read and absorb this sort of content, to involve themselves in the immersion of a world as one would with a fine book. And if you don't have that patience, then... how do I put this... the game ain't for you.  

Now back to the actual Character Creation. Both Baldur's Gate 3 and Rogue Trader do the art of character creation so right it actually hurts to see someone miss the mark so horrendously. You see because unlike the thousands of other games which keep character creation as little more than a vapid vanity show- creation choices mean something. When you rock up to the original Baldur's Gate and make yourself a gnome cleric with 8 Strength, (>cough< like me >cough<) you've created a unique situation where you are a cleric totally incapable of wielding any weapon heavier than the starting stick. (Which you then use to clobber the main villain to death. Somehow. Still working that one out in my head.) These choices translate into a dynamic canvass that reacts to the adventure before you in a way that brings you back to the creation screen time and time again across your adventure. And when you start again, the journey will feel fundamentally different for the new choices you make. This, ladies and gentlemen, is effective replayability. And it's getting all too rare in the world of RPG-lights that inflict our shelves.

Giving players a choice is giving them the power to screw up. But screwing up isn't the end of the world. Making the wrong choice and living with it, growing past it and becoming better is the fun of consequence, and as I hinted at with my cleric story- it can leave an impression that sticks with you. It can also be frustrating, however, which is why some of the more intensive RPGs out there don't expect you to be an expert and hand you perfectly viable character builds off rip. There's comes a point when a player, after blasting through every warning and roadblock designed to guide them in the right direction, loses the right to blame their misfortune on the accessibility of the game. If you ignore all the warnings, intentionally chance all the game's recommendations and then complain that you don't even know what any of these stats or abilities even do- then hell, maybe interactive media is a bit too much for you. At least for today.

Game Awards 2023

 

So here we are on the other side of the Game Awards and I have to eat some major crow- Grand Theft Auto 6 absolutely struck no deal with Geoff Keighley in order to make an appearance. I figured it was an inevitability what with the relatively insanity of announcing a game more than a year out from a release window, but more the fool's me- I guess. I just can't believe Rockstar would steal the Award ceremonies thunder like that- I know they do their own thing but damn, that was cold! Ahh I'm losing the forest for the trees again, we should just be happy for Geoff and what he achieved bringing another solid night of the Game Awards sans all those meddlesome controversies that were bubbling in the background. I don't think there are any winners that seem wildly out of pocket, even if a nomination or two absolutely was. (Destiny for best community support? Was that some sort of inside joke?) And I'm happy to say we didn't get another 'Deathloop' scenario of an unending sweep. Thank god.

This year I can't really pretend to have been all that excited about the reveals of the Game Awards showcase because to be honest, none of them really excited me. Don't get me wrong, there was nothing utterly mindnumblingly dull- like the Motorsport sections of Xbox conferences, but the most I saw were those 'yeah, genre fans will like this one' style games. When talking about what makes an Ultimate Game of the Year candidate, it's typically the importability of genre lovers. It's the sort of game that can slide through the gates of who should like the game and settle into just about anyone's laps, which is why Action Adventure games are so often candidates- because there aren't really strict action adventure fans out there- so every type of gamer can make time to slide them into a schedule. In that light, I don't think this year unveiled any potential Game of the Year contenders for next year.

However what we did get was a little looksie-loo at what SEGA are planning to drown the next few years of their line-up with. That's right, we're getting no less than 5 remakes of their classic titles, all of which seem to be borrow roughly the same 'updated' visual style with the exception of the iconic Jet Set Radio, which I didn't know SEGA owned until just that moment. We also got a teaser glimpse of the next Monster Hunter game, which is probably going to be my point to swing back aboard the train after totally blanking Monster Hunter Rise. And we have ourselves the most pitiful viewing of Kojima's next game OD, which was so horrifically insubstantial I can't even cobble up enough neurons to speculate on it. All we saw was literally faces in a 3D capture environment- have they even started putting together builds of this one yet? Sheesh! I mean sure, announce a Jordan Peele partnership if you want, but don't waste everyone's time!

Of course the big upset this year was the fact that despite being nominated for over 7 awards, Spider-Man 2 walked away with a big fat 0- which has set off about half of the potential fans because, whoops- Spider-Man 2 is still being kept off of PC. (If ya'll wanted votes, you should have given us PC gamers a reason to vote!) Personally I'm surprised that they're so surprised. Spider-Man 2 just plain didn't land with the same culture splash the first one did, any reviewer who isn't a career Insomniac meat-rider found themselves lukewarm on a sequel that played things a little too 'safe', and most of the categories Spider-Man 2 was nominated for was also shared with Baldur's Gate 3- the year's actual phenom. They weren't gonna win that fight! I just hope this gives Insomniac the kick in the butt to really try and knock it out of the park with the last game in their trilogy!

But positivity and having fun is a commodity that can be ill-afforded in this world where everything has to be everything else all the time. Many have made their displeasure known about the fact that in a year of record layoffs for the Game Industry, Geoff Keighley mentioned nothing on the topic himself- whereas in the past he has been known to sometimes expend 20 seconds or so throwing some shade where it's needed. That sort of candid armchair solidarity has petered out as the Game Awards have grown into more of a night about having fun and showing off big game trailers, the stand-in for E3 if you will- but this year I suppose people have grown incensed with this status quo. Particularly a lot of the game journalism outlets, the very same who have try their darndest not to care about the award ceremony and to pay it as little mind as possible, sometimes even delegitimising it's growing status with pithy Twitterisms. That same class are now upset that The Game Awards, as the official front of the games industry apparently, isn't doing it's due service. Mixed messages be flying.

And of course it goes on even more than that with questions about Geoff not bringing up Palestine, which is- I'm going to be honest, probably a bit of an insane hang-up to have. The industry lay-offs thing is fair, Geoff clearly turned a blind eye to that, but Palestine? Not sure I really care to hear about what a Game Industry personality thinks about Palestine, personally. The same way I don't really care what an actor has to say, or a Twitch Streamer. It's not really their area to comment. Unless you're seriously asking Geoff to condemn the concept of violence, because if that's the case you really need to check your 'weirdo American' card at the door. In the rest of the world we don't need to hear every single person in the world verbally denounce every horrific war crime, it's kind of a sincere solidarity which isn't helped by performative declarations of outrage. Seriously, Americans need to learn some damn taste.

Honestly the real controversy here has to be the tipping of the show away from the awards and further into the advertising portion of the show. We've seen footage of how award acceptance speeches were literally kept on a timer this time around, even after pushing out Christopher Judge to tell them they have all the time they need. And for what? Geoff had no showstopper announcements for the night, nothing that would have made or broken the evening by it not being present. His team squashed the special moments of so many acceptance messages in order to pander to a middling line-up of game announcements that could have been made at any point. Seriously, it's verging on losing sight about who we should be celebrating here. I want to see the personalities of the industry on display, you know- a freakin' personality!

Geoff Keighley has addressed his shortcomings in this area and claimed that he asked his staff to relax the rules as the show went on. (Which I frankly don't believe. That footage telling the winner to wrap up and sod off was taken from the Game of the Year award- literally Larian's big moment.) But at the very least the man has made note and committed himself to tweaking things come next year, which is a mark of respect and feedback I admire from the man. It certainly speaks a lot more than the endless article writers who never liked the awards, trying to grandstand their dismissal into some grand act of virtue that should be sang about. "Let us all gather around and wring our hands in praise of the brave article writers who slept during the game awards- truly they are the blessed among us!" Nah, rather than tear down the biggest award show of the year, like they are all desperate to do, I'd rather have some fun with the gaming community. You know, 'fun'? Like, the point of games in the first place? (These people, sheesh.)

Generative AI

 

As the world of technology continues to unfurl like a snake around the world, waiting for it's moment to constrict and strangle the last vestibules of life and personality out of us- the question of what AI is capable of and where it should be used is popping up in every other conversation, it feels like. On one hand we have new stories based on 'It's a Wonderful Life', being read out by the, now long dead, star of that movie over Apps- and on the other we have crappy AI generated 'Art' being spewed out by the hundreds of dozens ever other second. And trust me, I actually a follow a bunch of different art boards on a handful of different websites- they're all regularly indurate with so much AI art that the smart ones add filters to cut through all of them. And they're recognisable as AI at a mere glance, it's insanity to think anyone really expects to go wool-pulling with them.

But generative AI has become so much more prevalent across the Internet then you're probably comfortable with. Afterall, just look at your average browser, at your average search engine- how many have AI features slotted where you never asked for them? Bing has a whole AI delivery program thrown into it's algorithm that presumably is Microsoft's latest attempt to appear competitive to Google, Opera seems to partner up with a new AI integration service every other Tuesday- (the App tab is starting to get cluttered) and there's even talk of AI being employed in order to replace text-fill boxes- which would be like an assassination attempt to the casual SEO studying audience. All and all, it feels like the AI revolution has intentions to stay, whether we like it or not. And I'm veering more towards 'not' the more I stick around.

Because at the end of the day, I'm never as satisfied with a piece of AI delivered content as I am with handcrafted stuff, and I'm going to use Video Game as an example piece. Take Starfield, for example. That game has more unique locations than Skyrim and Fallout 4- and yet both Skyrim and Fallout 4 have comparable active player counts to the recently released Starfield. Why? Because the AI systems that allows Starfield to populate it's dozens of worlds fails to create interesting play experiences, whereas the smaller but handcrafted worlds of Skyrim and Fallout 4 deliver comprehensive, if limited, chances for play. Now Minecraft also has an AI that decides what populates it's world, and that game eclipses anything Bethesda has ever put out. But the difference is those algorithms have been relentless finetuned for more than a decade, they're brimming with content. Starfield's generative AI is young and stupid and barren- and boring.

Of course, that's not going to stop aspiring developers from looking over their shoulder at the hot-new AI advancement, and in fact the big man at Take2 himself was recently waxing lyrical about the possibility of Ai in the development room. In the age of speculation and guess work, this has of course led to rampant speculation about the role AI plays in the NPC interaction in Grand Theft Auto VI- none of which has had any sort of confirmation as every one of us is just grasping at phantoms and straws right now. Personally I think development of Grand Theft Auto VI long predates the AI boom, and it would be insane for Rockstar to start developing a new AI system for their NPCs from scratch mid-way through development- that's the kind of mistake that destined-for-failure projects make. So I don't think we'll be seeing AI in the game- but what if we were?

Speculation guesses that an AI powered NPC system in a Rockstar game could equip the populations of the cities to naturally react to the actions of the player. One provided example was the ability to strike up a conversation with a nobody, have them mention having a baby and then being invited back to their place to see the aforementioned baby. Now I have to be honest- that is the dumbest implementation of AI I could imagine. First off, NPCs already react to what players do in Rockstar games, they don't need advanced AI systems to freak out when you point a gun at them, or dive out the way when your car comes barrelling up the sidewalk. Secondly- why in the hell would I strike up a conversation to see someone's baby in a GTA game? This isn't the Sims! And thirdly, when in the hell would Rockstar grow insane enough to put a baby in a GTA game? That is a recipe for disaster, you know how sensitive Americans get!

More interestingly would be the potential for AI to do exactly what Bethesda wants it to do- fill in the spaces of worlds they're not equipped to fill by hand. If we were ever to have a Grand Theft Auto game wherein every building was enterable, I figure it would be with this sort of technology. Office spaces could be filled with handcrafted cubicles and supplies by an AI, mansions would have their luxury items, hovels would be covered in cheap trash. The trick will be teaching AI how to generate natural feeling world design practices, such as telling stories through intelligent and thoughtful placement. Both concepts that any AI, short of beating the Turning Test, is conceptually incapable of. Such a shame. More evidence that it just isn't really there yet- and doesn't really appear to be making much in the way of headroom either, what with the impending risk of model collapse as input data becomes more corrupted.

The cherry atop the cake? All of these AI tools are down right cancer to the climate, with GPU being practically factory pressed in order to spit out all the demands from them. The US is busy trying to squeeze Nvidia into not providing China with decent 40-series chips, meanwhile no-one appears to care about the stupid level of E-Waste these giant AI run data-farms are spouting out on the daily, right in the midst of a climate crisis- which is exactly the time when you don't need something like this to start popping off around the world. Generative AI may be the future but if things keep up at this rate, that future might just be an oxymoron lack of itself. If that makes any remote sense. So what is there really to do?

Shout, scream, run from it- all the same, AI arrives. There really is no putting this particular genie back in the bottle and it seems we're just going to have to wait until that all annoying honeymoon period ends and everyone starts to slowly realise this is either too expensive or too limited to do literally everything in their daily lives that they are too lazy to do. Until then expect more stories about lawyers who let AI do all their research and ended up conjuring completely fabricated precedent cases to quote, real content-filled websites becoming steadily overrun with AI powered content farms and people who don't know any better throwing everything into the AI train only to find out it's actually heading right for them to run them over. (Elon.) Them's just the breaks with the Artificial developements.

Promises kept

 Promises made

The other day I penned a blog talking about the rigorous betrayal of promises broken upon the altar of lies. The consequences, the lingering stink of breaking oaths. The inevitable drunken festering of staring eyes, and pointing fingers that inevitably blossom next- the poppy harvest of composting dreams. But what if I just throw that on it's head and talk about the total opposite. Promises kept. "Why, that's got to be the font of endless positivity, right?" Well, well, my hopeless optimistic friend, you might think that but I counter- what about a threat? That's a promise too, is it not? And a threat kept is a danger realised. Do we celebrate merely for the prophesized reaching fruition? Of course not, we scream and panic and cry and woe the day that Paramount ever decided it was going to be their turn to spit on the institution we call video game TV shows.

Halo is indeed going to be receiving it's season 2. As little as we all want to accept it, there's not a dang thing any one of us can do. The show created by a team of people who actively laughed at the source material and believed themselves to be such an 'heightened' form of creator that they could rewrite the very basic essence of everything the games were- they've got themselves a sequel. So now our helmet-less, rebel-rousing, sexual war crime committing, Master Chief can disgrace the name of his position once more with a narrative deeply confused about what Halo was originally about. It's space military fiction with a touch of space fantasy rubbed on top. (A lot more space fantasy as 343 took over, but I was told we had time before the story went down the Halo 4 pit.) Now they have got themselves a new showrunner, but if that will lead to any improvements I don't know. The show already put itself in a bizarre trajectory and even being teased with an actual Halo installation for once isn't enough to wash all that gunk out of mouths. But hey, they promised a season 2- and here we are.   

You know who else was a fan of making promises? CDPR. They made quiet a few in the lead up to Cyberpunk, albeit many in implication. Afterall, they didn't technically say there would be significant choice and consequence throughout the game, they just presented a level with tons of it and coined that ignoble get-out-jail-free-card "And that's just one mission!" They've made great strides since then living up to the spirit of the advertisements. Still it's quite astounding it took several years after launch for an actual crime system to be implemented into a game that had a line of adverts that literally led with "In Night City; what makes you a criminal?" Two years of post-game support, apparently. But on the otherside of all that we can actually say that the promises kept, or rather 'made up for' have gone a significant way to repairing CDPR's quite tarnished reputation and image.

Still is there any boon quite as fundamentally effective, quite as world breaking, as the decision to actually add in the missing train stations to the world? Because that very first shot we ever saw of the game running 'in engine' was of the Monorail rolling above Night City. It's exclusion kind of felt like a slap across the face. Bringing it back after all these years kind of feels like that final moment of truce being declared before the first villain of the anime arc turns around and embraces the protagonist. Enemies to Friends. You know how it goes. There's apparently some work also thrown into making the bike handling a little better and throwing in Romance-partner hang-out sessions- but who cares about that when I can ride above the denizens of brokeville and laugh at that lowly ineptitude compared to my high flying ways! Grovel for me, ants- GROVEL!

Where was I? Oh yeah: Grand Theft Auto VI. Now that game isn't out yet, so the only promises we can talk about is the promise that Rockstar has made to the industry in general by warrant of it's station. You see, for all of their painful backwards overprotectiveness regarding past developers sharing stories and hunting down harmless fan-made mods for their single player games- Rockstar are trying to maintain this magical image of theirs. This image of the 'mysterious big developer' who comes by generationally to totally rewrite whatever direction the industry is currently heading in and remind them what a true superstar is. Because as big as the games industry has become, as overwhelmingly popular as some of the best games of all time are- no one else in gaming is pulling 100 million Youtube views in 48 hours. It just doesn't happen unless you're Rockstar.

As much as it's becoming hip for Right Wing Social Media creeps to virtue signal about being unable to stand the franchise because of it's flagrant romanisation of violence against the police- (yes, that's real. Elon said he couldn't bare to shoot a cop in GTA V and now they're all conjuring up falsehoods about virtual blue-live solidarity.) the truth is that Grand Theft Auto is one of those culture phenoms that shapes culture in a variety of ways. Everything that exists about Grand Theft Auto VI seems to indicate that Rockstar have once again upheld their unwritten bargain with society itself, to ride as it's zeitgeist with every new entry. Whether or not the actual game itself is fun or a mismatched hodgepodge of openworld cliches butting heads in a desperate attempt to appear 'innovative'- well, we have couple of painful waiting years to find out. But as of so far- in marketing alone the company have done their part.

And do you wanna know who else kept their promise this year? Square Enix- in their promise to make that atrocious looking NFT 'game' they peddled during the height of that short lived trend- 'Symbiogenesis'. Remember that mess? After the crypto market fell off a cliff and every NFT market was systematically arrested for being various levels of illegally scammy- one would expect outstanding NFT projects to be quietly swept under the rug and all marketing to become gaslighted phantoms of a bygone era. But not Symbiogenesis- oh no! Not only is Square still making the project, but they've already started releasing some to the Etherium chain. And to put some icing atop the cake- to match their soulless and impressively bland art style, according to 'Decrypt.Co.' they've even been named as though entirely by an AI. We're talking NFT characters with names like 'Condiment', 'Wart', 'Egg', 'Starvation' and... 'Cockscomb'? Hmm... got brave with that last one, did they? So if you were wondering whether or not Square were interested in putting effort into this revolutionary, industry redefining concept of theirs... umm, no. They're not. Good day.

A promise made is a vow. And sometimes we don't really want to see what happens on the otherside of that proclamation. In some ways the yearning to see the fruition is itself the meat of the meal- as though purpose is defined by the struggle to achieve it. But given how that sounds like the sort of drivel that spikey haired, Welsh-dubbed, JRPG protagonists would wax-poetic over just before climbing up the last staircase to kill god- or worse, something that Kojima would say on his Tw-X account, I'm choosing to spit in the face of that. A journey unfulfilled is a waste of the single most precious commodity this life gives us- time; and those that can't reconcile the thrill of an escalator taken in place of a arduous hike might as well be philistines waving their fists at the construction of the Library of Alexandria, wishing we'd all just go back to the age of purely spoken knowledge. Or whatever the Philistines were moany about, I can't be bothered to look it up.

GTA VI Trailer 1

 It happened.

You don't need me to tell you judging from the 56 million views that the trailer was sitting at after the first 12 hours. The majority of which (42 million) came from the very first hour that this thing was out despite the fact that the trailer was due a 9 am reveal the very next day. Turns out someone leaked a 720p garbled version on Twitter which incensed Rockstar enough to drop their pristine 4k masterpiece edition early and make sure everyone saw it like that. Because Rockstar already went through the song-and-dance of people seeing the game in it's unfinished build state and remarking 'The textures look ugly!' and 'assets are being recycled'- as though they were looking at the finished thing. Long live the immortal moron who said, with his chest out, something to the avail of 'visuals are usually the first thing finished in game development'; a bigger load of barnacles on the Internet is rarely seen. But with all that behind us we can bask in the truly incredible visual treat which is Grand Theft Auto VI; the game that is coming out in over a year. Goddamn.

And of course the trailer has blown up the entire world for being one of the finest looking products ever to be made in this little medium of ours. So it should be. Rumours have it, and these are rumours from a time of great leakage which simultaneously opens up the possibility of proof whilst providing a vast potentiality for lies, that the budget for this game is between the ranges of 1-2 billion. Which would make it easily the most expensive game ever made and probably the most expensive entertainment product overall. But when you think about it, that kind of does make sense. Grand Theft Auto grosses about a billion a year when you add up everything, so if Rockstar want this to do one better it only makes sense that you'll throw a big chunk of those earnings into getting everything to it's top most. Graphics, sound, physics, animation- hey, maybe we'll even get an improvement to shooting- wouldn't that be a nice gift under the old Christmas tree?

And of course if anyone needed the confirmation we got that too; the leaks were absolutely truthful and indeed we shall be playing Lucia, the very first real female protagonist in a Grand Theft Auto game, and presumably also her boyfriend Jacob. Lucia looks stunningly realistic, and just plain stunning in a few shots, and Jacob looks kind of like a younger and less rugged Arthur Morgan. (I can't be the only one who notices that.) There's very little to go on this Bonnie and Clyde duo so far but I can't wait until the personality led trailers start dropping and the world can begin to get invested in the lives of these characters before they turn on each other in the third act and have to face off. Which, I can't say for sure that's going to happen- but this is GTA, and the basis of the story is Bonnie and Clyde- what else possibly could happen?

So far the king of the footage has been the world of Vice City (and surrounding settlements) itself and indeed, things have changed a lot since 2002. Florida Man is a main character in the circus that is virtual social media- lovingly recreated to depict the TikTok generation and the alligator wrestling populace in one mish mash of chaos. It would seem that interaction with Social Media is going to be a sticking point, at least from what we can see so far, so some speculate this might take over from the simulated TV stations and online news sites from previous games. Which makes a lot of sense. Why read about your exploits on the news when you can see a post of the store robbery you just committed filmed by a random bystander? There's so many prime opportunities for Rockstar to insert immersion points within everything we've seen already!

The biggest eye opener has been the return of believability. From the creator to the consumer. In that I mean according to the fine, and very critical, folks over at Digital Foundry- the insane beauty of these graphics are indicative of the running product and not just pre-processed exaggerations. They have a giant report on the footage detailing the existence of minuscule hair artefacts that would be easily swept away in a pre-render or if it were running on a suped-up 'trailer computer'- and there's even apparently proof it isn't running natively 4k but at 2k- much more achievable on the modern generation of consoles it's designed to run on. Rockstar have never been ones to pull the bait and switch on us, but if there was ever a time to doubt it was here- with a game that looks so stunning that even with lightly stylised characters people are calling it better looking than real life. But apparently it's true to life, as insane as that is to consider.

Such magic probably shouldn't be a surprise, however, given with that insane budget it makes sense that the team don't need to rely on other cheat-sheets to good looking graphics that the rest of the industry follows. Those costly techniques with their heavy limitations and performance hits. Rockstar are innovating and reinventing the wheel from scratch- they've put together simulator technology so complex that outside professionals can't even compare it to anything else on the market. As the biggest piece of entertainment media- Grand Theft Auto 6 is in the business of making the rest of the world sit down and show them how it's done. It's incredible because most other developers suffer those diminishing returns of being the 'industry leaders'. Ubisoft briefly told every other company exactly what style of game they would be copying for the next two years with Far Cry 3- but they slipped into the 'catch-up' role shortly afterwards and have been stuck there ever since. Rockstar have never played catch-up. They've always redefined the limits of the games industry. And it looks like once again, even just technically, they've rocked up with lessons to teach.

I only wish the game weren't so damned far away! 2025 is a lifetime from today, and I'll just bet it's going to be late 2025. If it were in the early months, they would have bragged about it! Just the other day we saw that comment thread on 'Tw-X' wherein Kojima lamented the loss of the vast wait between announcement and launch- characteristically romanticising the period of dreamlike anticipation fuelling the wonder of dreams. We stopped liking that because the expectations they built were always underwhelmed by the (Ubisoft) product. (Okay it's not just Ubisoft who disappointed. But they seemed to do it consistently. Still do, actually.) But it seems he wasn't talking to us but destiny itself, because here comes Rockstar lining up their two year wait mere days afterwards. Is this why Kojima got black-listed at Konami? For being annoyingly right about the near future? (No, I know the real reason. I just find it funny to think of him as the 'Kassandra' of the gaming world.)

So here we rot in our inequity. Forlorn and disgraced. Knowing of a brighter, stunning world of unimaginable debauchery, violence and corrupting freedom- but being unable to grasp it. Like toddlers reaching our stubby arms between the bars of our playpen, enraptured by the golden wonder of the summer streaks through the window blinds. Years it will take. Years! Honestly, I would have preferred if they'd never showed us what we could be playing, at least until it was a little bit closer. What the hell am I supposed to do now, Rockstar? Move to Miami and steal cars to replicate the experience? Because when I do exactly that, you best know I'm going to blame you when the Florida-man hunting media comes fishing for my story! You know, provided the police don't immediately open fire the second they see a mixed-race kid in a stolen car. Or near a parked car. Or at all. You know what? Maybe I won't go to Miami. 

Dragging on Divinity

 

Recently I was praising Larian on their fantastic work bringing Baldur's Gate 3 to it's final form with Patch 5, and I realised something- somehow I turned the blog into an anti-Divinity rag near the end. And there really needs to be some clarification on exactly where I stand with Larian's original franchise because it's not quite as simple as I perhaps made it out to be with my dismissive ravings. It is in that spirit I'm going to double back around on myself and mention a little bit of my history with Divinity to perhaps clear up my feelings on why I treat Larian's announced return to the Divinity franchise as a step backwards rather than leaping onwards to bigger and better things. Because I don't believe this development team are suddenly going to forget everything they've learned. I would suspect they might not go for something as achingly ambitious as Baldur's Gate 3 was, because that sort of momentum cannot be replicated project-after-project: but whatever they plan, in some way I already know I'll be disappointed.

I, unlike a lot of Larian fans out there, took my investigation into the company seriously when I decided to check in on Original Sin 2. I didn't start with Original Sin 2. I didn't even start with Original Sin 1. I started playing their games from the absolute beginning of the beginning. I started, with 2002's Divine Divinity. As retro as retro gets with an isometric, brush-stroked, classically by-the-books, chosen one by divine purpose- fantasy RPG game. With eye wateringly bad humour, which seems to equate 'funny' and 'screaming loudly'. (Larian's humour got a lot better over the years.) The idea was to see the origins of the franchise and see how the story evolved upon itself game to game in a manner similar to Elder Scrolls. But whereas Elder Scrolls went through various tweaks and refinements whilst still remaining decently recognisable from start to finish- Divinity went off the rails almost immediately. 2004's Beyond Divinity, the only game I honestly couldn't finish for how miserable it made me, jumps off the deep end with doubling down on humour, bringing the somewhat bad combat into the forefront and squashing the story down into a linear slog. 

Then comes along the game which I had quite some history with. Divinity 2, a game I played the demo for incessantly when I was a stupid kid who didn't know any better. Divinity 2 entirely rewrites the world at a fundamental level, throwing out practically all the major world building of the first two games in order to refocus the power of the world around 'Dragon Knights' and the new big bad evil man 'Damian' who is the least intimidating dark lord you can possibly imagine. He's just a bald guy. They would pull this total reconstruction again with 'Dragon Commander' and then again with 'Original Sin'- (but at least in those instances there was some slight narrative explanation as to why the world was so different. Even if it is the dumbest reason imaginable. "Everyone just agreed to throw away the steampunkian technological advancements of the Dragon War and jump back to the dark ages!" Yeah, right!) 

Do you know what perspective I got on the world of Divinity from all that history? That there is no world of Divinity. Any worldbuilding that Larian attempted to make was washed away with the next game, and even though Original Sin and it's total recontextualization of 'Sourcerers' seems significant today, it's hard not to visualise a world where they throw it all away in favour of a new threat tomorrow. There's little narrative through-line in Larian's signature world and it's started to grow to a point of poisoning their attempts at larger world building. As it is, I cannot possibly suspend my disbelief enough to believe that any of their worlds are at all bigger than the immediate play space you're operating in- which is a big problem when we're talking about the Fantasy Role Play genre which is all about getting lost in a world of imagination.

And they have tried. Take Jahar from Original Sin 1, he's a prince from a foreign land with a sad story about his fall he loves to regale you with. But listen to the actual story he tells you about his homeland. It's all 'golden spires' and 'thousands of towards' and just unimaginable luxury draped on unimaginable luxury. It doesn't sound real. It sounds like a fairy tale. And if it sounds like a fairy tale then I'm no longer picturing this place in my head and subconsciously integrating it's locales into my understanding of the world, I'm peering past the words and anticipating their, rather obvious, moral. And this is the same, albeit not quite as bad, with the Red Prince from Original Sin 2. He too, is a prince, and he too, comes from a life of indescribable luxury. The world building doesn't invite in the audience and thus loses the impact of actually building a world!

Compare Divinity with 'Pillars of Eternity', a game that sets you in a bog in the arse end of nowhere. But it does such a fantastic job fleshing out everywhere else in the world, giving you tastes of cultures and traditions and characters who's very mannerisms are inscribed with their homelands. Despite Pillars 1 providing what I argue to be the least appealing worldspace in RPG history- (The Dyrwood could burn down along with everyone in it for all I care) the wider richness of the world speaks wonders for itself. The Elder Scrolls tells a thousand stories about the world surrounding the one you're playing in. These are RPGs that understand the fundamentals of the craft, and I don't think Divinity's world was ever static long enough in order to follow suit. It reminds of Fable, in that way, only Fable leans more into it's incongruity. Divinity is burdened by it.

Baldur's Gate 3 greatly benefited from having an established world to set a narrative within, with confines that Larian couldn't greatly bend without causing havoc, forcing the team to rely on defined world spaces to flesh out the wider world of Baldur's Gate. From the Coast to the Hells you feel the weight of the locations you visit in a way that Divinity could never quite manage, and when you make an impact on the world you can't just weigh it up by the immediate people who are effected in front of you when you know there are a dozen more you'll never see suffering or benefitting from your acts. It's the difference between a puddle and an ocean, and it's the reason why Larian RPGs never scratch the same itch as Baldur's Gate did for me.

But all this is the Larian in the past that I'm talking about. Who's to say that the Larian of the future is going to make the same mistakes? Maybe with the influx of fame and talent that they are undoubtedly going to receive, Larian will start to examine their practices with a finer scope, see what made Baldurs Gate 3 just that extra bit special and take it to the products going forward. Maybe Original Sin 3, when they finally get around to that, will be their next big 'everything in' project that really shows everything they've learned and then some. And maybe if we beg hard enough we can get Larian to stop and give us a DLC before moving onto their next game. Maybe if we get down and beg and promise and cry then a DLC will be our reward. Dammit, I'm just not ready to let BG go, am I?

Paids Mods are back!

 Tell a friend,

Give them a mile and they will take the sun- as the adage kind of goes with a little bit of flowery exaggeration because you know me. Bethesda, love them or tolerate them or hate them so bitterly that you mount a dartboard with Todd Howard's head on it to your wall and play darts with it all day- they are the rulers of the western action RPG world what with their command of the one game that everyone has on their hard-drives somewhere- Skyrim. Even if you can't stand the thing and it's age-gone visuals, paper thin characters and slappy-like combat- you have it, don't you? That's the power of a good Bethesda game, it worms it's way so completely into gaming culture that you look weird for not being involved. And thus is born the perfect testing ground for Bethesda's experiments into exactly how to drain more life out of their long put down games.

To be clear, I don't really think that the whole paid mods thing is some dastardly scheme by Bethesda to make a fortune out of royalty sales from mods- afterall, they don't make much of anything off of Creation Club content as it is. Of course, if their paid mods initiative was to pop off I'm sure it would be a spectacular jump to the ol' bottom line- but the fact of the matter is that the mod community is too deeply rooted in share-ware freedoms. Trying to put chains on that is like wrapping a noose around the neck of your beloved childhood pet in order to keep it safe, and squeezing until- well, you get the image. There's too many quiet corners of the modding community that Bethesda risk losing if they locked down their games, which is why, I think, it's taken so long for them to get to the point where they are at now- providing their own platform for mod acquisition.

Yes, Bethesda has had Bethesda.Net for a while in order to present mods but it was kind of... awful. Bad UI, impossible to navigate, dropped connectivity like a brick every ten minutes or so. There was literally no reason why you wouldn't just use Steam Workshop. And besides, any proper game modder does their business before launching the game with a third party mod manager that allows them to change the load order, update animations, clean files- anything extra they need to do. Bethesda seems to have finally come around on that and are providing their new service, curated curations, as something of a middle ground between Creation Content commissioned mods, and just the basic Bethesda.Net hosting service. It's less of an evolution as much as it is a repackaging. But it came with new content!

Yes, just as we all knew the second that the Anniversary Edition was announced with it's delivery of every piece of creation club content- that was only going to be the beginning. Bethesda aren't done working with cheap labour to sell their mods for them, and I suppose that means somewhere down the line we can expect a 'diamond Jubilee' edition of the game to launch with the new stuff tacked on. Honestly, and I mean this absolutely dead-serious no joking, I think Bethesda should make a small team and set them off to make a new expansion for Skyrim- something exciting and big to reignite interest in the game, instead of all these small scale mod-creator developed, pieces of stocking filler that only exist to draw the scrutiny of paid mods critics. Sell us on something big before trying to push the little things under our nose, please!

Ah, but what of the new paid mods in question? Well, we've got yet another house mod to throw on top of the steadily amassing pile of Real Estate which is probably enough to assume monopoly over the entirety of Tauriel's housing market at this point. There is also a voiced custom Thief Companion, which is about the very first time I think a Bethesda backed mod creation has been able to boast custom voice files- however because of the 'low impact' requirement, as well as their 'no extra mod requirements' rule I assume they have, this particular companion is looking a little... rough compared to most other mods. (She doesn't use a High Poly Head or custom assets. That's not a deal breaker, but it's a head scratcher. Don't we want to start with the best foot forward?) And next they added guns. Wait what? Oh, Dwarven 'Arquebus'? Right. (I'm taking this as official confirmation that guns are canon now.)

Curiously this new era of paid mods has paved the way for some really ambitious mods, such as one of those one's that look ready to ruin the carefully crafted open world if you abuse it too much- which Bethesda would never had allowed under the Creation Club banner. East Empire Expansion appears to be a kind of 'alternate Gameplay' mod where you seize control of a franchise of the East Empire company and gain control of extra loot hauling services, extra vendors and... The ability to claim dungeons in the name of the East Empire Company, cutting you into mining operation profits and loading guard posts outside them? So wait, does that overwrite enemy spawns? How many mods would that potentially end up breaking? Yeah, really a playthrough definer, that one. And there's also a collection of apparently 'Legendary Dungeons' created by some dude called... wait, Trainwiz still makes mods? Okay, that one might be worth checking out- that guy's a genuine legend. (Provided Bethesda allowed him to access his full power level when making that mod.)

Of course the very inclusion of a price tag does sort of alter the expectations of quality around these mods before we've even gotten the chance to engage with them. How can I personally be assured that the money I spend will be worth my time? Well, that's up to me as a consumer to judge how I value these price tags. These are microtransactions, to be sure, for tiny pieces of content- similar to what Bethesda tried to do with Oblivion before 'Horse Armour' became labelled to them as a letter of shame. Do I think the roughly £5.50 it costs to become a member of the East Empire Trading company is worth it? Honestly I'd have to see how well the mod is implemented, and even then it would have to be a gleamingly smooth mod with minimal conflict possibility for me to even consider it. As for the armour packs? £2.50 for a new set of Thalmor Robes? I just don't see it. For a collection, high quality and 4k, I could see a fiver, but a single outfit? That just ain't it.

Is there hope for this new era of Paid Mods? I'm really not sure. Bethesda seem almost half hearted with this go around and every step they've made is dogged by the unavoidable elephant hanging over their head. More Bethesda mods means more game updates. More game updates means more damned updates to the DLL code that breaks every script mod in existence for no other reason than to throw some extra trash in the download store. It is getting beyond a joke at this point- no one wants Bethesda to keep breaking their game for this crap. If they can find a way to add mods without updating the entire game, then I'll call this a non issue that the disgruntled can simply ignore. But considering we've been at this for ten years, and Bethesda already said they'd figured how to circumvent this problem, before failing to do so for several years more, I'm going to call this a overwhelming annoyance that the company who will never cease keeps forcing into our faces.